My Trip to Wizard World Chicago 2016

A couple of weeks ago, I attended my third Wizard World show, and there was enough retro related stuff there that I thought it would make a good article for me to share my experience with all of you. For those of you who are unaware, Wizard World is an organization that puts on pop culture/comic book conventions all across the United States. They are a lot of fun to go to because, in addition to all of the cool celebrity guests that they have there, they always have a lot of other interesting things going on.

I'd like to start off by talking about all of the spectacular costumes I saw people wearing. There was an amazing variety of costumes this year. Some of them were characters I recognized. Others were complete mysteries to me. Some were comic book heroes or villains. Others were from movies or television. Some were of retro characters. Others were more modern. There was one thing that was common in these costumes, though. Most of them, if not all of them, were amazingly detailed and looked very good.

Speaking of the costumes, if Halloween was your favorite holiday as a child because you enjoyed dressing up, I would highly recommend attending one of these conventions or a similar convention. Having the opportunity to dress up as one of your favorite characters and seeing how everyone else dressed up is worth the price of tickets alone, even if you don't plan on doing anything else. This is also one of the few types of settings where you can dress up as an adult without children and not get uncomfortable stares. I have yet to try out wearing a costume to one of these conventions personally, but I am really thinking about doing it one day. It seems like it would be a lot of fun.

Next, I'd like to talk about the celebrity guests that attended the show this year, many of which definitely count as retro celebrities. There were a lot of cool guests there that I would have enjoyed seeing but couldn't due to budgetary reasons. These guests included Carrie Fisher from Star Wars, Back to the Future stars like Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson, and Christopher Lloyd, The X-Files' main leads, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, and The Incredible Hulk's Lou Ferrigno. As you can see, there was definitely a lot of great celebrities to entice any retro lover, even if you just look at everybody I didn't get to meet.

One of the guests who I did pay to see was Cerina Vincent, a former Power Ranger. I'd actually met her at last year's Wizard World Chicago show, but she was such a fun guest that I was willing to pay to see her again. I got her to pose holding a lightsaber, which I thought was pretty cool. After all, where else can you see a Power Ranger holding a lightsaber? It's like this unbelievable merging of two of my favorite universes.

The other star that I met was Rose McIver, who I know as Tinker Bell from Once Upon a Time and who is probably best known as the star of iZombie. Unlike Cerina Vincent, she's not a retro star, but I thought I would talk about my experience with her anyways. I got her to pose holding a lightsaber, too, and she seemed really into it. When I got up to her and she saw that I was holding two lightsabers, she immediately shouted, "Awesome!" She then grabbed her lightsaber and got into her pose without me even having to ask her about posing with one. I thought our photo op came out really well, though I do wish that you could tell that our lightsabers were lit up.

There were also many other cool things at the show, such as a tarot card reader and a free arcade. I'm not really a believer of any type of fortune telling abilities, but I did see the tarot card reader just for the experience. She told me that the cards told her that I had achieved a lot in my life and that it was time for a new project. I suppose that that's not the worst fortune I could have ended up with.

As for the free arcade, I ended up playing the original Donkey Kong game and a few different types of pinball games. Sadly, I wasn't able to get the Donkey Kong game to work after my first try, but it was still a fun experience.

That about wraps up my Wizard World experience for this year. As always, I had a fun time. I'm looking forward to seeing what they have in store for next year.

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Superman Posted on Feb 13, 2017 at 03:59 AM

@massreality - I'm glad you had a good time. Wizard World shows can be a lot of fun!

massreality Posted on Feb 10, 2017 at 01:21 PM

I also attended Wizard World Chicago last year, and it was honestly the best weekend of my life. That con was amazing. I went back to the hotel with sore feet every night.

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