A lot of you have suggested merchandise as something you’d like for SOS 11, a fair few complained there wasn’t enough: or, heaven help, the good stuff got taken by people who got in earlier than you. Well, I can’t really solve the latter… because thats kind of the benefit of getting there the earliest isn’t it? A couple even suggeted holding extra things back to sell at different times of the day… so you’d rather have it based on pot luck? Oookay.

I'm with stupid.

Now in 2009 you could buy TRANS//LATION for signage by Bentley and a lot of STC prints from Nigel & Nigel. In 2010 in the shop area we had the Archie comic prints and a vast array of specially printed Crush 40 merchandise. Plus Nigel Dobbyn had his prints of course.

Now I know you guys want this cd or this rare thing not seen since forever, failing of course to note that we would presumably have to buy, store and transport the merch before we even got around to selling it. Now when you get dealing with monies it starts getting very complicated. Our hands are tied a lot of the time by licencing – true story I did actually contact Jazwarez in late 2009 about a possible special Juvi statue for SOS10. Hey, No one can ever accuse me of not thinking big when it comes to this event – alas unless a few thousand of you were going to turn up and then all buy three each it REALLY wasn’t going to be really worth it.

Plus we’d’ve have enough event budget left to maybe buy a swiss roll to share out amongst you. It wouldn’t even be a chaos one.

Now licences will again be a bugbear, and I know this can be got around by possibly getting the licencees down to SOS, other places like Tokyo Toys have been suggested several times, blah blah blah. However I will be speaking with Mr & Mrs SEGA regarding this to see if there’s a way around it. So if specific Summer of Sonic branded merchandise can be created to be sold what would you be interested in?

T-Shirts obviously, but what else? After genuine suggestions here so please engage the reality switch on your brain before typing.

Ta!

- ArchangelUK -

EDIT: Comments are now closed.

Hi all, its your host with the most ArchangelUK here.  We’re not even out of 2010 yet and we’ve got a vast array of work still to do this year on Summer Of Sonic.

Well, I say we…

In order to progress with Summer Of Sonic 2011 I have to begin thinking about it now. As such we’ve begun talking about it in the SOS war-room and I’d like to open up the floor to suggestions from you guys. These are suggestions at this point only. Some things to bear in mind:

1) Don’t bother to suggest air-con. Ok? We know. As far as we were aware the Pavilion had air-con and you weren’t the only ones who suffered.

2) Please keep your suggestions in the realms of both reality and legality. Stupidity will be dealt with harshly and with a big stick.

3) If we then go to do something suggested within the resultant suggestion that doesn’t mean it’s all your responsibility it happened. There are still people who honestly are convinced Crush 40 happened because of them. You REALLY aren’t.

4) Final decisions are always that of SEGA and the SOS management team.

Otherwise you’re free to ask for whoever. Go on, off you go then.

Okay, I’ve put together some thoughts from this years Summer of Sonic hopefully I’ve covered all the important stuff.

Preparation

This year it was a minor miracle we managed to pull it off as everything seemed to be working against us on Friday, starting with the venue not being cleaned out, discovering holes in the floor, to suddenly having our people capacity number dropped less than 18 hours before the doors open, and I’m only scratching the surface here. We then had, a faulty Wii, a DS that couldn’t take a dev cart, a stolen laptop and camera, and the less said about the Pavilion staff the better. It is a true testament to the commitment of staff that we managed to overcome these problems.

Tails judges as the Pavilion staff dawdles.

So what did I end up doing? Well to start with not much, getting to the venue and finding it in the state it was, we had to just sit off the side lines and watch the Pavilion staff clean up very slowly. Once most of it was cleaned up it was a case of all hands on deck to get as much done as possible, setting up the stage, tables, pods, chairs, sound checks etc. A couple of hours later and we had something approaching a convention hall.

The next morning went a little more smoothly with everything falling into place, we ended up opening the doors half an hour late, but hey the year we we open the doors on time will be the year where everything goes to plan, and that is never going to happen.

