Subject: Botcon Report! From: John Runski Date: 1998/06/20 Message-ID: <358B5480.530D@amp.com> Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers Hi everyone. I'm at Botcon, and if you are reading this... you probably aren't.... Nyah, nyah, nayh... Sorry, had to do that... But, here is some info on the 1st evening! The exclusives are: A black Inferno named Antagony and a bluish Powerpinch named Vice-Grip. Inferno is the "high" price point item and comes with a beautiful flip-lid box. Vice-grip is the "low" price toy and is only poly-bagged with a card insert with the tech specs. Both are Predicons and I will leave it to others to give further details. Production of these was limited to 600, and 2/3 of that has already been sold to the pre-registrants. Sale price for the rest will be announced tomorrow. Attendance is expected to be higher this year than last with 80 more preregistrants and more single day attendees anticipated. Both Japanese and European dealers are here as well as American dealers with a wide array of toys: from the MISB to junk. (Seems to be a lot of the latter at my table! ) There's not a whole lot else that was announced this evening. There are a ton of guests here, including: David Wise, Forward & Ditillo, Furman & Wildeman, David Kaye, Gary Chalk, Susan Blu, Doug Parker... and others. (I appologise for the likely mis-spellings of the above!) I'm sure there will be lots more news tomorrow. Time for bed. I have a long day tomorrow, and I'm still on East Coast time! John ***** Subject: Botcon Report, Day 2 From: John Runski Date: 1998/06/20 Message-ID: <358C662B.4354@amp.com> Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers I'm back in the hotel room now, resting my aching feet... and figured I'd pass along (briefly) what little interesting there is to tell about my day.... (Hooray for laptops!) Don't get me wrong, Botcon was awesome, but I went as a dealer and was abandoned by my partner for the first 2 hours of the show and missed a lot of the good stuff while tied to my table!!! Oh well, let's get it out of the way now, here's the bad news: The Antagony exclusive sold out within 45 minutes of the show opening. In fact, an hour after they announced the sell out, they "found" 7 more and had to have a drawing to figure out who gets them! Now, I've heard that a few of the "usual" dealers did get some extras, so they will be available... at a price, of course. I'll leave a small pause here for all the non-attendees to bitch and moan..... ..... Can't be helped. On to some "nicer" news. Some nice displays were great. Kenner brought production samples of Depth Charge, Optimal Op, and Rampage. NICE! The Kenner discussion panel said that they would be out around Fall. So, if anyone is patient you should find these on sale for Christmas! (Believe, me. I've done it the past few years on almost every BW toy I have!) Other than that, Kenner said little. Very little. A lot of "no comments"... "can't say".... "Can't talk about that, yet". They did confirm that Machine Wars is dead, though. And did say "big" things are coming... better than we've ever seen. Typical hype, IMHO. Seriously, there wasn't too much interesting that I saw. Mainly because I was tied to my table a lot. Just about sold out, though. Chalk up a win for Flea Market Finds! I made a healthy profit and still had just about the best prices there! Later, John