she told me that they were filming bits for the new Hub channel.

 

Bumping this with a little positive note - the lobby at the dolphin was awesome, having that large open area with bar allowed for both good socialising with multiple people and easy selling / trading. I would say that Pasadena suffers greatly by not having a nice open public space.

 

llamatron is right. if it were widespread then hasbro would have to pay royalties for all of the songs used. for a one time, limited audience thing, it wasn't not an issue.

 

I had the very same experience at my Botcon '95...a dealer had a Bumblejumper in good shape and I asked him how much and he totally flipped out on me about how I "couldn't POSSIBLY understand how rare and valuble the piece was"...um....OK...me and my wallet will be leaving your table now   Sure the guy had no idea what i might or might not know, but assuming I'm that ignorant right off the bat was pretty bad for a guy who presumably wanted to make sales  

 

This was my first Botcon. At the beginning, there was little mishaps that goes along with traveling across the country. After the mishaps were taken care of, a couple of my really good friends and I had a great time. To meet Peter Cullen, we were there at 5:30-6 AM. As for those not being able to meet Peter, you can partially blame Hasbro. It was fun to meet the various special guests.

As for next year's Botcon's location, I knew of rumors before I went to this year's. I was told that it would be on the western portion of the country. The two possibilities were California or Las Vegas.

 

Yeah, I've had that a couple of times with pieces I've been prepared to pay good coin for. They lost the sale, simple as that. As far as I am concerned, I am the customer; if the seller can't be bothered to treat me with common courtesy they don't deserve my money.

 

I'll never understand why people have to be rude about it. I guess i can understand "make an offer" but to explode about how its really expensive or rare like a customer isnt good enough to buy it is unreal. When i was collecting sports stuff years ago i even asked one dealer "why did you bother having it on the table if you act like you arent prepared to sell it".

 

Sounds like that dealer was having a bad day.

The problem is that every single negotiating "advice" site tells you to make the other guy name a price first... So you have too many people out there fishing and hoping to catch a sucker willing to massively overpay or underprice. I run into this all the time at flea markets.

IMHO, it is the seller's responsibility to know the value of his wares and know how much he wants for them. That means having an asking price. Preferably written on a price tag. I know there's been a lot of complaints from dealers about not having enough time to price... I seem to manage fine every year. We all know what we are up against so it's not difficult to plan ahead. I was spending an hour or two most evenings for a few weeks leading up to the show making sure I was ready.

 

I had a great time, location was amazing, I suspect it wasn't as crowded as was hoped for, but personally it made it a lot more pleasant for me. As did the slightly less crowded schedule of events, it meant I was able to do just about everything I hoped to do.

The hotel was truel amazing and thats without the fact we stayed in a room that was about 3 or 4 times the size of most hotel rooms I've ever stayed in.

 

No the reason they did just one session was that about 2 years ago about 500 people all wanted his autograph and each person took about 10-15 mins meeting him. Mr. Cullen was there for most of the day doing autographs. About noon they had to such the line down and do a second session for thise that did not get through. I understand the reason they did it. Beside they did limit the number of folks that could get autographs down to 250 folks to save time. We had folks waiting there as early as 1 AM in the morning to be in line. I got down there about 6:30 or so and got in line.