Chiller October 2001 part 1

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Chiller notes from CultTVman

photos by Cult, Louis Toledo, and Mike Warshaw

Wow! What a weekend. Attended my first Chiller Theatre up in New Jersey this last weekend. I’ve been hearing for years what a great show it was, and it certainly lived up to what everyone said. My only regret is that there is a finite amount of time during the day, and that I had to fly out on Sunday afternoon.

First let me start by thanking Ed Bowkley for encouraging me to attend, and for inviting me to participate in the show. Many of you know Ed. He runs his own resin company called Diceman Creations, producing a full line of beautiful kits. Ed is also the driving force behind Model Maniacs magazine. This fun model magazine offers a lot of good solid information about building kits, and bringing them to life. Last but not least, Ed runs the model contest, and coordinates the model seminars at Chiller. Ed is one of these guys that really puts his heart into the hobby.

 

And Ed loves to mug for the camera as you can see from the photos on the left!

What follows are a number of random observations about the events of the weekend.

Ziz, me and Louis Toledo

John Zizolfo [aka Ziz] picked us up at the airport Friday afternoon. The Newark airport is a bit of a mess as they are rebuilding it. John was able to navigate the maze of barriers and diversions and get us safely out of the airport and on our way to the hotel.

Tom and Henry

We arrived Friday and met up with Tom Parker and his partner Henry. Tom and Henry put out the wonderful Godzilla replacement head that I wrote about in Model Maniacs magazine. We shared a table with them at the show. Thanks go to Tom for making room and inviting us along.

 

The Dealers Rooms were pretty impressive. Two huge rooms full of toys, models, videos, posters, shirts, and everything else you can imagine. I saw plenty of vintage toys including Mego figures, and Major Matt Mason stuff. I wish my pockets were deeper. I was also impressed by a number of the resin kits out there. Plenty of beautiful build ups were on display, from a number of different vendors. I took a lot of photos and I know others did as well. Will get them posted as soon as possible. First things I picked up were the newest Amazing Figure Modeler and a video of Irwin Allen’s epic movie The Story of Mankind. I first saw that movie years ago on late night television. It features one of the last appearances by the Marx Brothers, though they are in separate segments. Over the weekend I kept wandering around finding all sorts of things that I wanted. I picked up a laser disc of Star Trek the Motion Picture. This was the extended TV version. I got this because you will never ever see that version released on DVD. I chatted a while with the guys at Modeler’s Vault and picked up the Alfred E Newman kit from them. If I had my list of Famous Monsters magazines with, I would have bought a stack of them as there were plenty to be had. I hooked up with Al from Python Press to add his model of Lurch from the Addams Family to my collection. Al is a long time Aurora collector and among his products are Aurora reproductions like the Giant Insect and Aurora inspired kits like The Hanging Tree and Creatures Crate. Somewhere along the line, I also picked up a Lois and Clark kit. Not sure where that one came from, but I thought it was pretty cool. I also got some DVD’s from Something Weird video. And believe me, they were weird!

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