Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the latest edition of PopCon Indy, an entertainment convention locally owned and run here in our own hometown of Indianapolis. And we do love the convenience of events practically in our backyard so we can save on hotel costs and park for free at my workplace if the weather’s nice. We attended their first three shows (2014-2016), but began feeling out-of-place as the guest lists began targeting much younger geek demographics. Ten years later, here we are again! We only attended Saturday, but we accomplished our modest goals, such as “have a blast”…

…not to mention “meet new faces” and “buy stuff”. For extra credit, we also attended a panel! Hopefully that makes up for us losing an entire letter grade by eating lunch at the convention center even though we know better.

My workplace is about a half-mile away from the Indiana Convention Center and allows employees to park for free even when we aren’t on the clock. It’s a great perk as long as we can handle the extra walking through downtown to where all the action is. On occasion I’ll pay extra for a garage closer to the ICC if it’s raining or freezing, or if one of us is stricken by a random infirmity. (Ah, the joys of debilitating middle-age.) Thankfully this Saturday was a beautiful recovery from Friday night’s hours of rain.

We walked into the Convention Center around 8:45. Registration was supposed to open at 9:30, but volunteers had their gear fired up and ready to serve at 9. The exhibit hall entrance lines were shorter than we’re used to from most cons, which was fine by us. At 10:00 a dozen or so VIP ticketholders were allowed inside to run free, followed by the rest of us dozens at 10:30 sharp. Anime voice actors outnumbered the guest list’s other categories, though just about everyone had voice-work of some sort on their resumé. The tables for the two gents we wanted to meet were on the end of the autograph area closest to the front door. At first we joined a line whose star hadn’t yet arrived, but then at 10:40 TV’s Diedrich Bader and his handler arrived next door. Anne and I, plus one other fan, jumped over and started a Bader line. Sixty seconds later his handler realized they’d forgotten to bring a credit-card reader. (Most cons demand cash-only at autograph booths, but some are just now realizing the folly in our increasingly cashless society.) Bader, a hilarious and cordial gentleman, shook hands with us three before the two of them left to go fetch a reader and optimize their revenue stream.

The autograph line lengths varied widely around the show floor — most of them rather short, especially by mid-afternoon. By far the day’s longest line belonged to Sean Astin, whom we’d already met. You know him from The Lord of the Rings, The Goonies, that time Stranger Things was really mean to him, and a plethora of other roles. Here in Indiana, a state that super-loves sports above all other facets of life, he’s the hero of Rudy, The Second-Greatest Film of All Time. First place is obviously Hoosiers, with Breaking Away a distant third. And that’s it, those are the only three films ever. That lovable underdog Rudy won Best Turnout, no contest.

(Full disclosure: we’ve never seen Rudy.)

Bader and his right-hand man returned shortly after 11 and we all agreed to start over. He was extremely congenial and a pleasure to meet and I’d throw more complimentary adjectives at him if I thought you’d keep reading. I had him sign my DVD set of Batman: The Brave and the Bold season 1, in which he starred as the Caped Crusader himself. Bader deadpanned his way through a few dozen tongue-in-cheek adventures — mostly team-ups with various DC superheroes — which dug deeply into the company’s huge Silver and Bronze Age catalogs and offered a tremendously different sort of fun from the ’90s animated series that I also enjoyed on a different level.

Then we returned to our previous autograph line, whose assigned star had arrived moments before: Patrick Warburton! You’ve seen or heard him in such works as Seinfeld, Family Guy, Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the first live-action version of The Tick, The Emperor’s New Groove, Zootopia 2, and I could keep going, but you get the idea. I brought my Tick DVD set for signing, which was pretty light to carry because Fox canceled it after nine episodes because Fox sucks. After signing he thought for a moment before quoting in-character from 25 years ago: “I am the sterling silver ladle of justice, pouring its foamy cream over the just-picked strawberries of crime!” (Give or take a word, maybe.)