Looks okay from where I am.

My Job

My duties this time round were a bit more varied than normal, starting out with my usual role of door man along with Urtheart, I think I must have got about 200 people through in that first half hour or so, all the time saying, “if you leave you may not be able to get back in,” over and over again, in the end though capacity wasn’t a problem.

Convention hall filling up nicely.

After about half an hour and a case of dry throat later it was to take on my next role… as Wentos… or so I thought, as it was all a clever ploy by AAUK to get me on stage to perform my forfeit for failing this years wrecks factor. Damn him for playing on my willingness to help out! As it turned out it wasn’t so bad as I had feared that I would be forced to sing something… which would have cleared the room faster than suddenly discovering it was really a Mario convention, no instead I had to do Caramelldancin.

Once my humiliation was over with it was on with my third role of the day, Sonic’s helper. Which on it’s own doesn’t sound like much but when your in a convention hall filed with Sonic fans it suddenly turns into a real hassle. In the end it involved me (politely) asking people to move aside, a role my voice seems to be well suited to, and taking photos hopefully most of them didn’t come out too blurry.

The Event

I’ve talked a lot about what I was doing at the event but what about the rest of the event? What was actually going on? Well we had a lot more than last year, for a start the place was bigger which was a good thing however the ventilation wasn’t as good as last time some of those cos-players must have cooked.

The merch cabinet was back with the usual stock of Sonic curiosities old and new including some of mine, and a very special addition from First 4 Figures, after seeing Super Sonic light up for the first time I was glad I’d pre-ordered the special edition. peaking of merch this year we actually had a shop this time round where some of the staff flogged some of there merch and of course there was the magnificent Crush 40 merchandise.

This year we had two new games on show Sonic Colours for the Wii and DS which I didn’t get around to but it will be out soon enough, and the much anticipated Sonic 4 which I did take a few minutes to try out it was okay but I felt it’s a good thing they are taking the extra time to refine it a little more, and lets not forget the Allstars racing contest which was one by someone playing as Tails which pleased me no end.

Then there was the stage where we had me humiliating myself, the Wrecks Factor, Nevermind the Buzzbombers, Afternoon Tea with Jun Senoue, an amazingly busy cosplay contest that I still think Sally should have won, and of course the Crush 40 concert to round off the day (videos of which should be forthcoming soon on my end).

I’m sure I’m forgetting a pile of things but when your dashing around the place it’s hard to keep track of everything that’s going on.

In the End

Overall it was once again an experience that left me mentally and physically drained, with barely enough energy to find the after party, but I wouldn’t change a thing about it, I love helping out where I can making the day the best it can be for you guys. Now I hope everyone will join me in thanking Svend ‘Dreadknux’ Joscelyne for creating the event, Kevin ‘AaUK’ Eva for doing his SEGA magic, Adam ‘T-Bird’ Tuff for all his work organising the stage and the rest of the staff who helped to make this the best Summer of Sonic ever!

Hi everybody, I’m currently (trying) to get some sense of a break – alas things seem to be conspiring against me as usual. It’ll be nice one day to not have to worry about this sort of thing, very nice, as it stands though I’m always going to have to come back and do something. So as I’m here I might as well give praise to a few who should perhaps be getting a mite more credit on top of that issued already by my esteemed co-organisers. Who knows maybe as its me that’ll be worth more – like a double praise-bow. Or a pint of Strongbow.

Incidentally I was going to address things regarding my decision to stop being an active part of SOS after SOS11, but that ended up rather taking over the piece so I’ll leave that for another day – I also want to word it just right. It needs to be worded right… For now lets just shine the spotlight on a few individuals.

ADAM/T-BIRD

Make no bones about it, Adam was frickin’ GOD this year, instrumental in helping me to get Crush 40 over here for you guys be it whispering sweet nothings into Jun and Johnny’s ears to get them to agree in principle to come or helping me sweet talk SEGA Japan into allowing Crush 40 to come down and perform with his awesome proposal writing skills. Adam was also responsible for much more, he (along with Svend) forked out part of Johnny’s plane ticket, covered the hire of the band equipment (which reminds me I owe him £200 towards that) and the organisation of an awful lot over the Friday and Saturday.

