Great write-up, Fireminer. Hilarious to read about shows that wind up sounding like real disasters. Some fun take-aways from this:
By every account, STC was a smashing success. It attracted 160,000 attendees and earned in excess of $100,000. Even Trekkies who did not attend and non-Star Trek SF fans were thrown into a tizzy.
Kinda weird numbering that paints a show as a success... if you math it out, that means admission/membership was about $0.62, which could be easily refuted, unless they claimed profit of $100k. If they claimed profit of $100k, that's different.
They were scared that since Lisa’s team—named “Telos IV”, or also known as The Chicago Strektacular—had paid so much for the guests, non-profit cons would never be able to afford the actors even if they were willing to pay. Furthermore, Telos IV planned to organize similar Star Trek cons all over the country. It seemed like the end of fan cons was nigh.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I've heard the same thing about anime/VG voice talent charging for autographs and headshots and the like at anime cons, where they'd been done for free, because the talent were getting booked for other cons and shows where they could charge for those items.
Everything is that is hyped as being the "death" of the fan convention at the hands of a corporate convention is, I think, a very small percentage of the cause of death of those shows. More likely, shows die from boring mundane causes like staff burnout or poor financial management.
Also, the "run shows all over the country" hubris is a recurring theme. I'll have to search and see if there's a write up on KuniCon already.
Behind the scene, things were however not as rosy. The organizers had made up the $100,000 to the media while in fact they lost $10,000. Long-time Trekkies who had experience attending cons also reported poor planning, poor reception, poor coordination and just a mess overall. Vendor owners were also angered as they were given just a narrow corridor to hawk their wares. All in all, the con “succeeded” because it attracted and impressed “normies”, while by every measure it should have been seen as a terrible con. So what could go wrong when Lisa Boynton and Telos IV decided to bring their con to New York?
Oh, look, lost money - guess we should expand! And lots of first year, logistical issues that could be worked out if you stay small(er, than say, going national), re-evaluation of policy and procedure, and lessons learned to take forward the next couple of years.
Among the guests were the cast of the original series plus the astronaut James McDivitt, Dr. J. Allen Hynek (professor of astronomy and director of the Center for UFO Studies), writer David Gerrold and artist Kelly Freas.
Admittedly, J. Allen Hynek made me laugh out loud. I'll need some experience for some folks who were attending shows in the 70s and 80s - were people like Hynek or other paranormal/conspiracy-adjacent folks more common on the general SF convention circuits then? I get that there's a link to an SF TV show about alien life to a guy who nominally researched aliens. I know that crowd has (and has had) their own shows or huge multigenre affairs like DragonCon have a programming track for that stuff, but it's just a little weird to me that the organizing committee thinking about there is a sizable amount of attendees for a clearly fictional TV show, showing up in their Vulcan ears to get fencing lessons from George Takei, ALSO wanting to stop by and get a lecture on the Edge Of Reality.