Transformers: The Last Knight Super Fan Event

On March 21 2017, Paramount Pictures, at the behest of Michael Bay, flew in fan-journalists from around the globe to an unusually gray and drizzly Hollywood California for the Super Fan Event, a promotional tour for the upcoming The Last Knight film. TFWIKI.net's Greg Sepelak was on hand and on average mostly coherent for the trip.

The Event

Monday, March 20

This was as bright and sunny as it got the whole time.

The day of travel. No big news here so if y'all want that, jump down to Tuesday.

I was awake at 5am EST to get on my 7:30 nonstop to Los Angeles International Airport, arriving there at 10am PST (1pm EST after the most uncomfortable flight I've ever been on), finally arriving at the Loews hotel just off of Hollywood Boulevard about 11am... where the rooms were not yet ready. Now, this is not a drag on the Loews staff, as they had apparently been unusually swamped that weekend with a massive number of guests all checking out on Monday, leaving the cleaning staff with a loooooooooooooooooooong list of rooms to take care of as soon as possible, and a long list of people checking in as well. I'm sympathetic even when I'm really really tired. I didn't actually get to a room until about 4:30pm (EST again, so 7:30 "my" time), at which point so ready to die.

When I wasn't napping in the lobby, I did wander along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, checking out Grauman's Chinese Theater (though I had been unaware that Peter Cullen and Optimus Prime had left their hand (and tire) prints in the cement out front so no pics sorry), and looking for the important stars on the Walk... and the CVS. Really needed sinus drugs.

I said important and I ****ing MEAN it.

At this point I should note that Hollywood Boulevard is less glamorous than Hollywood would have you believe. Were it not for the stars in the sidewalk and a couple of locations like the Theater, Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, Madame Toussad's, etc... it'd really be just another retail-focused downtown street, with both upscale and "downscale" areas. And most of those "name" locations are pretty tightly-packed into a couple blocks.

Paramount was hosting an informal get-together for the attendees at the Dave & Buster's in the shopping center adjoining the hotel later that evening. I mostly just popped in (after an actual in-bed snooze and light shower) as I also had loved ones coming up to visit for a quick hello and hangout. After a bite at Johnny Rocket's, some shop-wandering, and game-time at Dave & Buster's, they hit the road road home, and I plopped back into bed, because tomorrow was going to be very, very full.

Tuesday, March 21

Universal Studios

9am, in the lobby to get on the bus. There were a little over 20 people this time, several from the first Detroit visit, but Paramount had brought in international fans from as far as China and Australia this time.

"ACTING!"
"Genius!"
"Thank you!"

First stop was Universal Studios Hollywood for a go on Transformers: The Ride – 3D. BotCon 2014 attendees may remember this, and while The Ride itself has not changed, the park definitely had. The Harry Potter portion of the park, under construction back at BotCon, was open and fairly busy even on this cool, damp Tuesday morning. The Simpsons seemed to have taken over even more real estate, with more Springfield shops and restaurants, including a small-scale Duff Gardens. We were largely spared Minions, thankfully.

Before The Ride, we got in line to have our pictures taken with Bumblebee outside the main ride hangar. (Sadly, Megatron was not due to appear until a good hour after we would need to leave, forcing us to find other sources of being rudely and hilariously insulted.) Our handlers corralled us away from the gift shop (later! LATER!) and into the expedited line.

For several folks in the tour, this was a first go. For those of us who'd already been on it... well, The Ride is a hard thing to prepare for even if you know what's coming. It's a simulated rollercoaster ride aboard the Autobot Evac, and even though the car is only bouncing and rocking in front of a series of 3D movie screens, it does a tremendous job of fooling you into thinking you're doing things like, oh, plummeting dozens of stories at breakneck speed or being dragged through a city skyline (and through a building or two) on Starscream's tow-line. Well-timed puffs of hot air and mist only add to the sensation that snaps your brain into "oh crap" mode for just long enough. (As an aside... fooling the brain for "just long enough" comes up later on. You'll see.)

$32.95 ain't cheap for Cyber Battalion figures, but given their eBay prices from overseas?

The original plan was to ride twice, but a combination of heavy Los Angeles traffic delaying our arrival (look it rarely ever rains in southern California so several days of drizzle may not paralyze the city but it sure as hell will slow it down bigtime) and our pressing neeeeeeeeeeeed to get to the gift shop meant only one go.

The gift shop had also changed since BotCon 2014 in small but notable ways. The exclusive Deluxe Evac, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee toys have new packaging, a modified and cleaner take on the Age of Extinction merchandise packaging with big character portraits up front. The Kre-O Kreon 4-Pack of park characters has been re-done with the revamped 2015-style Kreon, plus giving Evac some new chromed bits. And plushies! Yes, a 10-inch plush Evac! I'm kicking myself now for not buying one, but things were quickly getting expensive... especially since the park had in some of the Cyber Battalion figures, the only place in the US to buy them. And at $32.95 a whack, I could only justify one... Starscream. And you know what? As a one-off oddity purchase, he's pretty dang great. The store also had the whole of the first wave Robots in Disguise "Combiner Force" toys... but nothing of Titans Return that I saw. Interesting.

All in all, there's a ton of stuff in the Universal gift shop that I'm pretty certain you can't get anywhere else, and if I'd had the time to catalog it all, I bloody well would have. Oh well... another time. I'll be back some day. Oh yes.

Soon it was back on the bus (through a part of the park they don't let guests through, ha ha!), and on to our next destination...

Paramount Pictures

Amazing what painted styrofoam can do. No, really, it's literally painted styrofoam.

