calling 1987

Here's the Progress Report from the 1987 Atlanta Fantasy Fair!  We are at the very peak of AFF's membership, I believe.  I don't have official records, so who knows?  This progress report went out in January and its arrival in your mailbox was the starting gun for the year's convention planning.

The guest selection might be the most varied in AFF's history: SF writers, science fiction TV legends, Adam West, Caroline Munro (I mean, she was a Bond Girl, kinda), Tom Savini, something for anyone interested in SF or fantasy in the 80s, all sequestered in downtown Atlanta in the absolute hottest time of the year. Get ready for some sweating.

Here's an introductory paragraph from AFF's president.  Note the "grid" elements - this was graphic design in the 80s, kids; drop some grids in there. When you're done reading it you can use it to map out your D&D campaign. Don't forget to pick up your AFF T-shirt, this year it has a girl with a sword on it. 

Comic book guests included a lot of top Marvel talent including Chris Claremont at a time of peak X-Men popularity.  Also appearing was Bob Burden, whom I believe was at every AFF. He always had the best stuff for sale at his table.

But enough of this, on to the costume contest!

What do we have here? A Gumby! Some of the aliens from the Heavy Metal movie! Marvin The Martian! It's Eddie from Rocky Horror! Some kind of tinfoil box head thing, some Elfquest elves, what appears to be Cerebus The Aardvark, what I believe are X-men mutants, Spiderman, Black Cat, and Moustache Rhino, and one of those horse-riding things from Wizards.  You all get candy!

And of course there's Japanese animation represented by production art from Robotech. I cannot recall if I was staffing the anime room at this year's AFF. Certainly I poked my head in a few times. I know I was on staff but lord knows what area. Most of what I did at this AFF was run around with my friends all over the Omni, hook up a VCR to the hotel room TV and show our own anime titles on Saturday night, buy a lot of comic books and toys, and generally misbehave.

AFF was still screening 16mm prints at this time. Remember, these were the days before everything was available on home video. If you wanted to see vintage Chuck Jones cartoons or old Ray Harryhausen epics, you had to come to AFF! Or catch them on television, I guess.

Judge Dredd looms ominously over the Omni Hotel making sure crime is kept strictly to the parts of the Omni Hotel that he cannot see. Seriously, back in '87 this was a bad part of town. It was pretty easy to get mugged if you ventured outside the Omni. We got to see a stolen Ford Explorer peel off down Marietta Street on Thursday night during setup. If you went out in search of food or supplies during the show (good luck, it was a retail dead zone) you were certain to get panhandled. Nowadays,  CNN Center, Philips Arena, and Centennial Olympic Park, the Georgia Aquarium, and the World Of Coca-Cola have tamed this once wild frontier.

We TOTALLY did not obey this rule, we had VCRs set up like CRAZY in our hotel room. I can remember this being a fairly common "house rule" back in the day, but I knew lots and lots of people who brought VCRs into hotels and nobody ever got in any kind of trouble with anybody. It's not like liquor; wheeling a trolley full of booze past the front desk will get some questions asked.

Here's one of the ads in the progress report:

Yes, this is the convention at which a guest died.  Here's a hint: he played Doctor Who. And no, he didn't regenerate.

I haven't any photos from 1987's AFF-  heck, I didn't even have a camera at that point - but if you do, throw them on the scanner and send them my way at terebifunhouse@gmail.com!

calling 1984

The middle of the 80s brought many new shows to the Atlanta convention scene.  Well, okay, two. 

One of these was the "Creation Atlanta" convention, which is a name that will bring sighs of recognition and eye-rolling from many of our more experienced con-goers, most of whom first experienced fan conventions at a Creation event. So let's not get all superior. Creation was and is a business that's in the business of running fan conventions, which they've done more than two thousand of around the nation. Mostly consisting of a dealers room, an events hall, and a table behind which celebrities can sign autographs, the Creation business model carves out a unique territory somewhere between your local car and/or boat and/or RV show, an industry trade convention, and the local arts & crafts event that sets up in your local park and kills the grass.

My first convention was a Creation convention that Dad brought us to as the dealers were closing up on Sunday afternoon, somewhere in downtown Atlanta. A giant room full of people selling comic books?  I'm in heaven. It was not, however, the show I have this schedule for.

This Creation event is from 1984, as we can tell from the events hyping the upcoming "Supergirl" and "Dune" movies, and it was in the Omni Hotel, unless there was another Atlanta facility with a "Knollwood Room".  And maybe there was. As there are six different Star Trek themed events happening on Saturday one might surmise their big guest was a Star Trek actor, and it was indeed - Walter Koenig "beamed down" to sign autographs and deliver a stirring lecture to the crowd on the need to vaccinate your children and spay and neuter your pets. Actually he didn't speak on those topics but it's a good idea to mention them anyway.

