Here’s a roundup of group gathering stories that might be of interest to fans:
- The Walt Disney Archives and Disney fan club D23 is putting on a show called Fanniversary. The presentaton is “a celebration of movies, TV shows, attractions, characters and all things Disney that are celebrating milestones in 2012. It’s a roughly 90-minute presentation filled with rare and never-seen-in-public clips, audio, photographs, art and more, touring the country for the first time ever.” The six city tour had already sold out when it launched.
- Another fannish event in Southern California was centered on bronies, and the first ever local meeting got an extensive write-up in The Los Angeles Times. “Stephen Thomas, from Claremont, became something of a brony celebrity when he based his senior high school physics presentation on ‘MLP’ last year. A video shot in the classroom and posted online quickly went viral; it has racked up nearly 1 million views. Thomas, now at Cal Poly Pomona, said he’d been concerned initially about reaction from his schoolmates. ‘I wondered if I’d be a laughingstock for admitting how much I liked the show,’ he said. ‘But people didn’t think it was silly or dumb.'” They plan to hold their first convention in November.
- Sequential Tart wrote about yet another Southern California gathering, this one academic and business oriented, Transmedia, Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations. Unfortunately, one of the panels that was perhaps of particular concern to fans, “Working on the Margins: Who Pays for Transformative Works of Art?”, was rather inconclusive. “One of the audience questions posted to the question website asked the panelists to actually address the questions posed in the title of the panel. I had been enjoying the panel, but as soon as that question popped up on the screen, I reflected on it. I’m not sure that the panel addressed the question at all. They talked about their personal experiences, and Mike Farah was pinned down on a question about where Funny or Die pays for stuff, but even then the answer was not super informative. I came away from the panel wondering who indeed pays for transformative works of art and multimedia projects like those being mentioned at this conference? How do some of these people make a living? Where is the profit in things done for free and / or by the Average Joe?”
- Finally in France a conference on “La Culture du Fan Symposium” was held, which took a more fan-focused approach to some of the same issues, featuring a panel on fan-subbing, brand fans, opera fans, an examination of the term “acafan” and a panel looking at “cultural policy and copyright law in fan production…[and] how fan activity had now entered the political arena, with their practices increasingly monitored by media producers.”
If you’re a fan of Disney, My Little Pony, or have your own fan gathering stories, why not contribute them to Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.
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