For the last couple of years, my friend Bob has been talking about doing MegaCon, a comic con in Orlando, Florida. Since Ohio in February is a little on the Rura Penthe side, it didn’t take much convincing to get me to pack up my things and head for the sunshine state. Plus, I heard they have a couple amusement parks down there.

So we flew on down to Orlando. My flight was uneventful and crash-free, just the way I like them. I was joined by my erstwhile travelling companions Con Daddy Roger Price, big kahuna behind the always-excellent Mid-Ohio-Con, and our travel agent Bob Ingersoll.

The last time I was in Orlando was 1994, and I heard they had made some changes, including Marvel Super Hero island and some other stuff. But first, we had the con.

BIGGER ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER
MegaCon is a con. One might even say a mega con. In terms of scope, attendance and guests, it certainly lives up to its billing.

If MegaCon suffers from anything though, it’s in the programming schedule. For a show with all these many people at it, it just doesn’t take advantage of them. Michael Rosenbaum (Lex Luthor from Smallville) was a one-day guest of the show, and he didn’t do a panel, just a couple of autograph sessions.

Now it could have been his schedule or contractual obligations. But they had a couple other similar guests with similar non-panel schedules.

Look, I like meeting famous people. They seem to like meeting me. But not wanting to, and not being able to because of needing to work my booth, I can’t spend three hours in line to get Lex to sign a picture while I say “I really liked that part where you shot Clark.” But I like hearing the stories.

“Smallville” seems like a fun show to work on, and this is the first actor in the Superman franchise who, not only plays Lex bald, but also just shaved his head outright. No skullcap. He’s suffering for the part.

That’s my favorite part. Hearing the “Oh, Tom Welling slipped when we filmed that,” or those kind of things. And there was none of that.

Other than that, my con was uneventful and crash-free. I sold some books, met some nice people, got to bump into the guys from “Farscape” again, but nothing that blew my doors off. Now the amusement parks, that’s a different story.

THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH, DAMMIT. PART TWO.
The Buckeye Three went to Disney for a couple of days. Let’s just say I know some people who know some people, and as such we didn’t have to pay to get in. (What’s the moral of this story? Get to know me! Things happen! I surf a wave of good fortune that benefits everyone.)

We skipped Animal Kingdom, AKA Zoo Disney. It’s a nice enough place, I’m told, but I had a finite amount of time, and had a lot of stuff to do. I really like EPCOT... yeah, I’m the one... and wanted to see that. I think Disney/MGM is great. The Magic Kingdom is nice but not always my cup of mocha. It skews a little young, if you know what I mean.

WHO WANTS TO HAVE A POST-TRAUMATIC FLASHBACK?
So I’m at MGM and they have this “Who Wants to be a Millionaire- Play it?” attraction. You get to go into a studio designed to look like the “Millionaire” set and play along, maybe get into the chair, and if you win a million points, you get a 4-day Disney Bahamas cruise. Having just gotten back from the Bahamas, this seemed like a good thing to win.

The set is frighteningly accurate. Like I can hear the helicopters, Charlie’s in the trees accurate. At this point, I must note, that my episode of “Millionaire” hadn’t aired and I was a little more self-conscious about my performance. Plus, I couldn’t tell anyone about my time on the show, so there were all sorts of hidden issues.

The way it works is that they do one fastest finger and then the audience plays along on every question. This gives instant audience polling and, whoever has the most right and best speed total replaces the person in the chair when they go out.

We wound up going three times because we were pretty good and figured out how to increase our speed. (Tip: Don’t wait until the question is over to respond.) And I, well, I really wanted Bob to win.

Bob was a phone-a-friend for two contestants, myself and his co-worker Tom Condosta. I wanted him to experience the essential truth of “Millionaire.” It’s different when you’re in the chair.

So, what happened? I got in the chair.

I immediately wondered why. Why did I want to put myself through this again? Why feel the pressure, sit in the chair, just to win a trip to the Bahamas, nice as they were.

It wound up that I got to the 32,000 point question and blew it. Cold out blew it. I overthought the question. Unlike the real version, there’s a time limit and I confess, it spooked me. I thought too hard, picked the wrong answer, and went out.

