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Harmontown Invades New York

Rich Epstein writes for Bleeding Cool:

Harmontown invaded NYCC today, as Dan Harmon, Spencer Crittenden and director Neil Berkley were in town to promote the release of Harmontown: the Movie.

Harmon

For those that don't know, Dan Harmon, the creator of Community and co-creator of Rick & Morty, has a weekly podcast called Harmontown.  It's a two-hour weekly podcast taped live with Dan, usual host Jeff Davis, regular guest Kumail Nanjani and dungeon-master Spencer Crittenden talking about whatever is on their minds and playing dungeons and dragons.  When Dan was fired from Community in 2012, he decided to take the show on the road, and Neil Berkley filmed the trip for the Harmontown movie.

What makes this documentary different according to Berkley is how open Dan was.  According to Berkley, nothing was off limits. Dan wanted the movie to be an honest look, and he considers himself the villain of the story, with Spencer becoming the hero.

The panel started with a clip of the movie, with various people in Dan's life trying to answer the question "Who is Dan?"  Most people weren't able to answer, others called him a creator, a comedian of a "straight up nerd."

The big news of the day was the release of the Deluxe Edition, with the movie with extra content, commentary tracks, two hours of footage from Dan's birthday party and all 22 shows from the roadtrip.

Spencer was working at an Apple store two years ago when Dan asked if anyone in the audience knew how to dungeon-master. Since then, he has become a regular on the show, Dan's assistant and even appeared in an episode of Community. He has developed a cult following of his own and he was asked how he has dealt with the fame.  According to Spencer, he just doesn't think about the fact that there are 6,000 people reading his tweets about his breakfast everyday or he would go crazy.  He said that on the tour, the cameras didn't even phase him as weird as that was.

He's probably the most famous dungeon-master around right now, and his answer as to what makes a good dungeonmaster was that you have to be both egotistical and selfless.  The whole idea is that you are creating a world for other people to have fun in, but you have to be egotistical enough to expect them to go along with it.

As for Dan, he considers the documentary to be therapeutic.  He says that he was a bad boyfriend to his now-fiancee Erin (another regular on the podcast) and that he realized just how bad when he watched the footage (much of which was left in the final film).  The two go to couples therapy, but Dan said that the act of being himself on the podcast, of making the film, is part of his therapy.  It's how he stops himself from keeping things bottled up.

Neil described the crowd at a Harmontown show as misfits, an array of nerds.  Dan said that in every town they played, the crowd looked almost exactly like the one at their usual location, the Nerd Melt in LA.  These people have found a kindred spirit in Dan.  These are people who have been told their whole lives to stop talking about games and comics etc., but here is Dan, a successful writer who talks about his love for those very things.

Harmon is very honest about himself, in the movie, the podcast and on the panel.  He referred to himself as a narcissist several times, was willing, even eager to talk about his faults.  But it is this authenticity that draws people to him.  He isn't pandering to a group of people, everything you see with him is what you get.  There is often something refreshing in that.


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Dan WicklineAbout Dan Wickline

Has quietly been working at Bleeding Cool for over three years. He has written comics for Image, Top Cow, Shadowline, Avatar, IDW, Dynamite, Moonstone, Humanoids and Zenescope. He is the author of the Lucius Fogg series of novels and a published photographer.
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