We left his table elated around 11:30, and would see him again later. Our two photo-ops were scheduled in the afternoon, with ample time in between to peruse the show floor, shop, grab lunch, and amuse ourselves.

We saw her and her driver multiple times as they kept going at various times throughout the day. Sometimes she’d ride quietly; sometimes she’d bark in a steady, monotonous pulse. And keep barking. And keep barking, often audible from several aisles away — never angrily, never changing tempo. She sounded exactly like the “Bite Back with Kent Brockman” opening. I saw at least one attendee struggling with sensory overload, cringing and cupping their ears as she paraded past and wasn’t helping.

PopCon has always touted an interdisciplinary approach to fandom, inviting and encouraging guests and collectors from across all of pop culture. However, like another con I could name, their comic-book presence seems to have diminished drastically. The comics section of their official guest list had three names. One of them heads a startup company implementing an entire transmedia business plan based on generating content for a singular IP universe in as many forms as they can afford till they figure out which medium makes the most money, assuming any of them do. I’m firmly against that approach to ostensibly artistic endeavors (hence why I largely avoided the Star Wars “High Republic” transmedia line). I made a point of supporting the other 66.67% of the comics guest list, each of them locals.

(I saw maybe two or three booths selling back issues, tops.)

The northwest corner of the show floor was turned into a mini-con of its own called “Purrcon”, devoted exclusively to the wide world of cats — cat products, cat art, a stage for cat-themed panels, a “kitten therapy” booth where fans could pay to sit and pet cute li’l kitties, and so on. Alas, we noticed no celebrity cats to meet — no Morris the Cat, none of Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers, not even Indiana’s own Garfield.

At one point we witnessed an active game of “musical cats”, which was like musical chairs except instead of fighting to sit on too few chairs whenever the music stopped, contestants had to put their cat dolls into too few boxes. We didn’t brake long enough to check whether they were only playing songs by Josie and the Pussycats, the Pussycat Dolls, Faster Pussycat, the Stray Cats, Cat Stevens, Cat Power, White Lion, Glass Tiger, PinkPantheress, or Marvel’s Nightcat.

Our photo-op with the esteemed Mr. Bader was at 1:50. Longtime MCC readers have read more than a few photo-op cautionary tales from our past cons. We’ve seen many a photo-op area begin the day in a calm and orderly fashion, only to devolve into patience-testing, nerve-wracking pandemonium by about 1 pm or so. More often than not, if a con’s gonna have just one thing go terribly wrong, it’ll be with the photo-ops. Not so with PopCon…because its core demographic isn’t really into photo ops. Most of them are fine with table selfies, or have no use for actor photos at all. Bader showed up pretty much on time, posed with the eight or ten of us in line, finished in seconds and headed off into the sunset like a photogenic Lone Ranger. (Insert Krusty the Clown .gif: “Bada-bing, bada-boom, I’m done. Learn from a professional, kid.”)

Also a source of merriment: fan groups! As usual we took many pics of Star Wars wares brought by our local 501st Legion.

They never let us spin the smaller wheel at the bottom, thus denying us the chance to chant, “TINY WHEEL! TINY WHEEL! TINY WHEEL!” like Pam Beesly Halpert. In all we won an Almond Joy mini-bar, a ring pop, a keychain, and a yellow plastic communion cup filled with a product called “Mini Noise Putty”, which may or may not be edible.

We also checked out PopCon’s own booth, which was selling off their own leftover merch from past years. We didn’t buy much else, but we tried to walk as much of the rest of the exhibit hall as we could. The aisle patterns kept alternating between longitudinal and latitudinal, which made it impossible to take our standard grid-walking approach for seeing ALL the things. I’m pretty sure we missed some booths because of that.

Around 2:30 we headed over to the 500 Ballroom and joined the not-yet-long line for Warburton’s 3:00 panel. After the previous panel (re: One Piece) was dismissed, we grabbed front-row seats and praised PopCon for not cordoning a dedicated VIP section.

