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Click on any picture to see a larger version. Move mouse over picture for explanatory text. IMPORTANT NOTICE: All images on this site are Copyright Ian Smith and may not be reproduced or sold on Ebay, or copied outright to other fan sites without my express permission! Quotes are based on a mini-disc recording and may contain errors owing to high noise levels from convention attendees.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this report are those of Ian Smith (this IS a personal web site and a PERSONAL report!) and do not reflect the views and opinions of any other organisations or clubs that Ian Smith belongs to or may be involved with. Specifically this article does not purport to represent in any shape or form the views or opinions of TheOneRing.net or the Official Lord of the Rings Movie Fan Club or any of its members. Thankfully my hangover and nausea had cleared by early afternoon. Saturday night is the traditional big party night at RingCon when attendees take over the hotel bars and corridors with music, dancing and beer. Before that there is the costume competition, judged by many of the guests, and this year a novel twist was introduced.... each contestant had to 'perform', much as if they were entering a talent contest. On the surface this looked to be a great move to liven up one of the more boring parts of the convention - I think many convention attendees, like me, think that once you've seen one 'Elven woman' costume you don't really need to see 20 or 30 more paraded slowly in front of you!
		The performances were very much a mixed bag. Comedy was the key to success and the girls who sent up the Galadriel and Frodo mirror scene deserve special mention, climaxing in the innovative use of a hand hair dryer for the climactic 'All shall love me and despair' Galadriel scene. The winners, who started off seriously with a battle recreation that took place with 'Treebeard' nervously hovering in the background. As one of the orcs moved in on Treebeard with an axe the whole mood suddenly changed as the entrants suddenly started a rousing chorus of 'I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK'. Great stuff! Sadly, these acts were untypical. The costume competition went on.... and on ... and on. The organisers were clearly unhappy, but there seemed to be no way out without being rude to the contestants. The cleverer audience members started sneaking out the ballroom towards the hotel bars, but this wasn't an option that all of us could take up. And still the competition went on! One particularly slow piece, which I guess made sense given its Ent subject matter, involved an Ent wife in costume walking slowly backwards and forwards across the stage looking at a projection of Treebeard. Her costume was so elaborate that on the return visit across the stage she misjudged the edge of the stage and fell off it. No damage done, thank goodness, but for some unfathomable reason someone decided this meant the whole dull, overlong routine should be repeated again. I could feel my will to live draining away, and things weren't helped by the fact the entrant seemed determined to wait until the back-projection of Treebeard was ready again. Thankfully Ferguson and Parker came to the rescue (not for the first time), leaving their judges desks and doing an impromptu impression of Treebeard, complete with hanging fruit, to get things moving again. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, such behaviour is the stuff of convention legend. Thankfully, judging from a couple of conversations I overheard, the organisers are in no doubt about how the overlong costume competition deflated the party mood and something will be done to make sure things are speeded up at RingCon 2004. Costume competition aside, this year's RingCon was a huge success. Autograph queues were long and sometimes impersonal, but when you have 2000 attendees all wanting an autograph from guests that have to perform at panels and do a ton of other stuff too it's hard to make it otherwise without introducing an additional charge for autographs. A couple of fans approached me to complain that a couple of the 'less well known' guests were charging for their autographs while 'bigger names' were free. When I asked one of the organisers about this I was told that this was an unfortunate mix-up over a couple of the guest's contracts which had not made it clear autographs were expected to be given as part of the booking fee. Hopefully no real harm was done. One of the neat things I heard about was that there was an opportunity to have a photo taken with a celebrity on the Saturday and then collect it and get it signed by the celebrity on the Sunday. I also thought the 'photo opportunity with Sauron and the Black Riders' was a great feature this year. I missed most of the auctions, catching only a few minutes of one that Mark Ferguson was commandeering, but can report that people seemed to be having a good time with opportunities to purchase goodies normally only found for exhorbitant prices on Ebay. The attendee catalogue this year - a full colour 44 page publication - was also a nice freebie that must have cost the organisers quite a bit to print. All-in-all I thought the convention represented extraordinary value-for-money, given the high-class hotel venue it is held in. As last year, there was an opportunity to purchase a DVD of this year's event. If it's anything like last year's it's a very professional item. Really, how people can complain about this event being a 'rip off' (see opening page comments) is totally beyond me! And it's not like I don't have a reputation for being picky about these things! Anyway, it's time to wrap this report up (there's a stack of MiniDisc recordings waiting to be transcribed after all!). In closing, I'm often asked what the best event for the average Tolkien fan is. Admittedly it's some time since I attended a Tolkien Society event, but at the moment Ring*Con is top of my 'must attend' list and in a tight year financially I've cancelled Comic-Con in San Diego to ensure I can attend RingCon this year. Enough said! At the time of writing I'm hearing rumours of a possible 'name' hobbit appearing at this year's event, which would help consolidate this event in the face of the 'me too' events that are springing up all over the place without offering a tenth of the extra's that RingCon includes in its convention ticket price. In any event, I'll be reviewing both the UK August event (£200! Yikes - it had better be good!) and RingCon 2004 in a future web log and updating the panel transcripts from RingCon 2003 as time and workload allow. Click here for the official RingCon 2004 web site Click here for previous page of report (page 2) Click here for index of Ring*Con 2003 reports
Don't forget you can check out reports of lots of other Lord of the Rings -themed events in the Web Logs section

Email: ian@iansmith.co.uk