Sunday's schedule is pretty close to Saturday's - Creation was aiming at a one-day crowd that would buy a ticket, wander through the dealer's room, get Chekov's autograph, laff at the mandated-by-law screening of the Holy Blooper Reels, and go the hell home.

Another Atlanta event from 1984 with a different focus and a different feel was the Atlanta Comics Festival.

This two-day event is mostly remembered today as being host to the Jim Shooter Roast, a chummy comics industry event in which the popular Marvel editor was given the Don Rickles treatment. This was claimed to be "the ultimate in fan entertainment." This explains the cover of the program guide - you see, Jim Shooter is a tall guy, and that's the Marvel character "Nightcrawler" sawing him off at the knees. And boy! Just try to explain this to anybody not immersed in the trivial minutiae of the mid 1980s comic book industry! Now THAT'S the ultimate in fan entertainment!

Sponsored by a local comics distributor, this event had many Marvel guests like John Byrne, Bob Layton, Bob McLeod, Mark Gruenwald, and John Romita Jr.  as well as a dealers room and videos. A video of the Shooter Roast was available on YouTube there for a little while but got removed, as most YouTube videos do eventually.

Please note that, as required by law, the Star Trek Blooper Reel was shown on both Saturday and Sunday. This is how ubiquitous Star Trek was in the fandom scene of the 1980s - a convention with no connection whatsoever to television, to film, or to print or media science fiction in general still felt compelled to inflict the Starship Enterprise upon cash-paying audiences. 

How many of these comic shops are still in business? Survey says 'zero'.

By the way, at the time I was buying most of my comic books at a store in Smyrna's Belmont Hills Shopping Center - actually at the back of Belmont Hills, by the bowling alley - called the Book Trader. The owner was a man named Benny, who put up with a customer base made up of women bringing in shopping bags full of romance novels for trade and kids such as myself pawing through his comic books for hours, and channeled his irritation into a series of handwritten notes posted throughout his store reminding people that "others may sell for less but *I* know what my product is WORTH!" and similar passive-aggressive mottos. 

If this was held in the hotel I think it was held in, somewhere around 14th Street in downtown Atlanta, the site has long been turned into part of the Atlantic Station development. If memory serves the hotel was some kind of a mid-range franchise place. Maybe a Radisson. I was there for the Saturday and spent most of the time watching the anime film "Phoenix 2772" in the "Cabinet Room",which would pretty much be the template for the rest of my fan experience, ignoring American comic books in favor of Japanese cartoons. I regret nothing!

AFF 1983 newsletter

Here's some images of the 1983 Atlanta Fantasy Fair newsletter, sometimes referred to as a "progress report". In addition to flyers, conventions would find it necessary to publish 16 or 20 page newsprint booklets to really "sell" the show to a world that was decades away from web pages - it's hard to show the appeal of a costume contest, a film festival, or a giant downtown hotel in just a few lines of type.

I believe the 1983 AFF was the first show I was allowed to attend in any meaningful capacity - I roamed the halls of the Omni, bought my first Judge Dredd comics, watched five or ten minutes of "Robinson Crusoe On Mars", and purchased a full set of Elfquest comics that had me in a Pini-derived elfy-welfy haze for weeks.

I think that's a costume of the Godzilla movie-monster Angirus! That would have been something to see in the early 80s. Honestly I can't remember if we were allowed to stick around long enough to see the costume contest that year. Probably not. I did catch the amateur film festival, which as I recall featured a wonderful if overlong movie about a teenage magician titled "Summer Magic" that climaxed with a Houdini-style escape from a swimming pool. The next year's amateur film festival featured "Summer Magic II", a much shorter parody of the first film in which the underwater escape doesn't go quite so well. Also screened was a movie titled "Drugs From Deep Space" and the thrilling "Galactic Avenger", 30 seconds of cut-paper spaceship animation followed by three minutes of family home movies. You just don't get amateur films like this any more.

I probably made it to the con suite - what 13 year old doesn't want free soda? - but I didn't play any role playing games, see any auctions, or witness any awards ceremonies. Most of my time was spent poring through the entire dealers room, wishing I'd mowed a few more lawns that summer.

If you hurry you can get your membership to the 1983 AFF for only $13!! Or you might have to buy it at the door for $19. While you're at it, you can get a room at the Omni for $44. That's cheap even for 1983! Of course you have to spend the entire weekend worrying about getting mugged or killed while in scary dangerous downtown Atlanta, but that's a small price to pay.

Don't forget to pick up your AFF T-shirt and show the world you're proud to be a fan!

newsletter courtesy the Devlin Thompson National Archives

atlanta starcon & comics

ATLANTA STARCON & COMICS?