The question, of course, being: “Which of these instruments is the descendant of the clavichord?”
a. Organ
b. Piano
c. Guitar
d. Harp

I thought it was organ. I had already 50/50’d a question and the phone-a-friend is actually “Phone a complete stranger” there. I should have done that, just to buy time, but I didn’t. So at the last minute, I changed my answer. Clavicle is close to the neck, I figured, guitars have necks. I knew the harpsichord was an organ, so thought there was a chance the organ wasn’t the answer. Tragically, it was.

This, as much as anything else, helped me deal my performance on the real show. How lucky for me that when I was on the big show that I did get 10 questions I could answer right, rather than get this set and leave with $1000. And if I had won the trip, how lousy would I have felt going Broadway on the one that doesn’t really mean a thing.

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
One of the other highlights was the Buzz Lightyear ride. You scoot around a track firing a light gun at targets, which racks up a score and you get rated by Buzz himself on it. Bob has been on this before, and offers a running commentary on what you need to do. Having done it before, you’d think he’d have the better score at the end. But guess what tall Irish boy blew his doors off?

That’s right. As I told him “It’s not so much that your skills are vastly inferior to mine, but that mine are vastly superior to yours.”

RIDE THIS WAY
Also got to ride the Aerosmith Rock and Roller Coaster. I’ve long said that I like speed more than anything else, and a coaster that rust blasted straight would be cool. Yeah, you’d think that. But after getting slammed back into my seat on the straight line rush on Aerosmith, I see the fallacy of my ways.

It’s a pretty intense coaster, especially for a Disney ride, but the very beginning is a straight line. It was like a moment out of cartoon where you scream “Yaaaaaaaaaaah...” Pause. Take a look around. Realize you’re still falling, Repeat: “Yaaaaaaaaaaah!”

Generally I’m not a fan of drop rides like the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, but that was actually a lot of fun too. It’s randomized, so you never really know how many floors you’ll go up or down. Sometimes you go up three, down two, all the way up, all the way down... variants of that.

YEAH, JUST A FIREWORKS SHOW. AND ESTELLA WARREN’S JUST A PRETTY GIRL.
MGM features a fireworks show called Fantasmic. It’s a music and light show set in Mickey Mouse’s mind as he’s dreaming and winds up fighting the Disney villains to save the Kingdom. Or something like that. The important thing is, it’s cool as heck.

The fireworks and light show was pretty astounding in and of itself, but the presentation and staging are amazing. At several points fountains shoot up a wall of water so that they can project scenes from Disney films on them. This works much better than it photographs. In fact, it works so well that I almost believe that armed with only some dry ice and a movie projector with no visible source of power, you really could convince Old Man Johnson his farm was haunted... up until those pesky kids came along.

The only odd part of the show is when Mickey dreams a ten minute re-enactment of Pocahantas. It’s odd from a storytelling point of view, but it’s such a well-done scene that I didn’t mind it at all.

DISNEY FOR ADULTS
Disney also has a ton of shopping and entertainment venues. I got to go to Pleasure Island, Disney’s strip of nightclubs and bars. Every night is New Year’s Eve there, since it’s the biggest party night of the year, Disney has it every night.

The laws of the space-time continuum apply not to Disney. To top it off, they have New Year’s scheduled at 11:00 on weekdays, midnight on weekends.

I’ve always wanted to cause a ruckus at Pleasure Island just to see a Disney bouncer. I want to get thrown out by a linebacker wearing mouse ears.

It’s not for everyone by any means, but if it’s for you, it’s really for you.

Also I found shopping at Disney trés difficult this year. Hey, I’m a single guy. I can go in, buy my one cool Mickey Mouse bowling shirt and be done. But now I have a Goddaughter, and her entire room is done up in Winnie the Pooh. And Disney has a whole frickin’ store devoted to the furry old bear.

I bought a ton of stuff. Heck, I bought her stuff her parents don’t even know about yet. (Don’t worry, by the time they read this, they will.)

Is that it? Heck, no. Next, I go to Universal. Read on..