Days Before Event, Galacticon Cancels Eleven Guests, Con Chair Resigns
Tomorrow Galacticon 4, a con dedicated to Battlestar Galactica, kicks off in Seattle, WA. Now as a former con organizer I can tell you that during the last week of convention planning, things are pretty locked down for an event as the staff barrels towards the finish line…
Not so much for Galacticon though.
You see, earlier this week (and just days before the event), Galacticon canceled eleven of its guests. That’s about a third of the con’s lineup.
Fans of course suspected something was up, and as some of the canceled names were major stars, they were fairly upset. In the fallout of the announcement, Daniel Allan, the con’s chair, has ended up resigning. He handed the reigns over to the Battlestar Galactica Fanclub and Battlestar Raven.
The new operators have reconfirmed a few of the canceled guests, but the lineup is still highly diminished from what was initially advertised.
The entire situation, of course, comes down to money, and it’s kind of amazing what poor budgeting can do. Frankly I’m amazed the con bothered to invite thirty-something guests in the first place — the narrative would be quite different if the guest lineup had started at twenty and stayed there. Honestly, once you get into numbers that big, it doesn’t actually make a big difference from the attendee viewpoint… until you start dropping names like flies.
There are people asking for refunds, but I wouldn’t hold my breath at those ever coming. The entire reason the guests got canceled to begin with was because the con needed the money to pay bills in the first place — and you can’t refund what you no longer have.
This whole things a mess.
Via The News Tribune