Yes, ATLANTA STARCON & COMICS was a one-time show from the former Atlanta Fantasy Fair organizers. After the disappointing 1995 show, the administrators ditched the AFF brand and replaced it with a new convention featuring a wide slate of guests from Hollywood, the comics industry, the martial-arts stars of the WMAC MASTERS, and the usual costume contests, video rooms, gaming, con suites, panels, art shows, and dealers.

I did not attend this show because it was held on the same weekend as the second Anime Weekend Atlanta. As it turned out the second AWA was a total success and the convention is still rockin' it after seventeen years. How did Atlanta Starcon & Comics go? I don't know.

I was told that the dealers were packing up on Saturday afternoon, which doesn't bode well for any show. First year conventions, even if they have a staff pedigree stretching back for years, are always a tough sell. This was the last attempt by the former AFF administration to keep a yearly show alive in the face of both Dragoncon and public indifference.

Note the hotel, the Marriott North Central - Dixie-Trek had already been there a few times and AWA would move in for its next two shows. But Atlanta Starcon & Comics would vanish into the mists of the '90s.

Dragon-Con 1989

Dragon-Con, or Dragon*Con as it likes to be known, is now the big dog in the Atlanta fandom scene, a permanent fixture on the calendar not only of the nerd world but of the city at large, with media attention, parades, traffic congestion, and the kinds of  inexperienced-with-the-big-city crowds that make grifters, scam artists and panhandlers salivate from as far away as Warner-Robins or perhaps Waleska. But at one time it was just the new kid on the fan convention block, and this is what their advertising looked like at that embryonic stage.

I've often thought of the growth of Dragon-Con and the concomitant shrinkage of the AFF / Dixie-Trek as emblematic of a paradigm shift among Atlanta's fan community - the older Trekkie/Whovian fan power structure being replaced by a younger crowd more interested in D&D, fantasy, and Bettie Page Look-A-Like contests. And sure, I probably think about this too much.

Dragoncon started in 1987 and quickly swelled in attendance to match that of the AFF. Dragoncon's administration has freely admitted inflating their attendance figures in the early days, but it's the truth, that was one crowded show. By 1989 they were infringing upon AFF's turf, which was the Omni / World Congress Center downtown.

I'm pretty sure I went to this show and wandered around all weekend without a badge, setting a Dragoncon tradition that many thousands would repeat over the years. I'm not a gamer, not a fan of fantasy or horror movies, so there really wasn't much for me to do at the show other than gawk at the nerds. Again, a tradition many thousands would repeat over the years.

Wow, $65 a night for a hotel room in downtown Atlanta! At the Omni! Did the Omni still have the skating rink in 1989? The late 80s saw the transformation of the Omni complex into "CNN Center", when it was an oasis of light and order amidst the wasteland of Marietta Street. Which, thanks to the Olympics and subsequent urban renewal and the construction of a few parks, Coca-Cola Worlds and aquariums, is now tourist central. How things change.

I spent many a fine convention meal at that Chick-Fil-A in the Omni, as well as a fine convention quarter in the Gold Mine arcade. At one point CNN Center had a movie theater that showed first run films AND "Gone With The Wind." Every day.

Whoever had this flyer before me helpfully listed some video room programming, which included Dune, Robocop, Alien, Aliens, three Star Trek movies and the always-entertaining Star Trek Blooper Reel, required by law to be screened at every SF convention forever. Apart from the blooper reel this could very well be USA Cable's schedule for any given weekend.

Ten years can zip by in the blink of an eye and suddenly it's 1998 and Dragon*Con is the Last Con Standing among Atlanta's science-fiction-comics-gaming-movies crowd, presaging the kind of all-embracing pop culture attraction that is now merely called "(Name Of City) Comic Con" and happens everywhere. '98's Dragon*Con had a big squarebound program book with a cover by Roger Dean, hundreds of guests, and dates for Dragon*Cons through 2005.

Dragoncon is still going, in spite of scandals and assault and the baleful eye of the fire inspector. It's become the de facto Nerd Mardi Gras for costumers, fame mongers, gamers, and the newly empowered geek demographic as they parade through downtown in all their Klingon finery and Stormtrooper armor. And they said it couldn't happen here!

Dixie-Trek 1986

Dixie-Trek - which I wrote about extensively here -  was a SF convention held in Atlanta GA throughout the 1980s and half of the 90s. An outgrowth of the Atlanta Star Trek Society, it moved from strict Trek into the larger world of media SF, as its 1986 flyer demonstrates.

I attended the 1986 show mostly because of Peter Davidson; I was not then and never wound up being any kind of Star Trek fan. My memories of the convention include running a fan table promoting our Japanese animation club, filling a car with convention pals for a late night food run, wandering into a room party where BEER was being served (!!) and generally having a good time in the convention environment as an unsupervised teenager. Also note the ubiquitous presence of Brad Strickland.

