My husband and I went to Public Day on Saturday. They held most of it in the old Millenium Village space, although the Disney subsidiaries were in booths in the long hallway behind Pizza Piazza and the Fountainview bakery (next to Mouse Gear).
The theme for this year's convention was "A Mystery" so everything was based on mysteries and clues. When you enter the building, you go thorugh 2 "mysterious" curving paths, where they show up clues (Convention-exclusive limited merchandise and Silent Auction stuf).
Yes, Robert Sherman was autographing on Saturday...I'm sorry, but he doesn't look well at ALL. They also had about 2 dozen Disney artists and designers available to sign autographs of posters and, if you had them, things they had designed (cute story...as I mentioned in a previous message, an acquaintence of mine is married to one of Disney's artists/designers. She was not chosen to be one of the autographers this year (I guess she has in the past) and was pretty bummed about it. She and her husband were at Public Day on Saturday. Some Japanese conventioneers had some TDL pins that she had designed and were trying to get one of her co-workers to autograph them (not knowing who had made them). Co-worker said he didn't design them but knew who did. Since Dawn had already passed by, he walked around until he found her, and dragged her back so she could sign these copies of her work. Really made her day ).
ANYWAY...so they had the artists and Robert Sherman and his son, Robert Sherman . Oh, and Dave Smith was there to sign the Disney Trivia Vol IV Book. Next part was the Event Exclusive merchandise. Most of the limited edition stuff was already gone by Saturday and what was left was....icky . Next was Minnie's Attic, where they try to sell the stuff Disney can't get rid of on eBay (signs from old conventions, ornaments and 3D plates from Christmas 1998, etc.) After that was the dealer's room, which only had about 15 or 20 dealers in it. Again, the conventioneers had already gone through the stuff in previous days and there wasn't much good stuff left.
After going to Disneyana in 1992 and 1995, I have been on their mailing list until just this year. I stopped going because it seemed like it was turning more and more into an merchandise convention, rather than the fun event it was the first year or two (the ice cream social they had the first year could NEVER be beat!). I also saw the price of the convention go up from $800 in 1992 to close to $2000 by 1991. Obviously you got a LOT for that $2000...special dinners and guest speakers and all that...but $2000, on top of airfare/hotel/food/merchandise/park tickets/special behind the scenes tours, etc. was an awful lot to spend, IMHO. Obviously other people thought so too, because this year the event was less than $600...but a lot of bells and whistles were sacrified. Disney is obviously making this difficult for the dealers as well, because when I was a conventioneer, there was one whole ballroom filled with dealers...now there was a teeny tiny space in the far back of the building...I guess a lot of dealers gave up.
-Sharon-
