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SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2004 In the report yesterday I mentioned the show being a little boring without the appearance of Hasbro. Saturday turned out to be a very excellent day at Wizard World Chicago. We arrived early again but we swapped out a few new members to help us conduct surveillance for the day’s events. General Jason D. Meyers (Ret.) and Trooper Jetfire (a.k.a. Wedgewannabe) filled the shoes for the departed David Syczylo (Boba Binks) who had to leave for a family emergency. Our thoughts and prayers are with you Boba Binks! We stopped at the Gentle Giant Booth early to see a less hungry crowd for the Luke Stormtrooper bust. We also were told the Clone Trooper bust from Friday sold for $780.00! Our S.C.A.L.P. weapons supplier, dustrho, took a few photos of the Yoda prototype up for silent auction on Saturday.
After lunch we headed back for some autographs with Rena Owen and Orli Shoshan who were among a couple signing in the autograph area. Eric Walker was signing in the Federation Toys booth. We visited many of our sponsors who were all doing pretty well with the estimated 50k people that had rolled through the doors by Saturday afternoon. Brian’s Toys, Yestertoys and many others had quite a few collectors needs taken care of.
We headed for the Ballroom in which Steve Sansweet was hosting a two-hour presentation about upcoming events and products from Lucasfilm. We had the privilege of being able to see many video clips on the Original Trilogy DVD sets. They also mentioned the Droids, Ewoks and The Ewok Adventure and Caravan of Courage made for TV Ewok movies that are coming soon on DVD. There was also mention of George Lucas’ first film THX 1138 coming to select theaters on 9-10-04.
For those of you who love your video games and Star Wars, you will be buying many of the new titles coming out. Battlefront and Knights of the Old Republic II will be among the few I will be sure to purchase. Our friends at the 501st Midwest Garrison were also kind enough to introduce us to Steve Sansweet after the presentation.
While being pounded for questions by many, I managed to ask him if there were any plans for Lucasfilm Licensed Stormtrooper armor. His reply was, “Only for the last 7 years.” My guess is between making something movie accurate and in mass production there would be no way to keep it in the average collectors budget. Steve was kind enough to do a couple autographs as he walked by and General J and I were the lucky ST members to get his John Hancock. Dave Dorman was also on hand and I managed to get a couple words with him again. Dave mentioned something about a Sandtrooper print that may be in the works for the future! If it is anything like some of his previous work, we are in for something truly special. We hope to hear from the team at Dorman art very soon! We wrapped things up doing photos with members of the 501st Midwest Garrision and shopping for our loved ones! It was great to spend the day with so many of the people that help make Sandtroopers.com and our Forums such a great place. It was a great day and we really had a lot of fun. We would like to thank Jim from Federation Toys, Eric Walker, Dean Gibbs and Kathy Van Beuningen of the 501st Midwest Garrison for everything they did to help cover the show, your kindness and generosity is greatly appreciated. We also enjoyed meeting anyone else that we forgot to mention here. United We Find Troops! MORE PHOTOS
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