Films at the convention were 16mm prints run off a clackety projector. These included, of course, the Star Trek Blooper Reel, which was a highlight of conventions since in the pre-VHS days conventions were the only place you could see them. Of course you couldn't get Dr. Who episodes on 16mm so the convention used their ten-foot video projection screen. Remember those three-lens RGB projectors?

The world of Japanese animation was only then beginning to carve out a foothold among the Trekkies and Whovians of the world, and I can assure you that every bit of anime shown at this Dixie-Trek was copies of copies of copies of Project A-Ko and the Macross movie. Advance tickets were only $22, which was probably a lot back in 1986, but these days is pretty much what you'd pay for an advance ticket at a comparable show. Though these days you will probably get gouged for autographs, priority seating, and "VIP Access". Note the Century Center was charging $59 a night. You can't get a Super-8 room for that price any more.

Dixie-Trek faded away in the mid 1990s as Atlanta fan conventions crumbled under the onslaught of Dragon-Con; the Trekkies of the 70s and 80s found themselves with kids, jobs, and no time for filking, while the new fandom of the 1990s wouldn't be caught dead getting Billy Mumy's autograph, instead preferring to play video games and get Todd McFarlane's autograph.

"Dixie-Trek" was also used as the name of a sci-fi convention in Mississippi attended by a character on the TV show "Big Bang Theory". Somebody owes Owen Ogletree some royalties, is all I'm saying.

AWA would hold its third and fourth conventions at the Century Center, which is now a Marriott property and seems to have undergone a complete makeover. If you are planning a 900-1200 person event I highly recommend the Century Center; lots of good memories there.

Overview: the 1990s

Okay, so there was this convention in Atlanta called the Atlanta Fantasy Fair, and according to the internets it might as well not have existed. But exist it did, from 1975 until 1995. The following is an incomplete overview of the AFFs of the 1990s, when and where they were held, and who was there. Information has been culled from various sources including AFF program books, convention listings, usenet posts, and comments from readers. I will keep updating this post as more information comes in. If you have any data, image files of flyers or artwork, t-shirts, program books, please contact me at terebifunhouse@gmail.com.

Thanks to all those who have contributed!

1990 Atlanta Fantasy Fair XVI
August 17-19, 1990
Omni Hotel & World Congress Center
Guests: Jack Kirby, John deLancie, Sandahl Bergman, Catherine Hicks, Julie Schwartz, Sharon Green, Linda Thorson, Martin Caidin, Greg Theakston, Boris Vallejo, and Carl Macek.

1991 Atlanta Fantasy Fair XVII
July 26-28, 1991
Atlanta Hilton & Towers
Guests: Marina Sirtis, Dean Stockwell, Marc Singer, Matt Wagner, Julie Schwartz, Greg Bear. Sneak preview of "Beastmaster 2". Costume Contest, "Wheel Of Fantasy". 

1992 Atlanta Fantasy Fair XVIII 
June 19-21 1992

Hyatt Atlanta Airport & Georgia International Convention Center
Guests: Peter David, Bob Burden, Stephen R. Donaldson, Kim Cattrall, Lance Henrikson (cancelled) 

1993 Atlanta Fantasy Fair XIX 
June 25-27 1993

Hyatt Atlanta Airport & Georgia International Convention Center
Guests: David Prowse, Grace Lee Whitney, Caroline Munro, Monique Gabrielle, Jeff Rector, Gunnar Hanson, Irish McCalla. 
Memberships: $27 until 6/5, $30 at door.

1994 Atlanta Fantasy Fair XX
June 17-19, 1994

Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, Atlanta GA. 
Guests: Sarah Douglas, Bruce Campbell, Jeff Rector, Geraint Wyn Davies, John Russo, Ted V. Mikels. 
Memberships: $27 until June 5, $30 at door. Rooms $79 single/double, $99 triple/quad.

1995 Atlanta Fantasy Fair XXI, June 23-25

Castlegate Hotel, Atlanta GA.
Guests: Claudia Christian, Dirk Benedict, Dwight Schultz, Jeff Pittarelli, Don Hillsman II, Wayne VanSant, Joe Phillips. 
Memberships $35 for 3 days. Rooms $69.

So, as we can see, the convention went from being Atlanta's premier SF/Fantasy gathering with top-notch guests and venues (Stan Lee, Al Williamson, Jim Steranko, Ray Harryhausen, the Omni, the Hilton) to a confused mish-mash of scream queens, airbrush artists, and B-movie personalities, operating out of the Castlegate (!). More information about the Castlegate may be found here.