Adam was my suave, sophisticated and much better looking wingman this year. He said to me in about May when we were really getting into things that he didn’t realise SOS took as much as it did in organising. Fact of the matter is he handled his side expertly in spite of a lot of surprises and bumps in the way… and on the day he was a tour de force considering a rather unpleasant experience with an unknown agent in his meal the night before.

Kudos and thank you sir.

JOSH/URTHEART

If you look up the term “unsung hero” in an encyclopedia (because Dictionaries DO NOT HAVE PICTURES IN THEM) you’ll probably find Urtheart. Lewis (Sonic Yoda) posted the following in the SSMB and it sums up my thoughts somewhat.

I need to give a very special message to a particular member of the SoS staff:

There’s been one man who has staffed every SoS so far and has received almost no recognition for what he has done. His name is Josh ‘Urtheart’ Cartlidge and he has volunteered his time and effort to man the doors and deal with security every year. He does this for absolutely nothing and spends the majority of his day on the doors to make sure everyone is checked into the convention following the correct procedure.

Now, this probably sounds a bit dull. “Yeah, so what? How hard can it be to make sure people get in?” Well if you think that you need to wise up and realise that Josh misses everything you get to enjoy. Playing Sonic 4? Forget it. Meeting Nigel Dobbyn? Forget it. Watching Crush 40? Clear off!

What bugs me most about this is that Josh didn’t need to be on the doors all day because he had 2 paid and qualified members of security helping, yet he still fully committed to his role. That’s dedication and as far as I can see, he didn’t even receive a certificate for his 3 years of service.

Seriously, if you were a Sonic fan giving up your time to staff a Sonic convention, you would at least hope you get to enjoy it on the same level as everyone else. Josh puts in some incredible effort to do what he does and he takes all the flak you give him when you’re waiting to get in or end up disappointed that you missed getting a goodie bag.

Next year there needs to be as many people cosplaying as Josh as there was this year as Shadow! Make sure you show Urtheart just how valued he is in the Sonic community at the next possible occasion. Thank you Urth for doing such an amazing job year-in, year-out.

Couldn’t say better than that.

LEWIS/SONIC YODA

Being Sonic might seem a pretty cushy job, what Lewis does though is BECOME Sonic. Also the Sonic costume is NOT a nice place to be, if we hired an “actor” to play Sonic they’d last about 10-15 mins before disappearing off for a break. What Lewis does every year is do about 5x the amount of time they do, REPEATEDLY. Seriously we beg him to stop and he wants to go back out there for everyone the silly sod.  Not only that he was Wentos this year – and that coat is HOT. When he’s not in a costume he’s keen to help out in any way.

My thanks mate.

JAY/BLAKE DRACO & PHIL/VGER

You already know Vger very well for being such a great sport with Carameldansen. Blake helped run the ASR tournament with Dale/Shadtzer.  What you don’t know is that in the set-up and closedown these two were EVERYWHERE. Whenever someone needed a team to help with something Blake was there and helping out without complaint – if you needed some help he was at your side immediately. Vger deserves thanks for taking a lead role in the closedown of the event and helping me out in a time of trial.  Both worked like trojans to little fanfare – I’d like to give them such now.

ALLAN/ROARZ/ROARY RACCOON

Roarz wasn’t even a member of staff – but was quick to volunteer his services as runner supplying the crew with liquid refreshments and even buying a FREAKIN’ FAN for people.  Ultimately the best joy was just seeing Roarz again for the first time since SOS 08 and seeing him so happy.  I’d like to offer my thanks for his kind offers and for helping out in various ways.

The entire crew deserves your respect and thanks, as they have mine.  That’s all for now.

-ArchangelUK-