The Paramount lot was a rather more casual visit, with a light drizzle popping up time and again. It started with a lunch in a nice outdoor patio, with a special guest... Sqweeks! A remote-controlled animatronic model meant for promotional visits (the actual full-sized used-in-the-movie version is safely tucked away) warbled and rolled around as we got some salad, chicken, fish and fruit. Unfortunately, Sqweeks was one thing we couldn't take pics of. It was a really neat little piece of machinery, complete with a painted-on "WASH ME" in the "dirt" on the back of his dome.

We were split into small groups for the Paramount studio tour, taken through a couple of rooms with props and costumes from some of their big films. One room had its wall dominated by a huge chunk of the original AllSpark prop... but I must admit the thing that got me going "oooooh" were the costumes worn by Raul Julia and Angelica Houston for The Addams Family. I love that movie and I will fight you.

Our smaller group piled into one of the extended golf-carts used for tours, and off we went, passing by the grassy park areas used in about a billion productions, notably by Community (someone just perked up). The palm trees were disguised by simply wrapping fake bark around them. The first part of the tour was pretty Transformers-light, but that was fine, as we got little history lessons and trivia bits, such as how William Shatner discovered a fire back in 1983 while trying to beat out Leonard Nimoy to the other productions' lunch setups, saving millions of dollars in damages by alerting crews to the fire so early on. We also saw the spot where Isabela Moner sat for the "Fight Like A Girl" promotional bits... which is right outside the same alley a pre-serum Captain America picked up a garbage can lid and used it as an impromptu shield. There was a lot of talk of how Lucille Ball did so much for the studio and actors, from creating a day care so writers would not have to quit their jobs to become full-time housewives, to pushing hard for productions like Star Trek and more. We got to check out a few studio sets, including daytime talk show The Doctors and Nickelodeon's The Thundermans. We passed studios where some of the biggest TV shows out there were filmed, and some of Hollywood's biggest names got their start. We even passed by Hasbro's Allspark Pictures's offices, in the Lucille Ball Building.

Iiiiii ain't got no... original jokes...

Then it was a hangar for showing off bigger props from quite the eclectic mix of movies. Here stood a colossal prop Bumblebee from the first film as well as the original movie Optims truck cab, not far from a transporter from the new Star Trek movies (as well as young Kirk's hoverbike... not the one from the final film, but a prop used before the scene was re-done), a Cobra motorcycle from Rise of Cobra... and the dead grandma from Bad Grampa next to a city street from Team America: World Police. Oh, and a Count Olaf portrait hanging on the wall. Like I said, eclectic mix.

Soon though we started hitting the real back lots, where Transformers-related stuff was waiting. Soon we headed into the audio booths to take a look at the ridiculous editing process that goes into movies. There are actually three different audio teams working on the film: one for dialogue, one for sound effects, and one for music. These three departments work semi-separately, laying down tracks to the footage provided so that when the final edit begins, each piece can be separately adjusted for the tone desired. Most impressive was the sound effects department, where we got to see a couple minutes of a chase sequence from -presumably- early in the film (with a mix of semi-finished, rough-animatic, and not-yet-added CG robots), with no dialogue or backing music. Here, every single sound is a separately-recorded piece of foley, recorded in the controlled studio environment. Every footstep, bullet impact, tinkle of glass, door creak, ev-er-y-thing. The sound captured live at the shoot is merely used as a template for timing. This allows for the final edit to adjust volume to emphasize/downplay sounds as needed for the scene: loud echoey footfalls in a wide-open space, or the quiet whine of a tiny rotor for a tense close-in shot. Hundreds of individual sound files for just the sound effects in a few minutes of footage.

Dear Hasbro. Please make. Love, people who love good things.

There aren't enough green cars.

Soon it was back outside where the drizzle was threatening to become a proper rain, but our next visit was in the roadway between studios, appropriately on Michael Bay Avenue: Optimus Prime. The shiny, sleek truck form he took in Age of Extinction was waiting for us, with stunt driver extraordinaire Randy Peters on-hand once again. There was even a professional photographer there to snap pics of us all in front of, and inside, the big bot. (Those pics are presumably forthcoming.) And from there, a short hop to an almost-empty hangar, where five vehicle-mode Transformers awaited for photos. Crosshairs, Bumblebee, "Mohawk" (production name, final might change), Drift and Barricade sat in shiny glory. I admit it's Mohawk that was the coolest to me: a vicious-looking Confederate Motorcycles "Combat" model bike, an alt-mode new to the franchise. Randy's assistant (dangit I didn't get his name!) started him up, and even at a slow roll that bike has some pipes. Randy started up Barricade's lights, and I think there are still some residual color blobs in my vision from that display. We had plenty of time in the hangar, a bit of a nice chance to stop and collect ourselves.

It was rather fortunate that this was when it decided to give us something that properly qualifies as "rain". It was brief but more than you'd want to be outside in for any length of time.

Afterwards, the bus was brought back, and after another too-long drive, back to the hotel for a shorter-than-planned break. Our given itinerary only stated "Transformers activities" for the next thing, so while many of us had some guesses, we didn't actually honestly expect where we ended up next...

Wednesday, March 31

Four hours is enough sleep, right?

Okay I got little to nothing here. The flight back was early and uneventful (other than re-affirming that Delta apparently doesn't think seats need cushioning), and whatever theoretical jetlag the 3-hour time-jump might have inflicted was lost in the swirling miasma of abstract concepts that my circadian rhythm had mutated into well before this trip.

But I'm back and have relayed this information to you. Enjoy, let's?

Notes

• The badges given for the event oddly have the date as March 23, aka Thursday, aka when most of the folks should have made it home by. I sure hope they were home by then.