Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the fifth edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. In 2022 they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times, and have expended tremendous efforts to maintain the previous showrunners’ geek-marketed traditions to keep luring in longtime fans and newcomers alike…

…and for us it meant another round of photo ops with actors from movies and TV shows we’ve enjoyed. Longtime MCC readers know jazz hands are our thing, if we feel it’s worth a shot to ask, and if the stars are amenable. Sometimes they don’t, and that’s fine! They’re adults, we’re adults, and we accept it — their image, their choice. But it’s a lot cooler when they do. Overall we enjoyed ourselves, but this year FEC was crippled by the worst photo-op complications we’ve ever experienced for a show of its size within the past fifteen years.

Fortunately we’d put off our appointment with our lead guest — beloved actor Kurt Russell, who needs no introduction — until Sunday morning. We hate doing Sundays at cons, but we initially had such a long to-do list that we couldn’t possibly have fit everything into the first two days. By then the comic-con photography company that the showrunners hired — Leap Event Technologies, formerly Epic Photo Ops — had gotten their issues under control and resumed business as usual. By all accounts Russell was a gent throughout the weekend. This moment was the last item on our weekend to-do list; once we finished, we were out the door and on the road back to Indianapolis by 11:40 a.m. CDT.

By contrast, Friday was our longest day. We left home around 8:15 a.m. EDT through the last of the week’s record-breaking heavy storms and arrived in Rosemont right at noon our time, 11 a.m. local time. We got lunch out of the way first so we could put off needing the convention center’s overpriced options for as many hours as possible. We walked into the Center right around noon Central, went through the usual security rigmarole, and joined the line for Ultimate Fan badge-holders that’t formed over by the panel rooms. Ultimate badges came with far fewer perks than VIP badges did, but their primary advantage was early admission to the show floor all three days. Friday the con opened at 4; we were allowed inside shortly after 2:00, once all the VIPs were in before us. Not all vendors were ready and virtually no actors were in the house yet, but it gave autograph seekers the chance to go reserve their spots in line for the guests of their choice.

We went straight to Karl Urban’s table and patiently waited, among the first dozen in line. We’d already met him at Wizard World Chicago 2014, where Anne added him to her vast Star Trek autograph collection (this was a year after he reprised Dr. McCoy in Star Trek Into Darkness). We’d taken a quick pic at the table, but professional photo ops weren’t our thing yet, and it wasn’t till years later that the Lord of the Rings cast collectively began popping up at shows and convinced me to start having them sign my extended-edition DVDs. As the long-haired Eomer, head of the Riders of Rohan, then-unknown Urban debuted in The Two Towers and therefore qualified for inclusion into my little quest.

After the show officially opened at 4, Urban appeared at his table around 4:15. The volunteer managing our lines did a capable job of alternating between our general-admission line and the VIP line — she’d let VIPs go through at a time, then a few of us GAs, then back and forth. For my chitchat moment I swerved onto the topic of The Boys and his two final boss battles in the finale — one with Billy Butcher as the underdog victor, the other with Butcher as the Final Boss himself — and Urban was just as friendly as he’d been twelve years earlier, even though he still had Butcher’s intimidating hair and beard. We were done by 4:40 and had no other major autographs planned.

We spent the next couple hours on other forms of fun while waiting for his solo photo ops to begin around 7. We arrived later at the booths and found a teeming, disgruntled crowd surrounding the entrance — not an uncommon sight, really. Sooner or later at any large-scale show, photo ops nearly always go off the rails after the first couple hours or so. This time the delay wasn’t quite so uncommon or short-term: we learned some sort of catastrophic system failure earlier had caused them to cease all photography for about an hour, so now all ops were running behind across the board.

The Leap staff were doing their best to catch up, under the watchful eye of their stentorian-voiced traffic controller whom we’ve witnessed in his element at many a con. The muscular, tattooed gent sounds like he was born with a megaphone in his throat and has nigh-unlimited patience as long as you do exactly what he commands, get in line only when he tells you it’s time, and stop adding to massive messes that might invoke the ire of the nearest fire marshal. He’s all about crowd control and stampede prevention, which is what a con this size needs. He’s easily recognizable whenever a particular actor is about to wrap up and leave their booth, whereupon he takes to the mic and bellows to the crowd loudly enough to be heard in Milwaukee, “IF YOU HAVE A PHOTO OP FOR BRENT SPINER, THIS…IS YOUR LAST AND FINAL CALL!”

Even with Thunder-Throat at the helm, they were still working through ops from the 5:00 hour, rushing them wherever possible. Thankfully some actors and groups had small turnouts, and I didn’t get the sense that any actors had contributed to the delays. To the best of our knowledge, this was entirely on Leap’s tech-support side. It was more than just a basic wi-fi outage, considering most folks in this overstuffed de facto waiting room passed the time by screaming into the internet through their fully functional phones.

