Posted in: Movies | Tagged: Adult Swim, entertainment, film, Justin Roland, Kim Whitley, michael jai white, NYCC

Adult Swim Sets Sail At NYCC

Published Tue, 14 Oct 2014 13:30:38 -0500

Jeremy Wein writes for Bleeding Cool:

After years of doing off site parties and events at SDCC, [adult swim] finally decided to bring the party to NYCC. This year I was fortunate to be a guest on the maiden voyage of the S.S Adult Swim Tyrannic, yes a boat party. There were two ways into the party for fans, one was an open RSVP on their website, the second was winning a golden ticket at one of the various [adult swim] panels during the con that guaranteed entry, I got in the second way.

Me and my guest arrived at Pier 81 at around 8pm on saturday night to be greeted by a three level party boat that [as] had taken over for the evening. On any other saturday night it would just be another booze cruise, but tonight it would be taken over by cosplayers, talent from various [adult swim] shows, a surprise musical guest, and the fans!

As we stepped into the ship we noticed a GIF Booth toward the entrance, you could sit down and just like a photo booth you could take various photos and get a print out, BUT you could also turn these four photos into a gif that was sharable on facebook and twitter. In addition we were handed meal tickets, which entitled us to a sandwich and a bag of chips, sadly though us non v.i.p were offered a cash bar, so this writer bypassed fifteen dollar cocktails for a three dollar coke, everything seemed just the right amount of "off" for this [adult swim] party. There weren't a whole lot of changes to the boat apart from some S.S Tyrannic lifesavers hung about and a banner. My favorite thing though was the guy hired to play Master Shake all evening, his straw kept getting stuck on the door frames though.

We undocked around 9pm, based on what I had asked the girl at check in the capacity for the party was 500, I'd say there were maybe 300 on board. Now while the talent did somewhat mingle with the fans, this was essentially one of those parties where there were sections for us normal nerds and then areas for the "beautiful" people. All that aside I did get facetime with Justin Roiland (co-creator of Rick & Morty), Michael Jai White (Black Dynamite himself), Kym Whitley (plays Honeybee on Black Dynamite) and best of all Killer Mike.

Now you're probably rubbing your head about that last one, well remember that surprise musical guest I mentioned earlier, at about 10pm it turned out to be Run The Jewels, a hip hop collaboration between Killer Mike (who you may know from the Outkast song "The Whole World") and El-P (founding member of the hip-hop group The Weathermen). This didn't surprise me as [adult swim] have pushed them pretty hard through their "Adult Swim Singles Program" and the fact they have an album out on October 28th. They played a pretty rapid hour of songs, at one point El-P proclaimed to the audience "Its not often you get to play this next song on a boat" before promptly launching into "Sea Legs". Unfortunately while I had a great time during their set, more people tended to leave and explore various part of the ship after each song until there was about a hundred of us left at the end, their loss.

As we sailed around the isle of Manhattan, we soon reached lady liberty around 11pm. Everybody rushed up to the front of the boat to take in a true wonder, selfies were taken, USA! chants were proclaimed, and even several folks broke out into God Bless America, nothing says comic-con like a dude dressed as spider-man being patriotic. I've never been to the "Statue of Liberty", so it was kind of surreal to experience what immigrants coming to this country experienced over a hundred years ago.

At this point we began to head back to Pier 81, a DJ provided some tunes, people danced on the dance floor, some folks just sat out on the deck and enjoyed the amazing view of the city, I on the other hand hung out with Killer Mike which was the second surreal moment of the night, let me just say, an awesome dude if you ever get the chance to meet him. And just like we had been promised, we arrived back to the dock at around midnight, as the DJ played the last song of the evening "What's Your Fantasy" by Ludacris. We disembarked back to dry land, to be greeted by one last gift, engraved [adult swim] flasks before going off into the night to get minimal sleep before heading back to the convention in the morning. It was an enjoyable event and I hope [adult swim] decided to go even bigger at the con next year.