Selling Funko!: Surrrounding Your Wife With Snakes At San Diego Comic-Con Preview Night

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Surrrounding Your Wife With Snakes At San Diego Comic-Con Preview Night

Hello Bleeding Cool, It’s your old pal Will Romine here to tell you about my Preview Night.

For those of you who have never been to San Diego Comic Con, Preview Night is a magical time when the showroom floor opens up for the select few (thousand) to peruse the show floor offerings, pick up an exclusive or two, and generally take the show at a more relaxed pace before the lure of panels pulls them away from walking the floor.

Now friends, this is my seventh SDCC and the first bringing my wife along. Each year I start the show thinking that I’ve seen it all, and each Preview Night I’m proven wrong. Yesterday was no different. As with every Preview Night, my first stop is the DC booth. They usually have something interesting to see, but they always have the softest carpet of any booth. So luxurious.

My next stop was the Entertainment Earth booth. Entertainment Earth purvey some of the most interesting, most eclectic exclusives. They have a knack for turning the simplest, most time honored playthings into creative, high end, and sometimes irreverent into high end collectables. The hit for me this year were the Pinmates. Everybody remembers playing with these things. They’re the only toys which simplify the human form even more than Legos.

Aren’t they adorable? Zero points of articulation, and that’s a good thing!

Next, we headed over to the Conan O’Brien booth. Conan went all out this year. In addition to the four shows filming from SDCC, he has a whole booth where participants can enjoy a VR experience as they peruse Conan’s office vis-a-vis a giant Funko Pop head.

Now Gang, I mentioned that I brought my wife along. We have a healthy happy marriage, but marriage, like the safety restraints on a roller coaster, needs to be pushed, jiggled, and tested to ensure its strength. My wife is deathly afraid of snakes, which made the next booth a perfect way to test the strength of our marriage. We ambled on over to the History Channel’s Vikings booth to experience the Viper’s Den, where participants are surrounded by over 40 live snakes an area the size of a large port-a-john. See our video here. Our marriage survived!

We ended the night at the Game of Thrones Hall of Faces offsite. On our way, we ran into our fellow Bleeders Hilton Collins, Frazer Brown, Erik Amaya, and Jeremy Konrad. In addition to sitting on the Iron Throne and having our mugs included in the Hall of Faces, we got SO MUCH COOL SH-T. They had an unguarded pile of free GOT Funko Pops, one per person. I took like six.