They began forming Urban’s lines around 7:40. His booth opened quickly after that, implying he’d been more than ready for us. And indeed he was.

We had one more op scheduled that night at 7:40, which was pushed even farther back. That man was a bit slower in arriving, but made it nevertheless: Mr. T! The iconic ’80s tough guy is best known online as a sweet Christian gentleman on his social feeds, a stark contrast from his breakthrough role as the powerhouse boxer Clubber Lang in Rocky III. I saw that at the drive-in when I was ten, and Clubber’s unfettered fury on that giant screen was terrifying. He’d keep his fame rolling as TV’s B.A. Baracus on The A-Team, as the star of his own Saturday morning cartoon where he inexplicably played a gymnastics coach who led his plucky kids into adventures, in the mostly forgotten comedy DC Cab, and so on. I still treasure that time he cameoed on Saturday Night Live in one of Eddie Murphy’s “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” sketches.

We wrapped with Mr. T at 8:40 and by that time were beyond exhausted, over thirteen hours since we’d left home. We hadn’t had supper and hadn’t even checked into our hotel in Arlington Heights. We nibbled on the emergency snacks we’d brought along — granola bars and bagel chips — as we made our way past the road construction currently ruining the I-90 exit near the convention center, tried to follow a Google Maps workaround in the dark, turned too soon, and, as an unexpected and unwanted treat, discovered I-190 West leads directly into a loop around the terminals at O’Hare, where traffic can get really hectic on Friday nights. We hated learning that the hard way.

Saturday we had two photo ops scheduled and hoped all Friday’s problems were fixed. As of the 11:10 appointment time for our first one, all was not well. Whereas Leap’s solution to Friday’s troubles had simply been to call time-out for an hour, Saturday had far too many high-profile guests for them to allow potential hours’ worth of delays. This was a comic-con, not O’Hare — the show must go on. Their new solution: “Let’s just do photo ops without our systems!” The volunteer handling our line didn’t bother scanning the QR codes on anyone’s tickets, per normal procedure — he just eyeballed them and nodded us onward into the booth.

We got in, took the pic, got out by 11:25…and were informed at the pickup table that we’d need to come back in an hour or so for our hard copy. That’s how photo ops used to work, say, ten or fifteen years ago before the advent of tethered cameras that relay files instantly to speedy laser printers. We sighed, bugged off, came back 75 minutes later, and picked ours up. It was printed without the code that’s normally etched into the edge of every comic-con photo so fans can either buy the digital copy online later or receive what they prepaid for via email.

If the physical copy is all you wanted, then you were all set. Sometimes we prepay extra for the luxury of digital copies because: (a) it’s fun sharing them with friends immediately while you’re still at a con; (b) they look better than how roughly our 20-year-old scanner would treat it; and (c) they’re often higher-quality than the physical product, which can be subject to ugly printing flaws if the volunteers haven’t maintained their equipment. (Want a concrete example? Please enjoy this flashback to the Fandom Fest 2017 fiasco featuring Brenda Strong.) We prepaid for digital; as of this writing we’ve yet to receive it or have any way to access it.

Hundreds of other fans, maybe more, were in the same boat all morning long, for this op and others. And we’re all still here. Leap later emailed everyone to advise they’re still figuring out how to distribute those to the affected fans, and that whether or not they work it out, we’ll all receive refunds for the digital expense and fees. In the meantime, the physical copy alone will have to suffice.

Even without Leap’s persistent tech letdowns, the pic had its own issues that were not our scanner’s fault:

Yes, that’s the great Danny Glover, who was in such films as The Color Purple, Places in the Heart, Predator 2, 2012 (he was the President!), and dozens upon dozens of others besides the ones where he plays the cop who’s “gettin’ too old for this” even though he was a mere babe at 41 when the first one came out. Glover is now 80 and has publicly revealed he’s been dealing with Alzheimer’s for the last several years. He was well enough to come out for the show this weekend and meet the fans.
And when we asked if we could do jazz hands, he kindasorta did them! I saw his hands at full-jazz for a brief moment, which the photographer missed by about half a second. But I saw them! They were real!

The same cannot be said for his sidekick, Academy Award Winner Mel Gibson, who’s ten years younger than he is. When Anne asked if we could do jazz hands, he said, “Yep!” and, well, here we are. Dude looked like this in every single photo of him that we’ve seen so far from this weekend, as if he were only here because it counted toward court-ordered community service. To be fair, he bared his teeth a wee bit more here than he did for many others, so we got that going for us. But it’s a reminder that not all the actors who accept the paychecks for these events actually want to be there. Some hide their disdain for us through the power of Acting. Others, not so much.

When we were planing for this weekend, we debated quite a bit over whether or not to go for this one, for multiple reasons. Ultimately we decided if Danny Glover was game, then we were game. So hey: here’s Danny Glover, a past winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award! Who’s not gettin’ too old for this yet!

(If we ever actually get our virtual hands on the lost digital copy, I’ll update here. Let’s all hold our collective breath.)

Our next encounter, by contrast, was a solid grade-A. Among the other guests around the halls, this one was for Anne: Brian Tochi! You might remember him from such films as the Police Academy series (I saw six of the eight), the Revenge of the Nerds series (I saw the first two), or the ’90s live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies where he was the voice of Leonardo (saw the first two). Closer to Anne’s heart, he’s also one of the few actors who ever appeared in episodes of both the original Star Trek and The Next Generation. As a child he was one of the space ragamuffins in “And the Children Shall Lead”, generally considered one of the all-time worst through no fault of Tochi’s. As an adult, he netted the rotating “random ensign on the bridge” slot in “Night Terrors”, generally considered one of TNG’s all-time worst through no fault of Tochi’s. I refuse to believe he’s a jinx.

Tochi was hyped to be there and extremely energetic. Together he and Anne recited the horrible chant from that old Trek episode, which I just saw for my first time last year and am still trying to forget. He was an absolute pleasure to meet; 10/10 would recommend to anyone. On the Sunday drive home, Anne and I talked about how maybe we really need to go back to focusing more on the character actors we know at these shindigs rather than on the headliners everyone knows.

Tochi’s TMNT costars were there as well for a full-blown cast reunion. Next booth over, his castmate Kenn Scott (originally Kenn Troum) interrupted the entire area to celebrate a Turtle cosplayer at his booth, leading us all to salute her with a hearty “COWABUNGA!” And thus her day was made.

By 5:00 Leap had exterminated their system bugs at last and con life went on as normal, just in time for an op with one more guest: Erin Moriarty from The Boys! I shouldn’t even admit I watch the show, but the arc of her character Starlight was fascinating (if frequently depressing) to follow. Her expression seemed to be channeling the spirit of her character’s later seasons, or maybe she’d gotten bored with attendees like me making oddball requests, or maybe this is her default. No idea, but I made the most of it.

We also made time this weekend to attend two actor Q&As. Sometimes those can be dreadfully cringe, but Fan Expo wisely excised the whole “questions from the audience” segment from each one, which improved matters a good 90% above normal quality levels.

Friday between Urban’s autograph and his photo, we watched a joint session for two classic Rocky opponents: the aforementioned Mr. T from Rocky III, and Dolph Lundgren, a.k.a. the Soviet human bulldozer Ivan Drago from Rocky IV, which to this day remains the only film I’ve ever seen in a theater that roused sports fans in the audience so intensely that a group of guys actually stood up and cheered and pumped their fists when Drago went down for the final count. Both owed their careers to Sylvester Stallone discovering them at their respective points in their lives, each of them with experience as club bouncers before they made the leap to Hollywood.

One other thing they have in common: neither of them have any of their original movie props or costumes. Mr. T held onto his for years before donating them to the Boys Club of Chicago (his hometown!) and other charities for fundraising purposes. Lundgren entrusted all his to a shady manager who put them in storage, failed to pay the monthly bill, and lost them all. Among Lundgren’s most interesting trivia: Jason Momoa’s Aquaman films were his first big-budget green-screen productions, which were really weird to wrap his head around at times.

Saturday between Danny Glover’s photo and Erin Moriarty’s, we sat in on a panel celebrating Smallville‘s 25th anniversary, which I didn’t realize was that long ago. We’d already met all three cast members at previous shows — Tom Welling at two different cons (most recently at GalaxyCon Columbus 2022), Michael Rosenbaum at four of them (including that same GCC), and Erica Durance at C2E2 2023. We watched most of the series (Anne managed six seasons; I lasted 7½, then returned for the back half of the tenth), but had never seen any of them in a panel before. This, I felt, was the time to rectify that oversight.

All three had fun kidding each other and seemed genuinely happy to be hanging out together again. Rosenbaum plugged his podcast and told the best anecdote: one time a sullen fan waited in his autograph line for however long, then upon reaching him, used that moment only to shout at him, “GENE HACKMAN WAS THE BEST LUTHOR!” Rosenbaum shouted back, “I KNOW! HE IS!” The fan, apparently not getting what he was hoping for, silently slunk away.

…

…and that’s pretty much it for our actor experiences at the show. We’d had other names on our to-do list, but in the weeks leading up to the big show, John Noble, Miranda Otto, David Wenham, and Dafne Keen all canceled. If they had all shown up, I’ve no idea how we could’ve possibly managed our time, in light of the other meet-ups that did happen and Leap’s photo-op breakdowns. In a sense, that worked out for us — I’m not sure we could’ve survived if we’d had to stay all the way through the end of Sunday just to do everything imaginable. As of Monday afternoon we’re both still aching and sluggish. We really hope we aren’t getting too old for this.

To be continued! Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: A Little Cosplay!
Part 2: Slightly More Cosplay!
Part 4: Comics!
Part 5: [coming soon]