While we waited for Our Hero, we got a brief visit from a fellow attendee and familiar face: Michigan TV meteorologist Katie Nickolaou from WLNS in Lansing! We enjoyed seeing her Trek-themed presentation at Creation’s Star Trek to Chicago show back in ’24. Since then, the Facebook Algorithm keeps showing her posts to Anne. Nickolaou attends lots of cons — more than we do! — and posts pics to her followers. Anne apparently replies to her often enough that they exchanged FB pleasantries and she came over and said hi for a minute. Small world!

Then: showtime!

As a well-honed standup comic (alas, we missed his Thursday night gig in town), Warburton kept the Q&A breezy and allowed nary a dull moment. Each question begat many anecdotes and swerved into other topics, often going on for entertaining minutes at a time.

He opened by discussing his role as “the poor man’s Buzz Lightyear” in the Toy Story spinoff cartoon, along with Big Trouble and Joe Somebody. (He and Tim Allen have intersected quite a bit.) Other works that came up throughout the questions and digressions included The Tick, Family Guy, The Emperor’s New Groove, Zootopia 2, The Venture Bros., Ted 2, the Mr. Peabody and Sherman movie, Bee Movie, the 2023 film The Duel (filmed here in Indiana), National Car Rental ads, The Woman Chaser (one of his earliest starring roles), the Australian film The Dish (not streaming in the US due to rights issues), the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks, and even EPCOT’s Soaring Across America ride, which used to feature his narration.

Fun Warburton trivia:

• He once narrated a Roy Disney documentary.
• Some of his online standup clips are cleaner than others because they were produced by Angel Studios, Christian distributor of such films as Sound of Freedom and Animal Farm, which we’re all now avoiding in theaters.
• He works out regularly and golfs frequently, which he agrees doesn’t count as working out.
• He did Joe Dirt 2 chiefly for the chance to work with Christopher Walken.
• An unnamed CBS sitcom kept him off Seinfeld for two seasons. (I looked it up: Dave’s World.)
• His mustache (which he grew for The Duel, then allowed to regrow) now gets him mistaken in public for Tom Selleck.

More fun Warburton trivia:

• Harvey Weinstein knowingly screwed him out of contractually owed earnings when Miramax bought distribution rights for Hoodwinked.
• In South Africa during the making of his very first film Dragonard, costar Eartha Kitt tried to seduce him.
• He showed us his only tattoo, the VFD Eye from A Series of Unfortunate Events, on his leg.
• He’s in a Pearl Jam cover band.
• His son Talon Warburton is also an actor; his roles include voicing young Omniman on Invincible.
• Upcoming projects that he was allowed to mention include the comedy Mick Skylark: Mini Golf Prodigy and a horror film with his son Gabriel.

Afterward, we had one last appointment: a 4:15 with The Tick himself. This time a few dozen other fans showed up as well. Once again the line went quickly and smoothly.

After one last-chance walk through a single, randomly chosen exhibit-hall aisle, we left the Convention Center around 4:45 in high spirits. Our PopCon day had been long yet joyous indeed.

The rest of the day, maybe not so much. The weather was much warmer than it’d been seven hours earlier. The walk back to the car felt longer, now that we were exhausted. The sidewalks were much more crowded as we found ourselves walking into oncoming foot traffic — hordes of sports fans heading the opposite direction toward Lucas Oil Stadium for that night’s Indiana Fever game against the Dallas Wings. Oh, and then my car wouldn’t start. It took AAA over an hour to get someone on site, only to discover my battery was fine but for some reason the battery tray wasn’t bolted down, and possibly hadn’t been bolted down since the last time a mechanic had done something battery-related, which would’ve been months ago, so apparently several months’ worth of vibrations had jarred the connector loose. And we were tired and hungry and this is not how a comic-con day is supposed to end, and adulting is stupid and I HATE IT SO MUCH.

But we still have our new, much happier memories. Plus all those Ghostbusters prizes. They’re, like, major awards.

The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see you next con…next month!