The little con that could

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This article was published 22/06/2018 (3009 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Don’t dream it. Be it.”

— Dr. Frank N. Furter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

If there is an overriding theme to the second annual FanQuest convention this weekend, it’s that fandom — too often presumed to be a waste of time and energy — can sometimes turn out to be a vocation.

So says FanQuest founder and producer Dan Vadeboncoeur, pointing to the con’s guest of honour Pablo Hidalgo, who will receive a distinguished graduate award from Red River College on Saturday in acknowledgment of his journey from Star Wars geek to writer and content developer for StarWars.com.

“Pablo is a great example of that dynamic,” Vadeboncoeur says. “He started out as a fan and now he works for Lucasfilm.”

When it comes to all things Star Wars, it is Hidalgo who can tie together all the elements of the still-exploding Star Wars universe. And Hidalgo credits Red River Community College and its creative communications program (where Vadeboncoeur is an instructor) with giving him his start back in 1996.

“In the second year of CreComm, there’s a big project called the IPP, the Independent Professional Project,” Hidalgo says in a phone interview from San Francisco. “(It is) the expression of your particular passions and skills that extend to a project of significant scope that will be your calling card in terms of what you want your future to be in the realm of writing.

“So the stab I took was: ‘I’m going to write a Star Wars Encyclopedia. That sounds like something I want to do.’

And so he did.

“It ended up being this enormous tome, over a thousand pages and this was in the mid-’90s,” he says, referring to the fact the franchise’s second trilogy, which began with The Phantom Menace (1999), was still years away.

“So it wasn’t as big as how Star Wars has expanded to this point, but that was the project I undertook, thinking that with something like this, maybe I could leverage it and I could focus that passion and produce something usable in the realm of publishing.

“And that encyclopedia gained a reputation, not only among the licensees that were publishing Star Wars books but it came on the Lucasfilm radar,” he says. (Hidalgo ultimately joined Lucasfilm in 2000.)

“So, I do like to think that the exercise helped establish me as a bit of a Star Wars authority in the eyes of people who could make decisions like: ‘Hey, let’s hire him.’”

In a way, Hidalgo serves as something of an ambassador from the Star Wars universe when he appears at fan conventions. At FanQuest, he is scheduled to discuss his new book, Inside Solo: The Official Guide at noon on Saturday. On Sunday, at 1 p.m., he’ll get personal with a talk titled “From Winnipeg to a Galaxy Far, Far Away.”

“I’m still putting it together, something that tracks the journey from where I was born in Santiago, Chile, to where I grew up in Winnipeg to where I am now at Lucasfilm and just lay that out.”

He is in a position to address some of the controversies that have recently cracked the seeming solidarity of the Star Wars alliance, such as how The Last Jedi actress Kelly Marie Tran had to shut down her social media accounts in the wake of vicious attacks by online trolls.

“We’re still piecing together what social media does to your day-to-day life, but I like to think that, in general, there’s far more positivity surrounding Star Wars and other franchises,” Hidalgo says. “We’re coming to learn what a few bad actors can do to an online experience, and it’s a shame that it took an example like that to draw out the positivity that followed.

“But there was a lot of outpouring of support for Kelly after that incident and I think that’s the lesson to take from all this.”

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Another example of a FanQuest guest who “shows how people can pursue their fandom and make a career out of it” is a professional video gamer known as Kyente.

“Kyente is a Twitch streamer, he’s from Winnipeg and he makes a living playing video games online,” Vadeboncoeur says.

“He streams on Twitch. Every day, he goes online, plays a video game, does some funny commentary and people love it, they eat it up.”

• Toronto-born actress Nicole de Boer may be best known in convention circles as Ezri Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but FanQuest allows her to highlight her role in a Canadian sci-fi cult classic when she presents the 1999 film Cube at Cinematheque at an all-FanQuest triple bill on Saturday evening (see fact box below).

• On Sunday, former Kids in the Hall comic Kevin McDonald will attend the con “to talk about something he doesn’t often talk about, which is his voice work, and being a voice actor,” Vadeboncoeur says. “He’s done a number of voice roles, including one from Lilo and Stitch.” (McDonald is also a veteran of animated shows such as Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Moonbeam City and Phineas and Ferb.)

“He says he’s never been to a convention like this before, so he’s pretty happy about coming down and talking to fans.”

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Vadeboncoeur says he intends to distinguish his still-fledgling FanQuest from the more established Central Canada Comic Con (C4) that takes place at the Convention Centre every October. At FanQuest, he says, guests will not be expected to drop hundreds of dollars on top of admission fees to acquire autographs and photos with the convention guests.

“If you pay to get into the con, and if you want to go up and get an autograph from somebody like Nicole de Boer or Kevin McDonald, they can just sign it for you,” he says.

“There’s a system built on these autograph fees. (Cons) charge the fans for the autographs and the fans end up paying for the guest to come, not the convention.

“That’s a way for smaller conventions to get bigger guests, and you’d think that would work in our favour, but we wanted to start on this footing,” Vadeboncoeur says. “So we don’t charge for autographs and we never want to charge for autographs.”

Last year, when the inaugural FanQuest took place at the University of Winnipeg campus, the attendance was a modest 500 people.

“We’re hoping to double that this year,” he says. “The plan is to grow every year. The plan is to get bigger and bigger.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing