I knew many of the people coming to my Line Party event were going to be down at the Irvine Spectrum most of the day, but I had worked all weekend and still had tons of preparation to do on Tuesday. I spent the morning and early afternoon making up gaming forms for scavenger hunts and mad-libs and the costume contest ballots. I finally got down to the spectrum around 4pm and hooked up with the theater manager to discuss timing of opening the theater up, where the line would and would it be moved. I then checked on the line, which still only about 20 people or so and discovered one industrious group brought a television. OK, this was going to be a serious line, and I do have two pictures of the group with the television, so here they are.

Some of my line partiers came in costume, and hung out all day like this. You can see a few in these pictures, and the rest can be seen in the costume contest pictures. I started to run my games, such as a scavenger hunt, that took teams all over the Irvine Spectrum trying to figure out my clues and find the correct stores and collect keywords. For prizes, I had the Decipher box full of booster decks of the TCG, I had a shirt from 13 Ghosts, and I had some rather nice posters of various sizes. I also had some very cool shirts from Scifi channel, as they were doing a promotion for their new Babylon 5 movie, The Legend of the Rangers. I was wearing one of their shirts, but they also sent me extra shirts to use as giveaways, and I gave them away.

Aside from the scavenger hunt, we also had a raffle, which you can see the tickets being handed out here by an assistant I drafted. I had to call the ticket numbers in the movie theater, and it seats 600, so I was a bit hoarse the next day. I had a large movie poster that the theater gave me, as well as some movie passes, so that was cool.

After dark, Todd, from Decipher, started to demo their TCG game. He was allowed to pull a table out from the theater, which was quite nice, and he had game demos going on for the next 2 or 3 hours. Actually, I had a really great relationship with the theater. By the end of the evening, I ended up with two large movie posters, one of which was a one-sheet, 5 pairs of movie passes, all of which I gave out, and I walked away with a few items for myself.

Because I went to the Hollywood premiere and talked with some of the actors there, I was able to get the manager of the theater something in return for his help. These two pics show Mark with the two balloons and the card I gave him, which included a bookmark of Liv Tyler as Arwen, which I'd had her sign to him. You can see he was quite surprised, which is why the balloons say Thank You and Surprise. Anyhow, he sort of did the same thing to me inside. I had just finished the raffle and had awarded the costume prize, when he quieted the whole audience and thanked me for working so hard for the event. Hey, I'm just a fan, I would have gone to an empty theater, someone elses line party, or anywhere to see this, so for me, it was work, but for something I wanted to do. Anyhow, the theater gave me a few movie passes to use later on, and a rather large display item, which you will see in the costume contest pics.

OK, here is the first 3 entries in my costume contest. I only had 7 entries, but ended up with more people in costume. Some of them did not show up until later on, and I had already distributed numbers and ballots for people to vote on. Anyhow, the large display behind each contestant, the theater gave me that thing. It's 7 and a half feet tall, just over 4 feet wide and about 2 feet deep. The Black Riders jut out at the bottom and are all waving swords around, Aragorn's sword sticks out a bit on the right side and Legolas's bow sticks out a bit on the left. It's huge, and I just barely got the thing home. You aren't supposed to take these things apart after it's been together, as it's just cardboard and it throws the balance off, or something like that. Anyhow, I now have it and now I need to find some place to put it or maybe find a better use for it, not sure where I'm going with that yet.

This is the next set of photos from the costume contest at the Irvine Spectrum. A woman, whose cigar shop was selling the official goblets and what not had made arrangements to be able to display some of the goblets and hold a raffle. It's blatant advertising, and they were still on display yesterday when I was down at the theater, but the theater chain approved it, so whatever turns them on. A lot of people thought that her raffle was associated with my activities and just didn't believe me when I said I had no idea where to put the entry forms. Oh well, maybe next time she will learn to make a better display.

OK, that's my costume contest. Entry 7 won, and recieved a nice LOTR display poster from Borders books, along with the accompanying strip that had the Elvish inscription on the Ring. Entry 1 was my runner up, but I had run out of things to give out. Now I'm trying to remember if I gave them anything the following day. I was able to save some prizes for the Wednesday screenings and added a bunch of coupons from the Ben & Jerry's at the Spectrum.

Once the prizes had been given and I could finally sit down with my popcorn and soda, I was able to just enjoy the film again. I'd seen it at the Hollywood premiere, but was really looking forward to seeing it with a really enthusiastic crowd. I was also able to really just enjoy the overall look and got much more emotionally involved in the film. Especially the two scenes designed to make you cry, which did, and I won't mention more of that here, but I was a weepy mess coming out of the screening just after 3am.