The Gay Robot Convention a.k.a TFcon

Well Tfcon has come and gone for another year. I was looking forward to this one for awhile since:

1.This is probably the last convention I can attend and not think about the amount of money I spent/wasted.
2.I had tons of cash to blow thanks to eBay sales (something at this point I’m regretting)
3. Dan Gilzevan (The voice of G1 Bumblebee) was going to be there

The day kind of went like this

I decided not to leave my house until about 9:15 or so. This way I would hopefully miss the bulk of the line (another regret I have is not pre-registering to get in an hour early and get the exclusive powered commander set from Fansproject after I saw the ridiculous amounts it’s going for on eBay. I’m not trying to be a scalper, but a good flip is a good flip)

Got to the convention around 10:15. Saw may people already heading to their cars with bags, What were they buying that I didn’t!?! Got ansty and pretty much briskly walked the rest of the way to the registration area.

Zero Line. Victory.

Filled out my door prize ballot and headed to the dealer room where I was greeted to absolute pandemonium. You know those news clips you see of Black Friday in the States? Imagine that but with Transformer Fans. First things I grabbed were Reprolabels to upgrade my Universe Prowl and a Convention Bumblebee litho that I got signed by the artist Alex Milne. From there headed into the inferno of the Transformers tables. (The Photo below does not do the scene justice)

You had to literally fight to make room at the dealer tables to look at the figures. Managed to grab a complete, mint Beast Wars Cybershark for $10. The day was off to a good start (Later that day I realized I also got a Beast Machines Tankor Instruction book and missiles with Cybershark, the dealer had them with the wrong figure)

Walked around and grabbed a few more figures I was looking for off my “Most Wanted List”, I really wanted a Razorbeast from Beast Wars, since he was the first “New Era” Transformer I purchased as a collector, but the only one I could find loose was missing one leg. Got the guy to sell him to me for $2. He’s mint and with super tight joints. I’ll find a Boar leg for him eventually.

Also, myself and may other collectors commented that it was so crazy you didn’t even have the chance to “think about something” because by the time you got back to the table it was probably gone. This did work out in my favor though, 2 figures I was eyeing – Beast Machines Black Arachnia and Movie Arcee, I managed to get MOC for the EXACT same price as the loose ones I missed out on.

Got a Destro Mighty Mugg at only a $3.50 mark up from retail price. Pretty good for a toy that will probably never see the light of day at Canadian Retail. (At the time of this posting, Destro still has not been seen at Canuck retail)

Sat in on the Panels with Derrick J. Wyatt and Dan Gilzevan, mostly to kill time before Dan’s autograph signing. Both turned out to be really interesting. Plus hearing Dan say “Optimus?! What the fuck!?!” in Bumblebee’s voice was pure win.

Got Bumblebee’s autograph and bought a Derrick Wyatt Sketch of Optimus which he personalized for me. Met some of the guys from Cybertron.ca and won a door prize! I selected Protoform Optimus Prime from the first movie line and I was actually looking to pick up this figure to boot!

Autographed by Dan Gilzevan (Voice actor) & Alex Milne (Artist)

Derrick J Wyatt original Sketch - Probably my favorite thing I got :)

See all this stuff below? There’s always this huge table at the Various Toronto area conventions where they sell all this stuff for dirt cheap, I asked the guy how they get all the stuff and apparently it’s from close outs, bankruptcies and overstocks. The dirt cheapness of the stuff sucked me in. The Minimates were $5 and the Figures were $4 each.




I’m selling everything except the SAW figure. They guy had 2 Jason figures too (Mezco’s Jason Goes to Hell and the new Derek Mears Jason, in retrospect I should have grabbed those instead to keep MOC on my Jason shelf. It pissed me off though to see about $80 worth of figures that I owned that I could have bought for a measly $16 bucks. -Insert angry emoticon here-

Here's photos of the stuff I grabbed if anyone is interested











All in all, a great day. But here are some of the things that pissed me off.

-Bought a Beast Wars Inferno for $10, thought the guy said “He has his gun”, turns out he said “He doesn’t have his gun” Flipped him on eBay already.
-Forgot to buy a cool drink before leaving the Hotel...I was craving Pepsi
-Dealers charging $10-30 for Rock Lords. C’mon, that’s my cheap – I like to pick it up for fun line.

After all that only spent $171 dollars. I had budgeted for $300.


UPDATE: Sold off a bunch of the stuff I bought. Turned a profit on most of it to boot!

Cheers!
-Ian