CNN news 2010-07-27
Well, listen to this. 163 million dollars. That's the estimate, right now the latest estimate for what kind of impact this one convention, this just lasts several days, has in San Diego. In fact, San Diego itself is now on a battle to hold on to this convention up against Anaheim in L.A. and some other cities that really want it cuz even if it means some Klingons running around your town for a while, who doesn't want that economic impact? We have someone inside right now, our most viewed iReporter ever, Chris Morrow who is here with us, joining us by Skype. Chris, are you there?
I'm right here. Thanks for having me.
There you are. Awesome. Thanks for being here. All right, set the scene for me. Tell me what's around you. What are people doing? What's everyone excited about?
Well, I have to tell you, I am in geek central, and I'm so happy about it, you know. These are my people. And this is a lot of fun. There are over 130,000 people here at Comic Con. It's just about to start this morning for the entire weekend, and you're going to see costumes and you're going to see different designer toys. You're going to see platform toys, things that you've never seen before, as well as, you know, comic books, digital comic books, apps for your iPhone. You're going to see a lot of other things, like movies of Angelina Jolie, who knows, maybe Brad Pitt will show up.
I know people are excited about Angelina being there. Tina Fey is going to be there, Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford. What are you holding? What are we looking at? What's in your hand, what is that?
This is what you call a do-it-yourself toy. You buy it. This is from Jermaine, it's called a veil. And you buy it and you paint it up yourself. So do-it-yourself toy. It's a lot of fun. I think it's about, I don't know, 200 dollars.
Two hundred dollars for something you have to paint yourself?
Two hundred dollars, something you paint yourself and you know in five years, this could be a thousand dollars. These are going like hot cakes, the do-it-yourself toy. There's a brand new platform toy out and this is from Monkey King. And this is something to wear, you can take it and you can put it on a wall. It's got a little peg right here, and you can put different ones together, you know. It's a kind of little fun thing. And then you've got the kid robots and, you know, you've got fun little toys exhibited with kid robots. So, uh, what?
And these sell big time. There are people lining up to get these. Actually, let's go to some of this video that you gave us, people lining up last night. Because the way it works is you have to get more than 130,000 people expected to come, but there is only a couple thousand that fit what's it called Hall H into where a lot of these VIPs are going to be with the movies, so you are outside, you saw all of these people already lining up to try to get in early, right? Talk to me about that. How long have they been there? What are they doing all night?