Creation Entertainment's Salute to Supernatural, the
Supernatural Official Convention just took place August 21-23rd at the Minneapolis Convention Center... I believe this was the first Supernatural Minneapolis show, and it felt extra-special as the show is currently celebrating its 10th Anniversary. Prices started at the cheapest $70 for single general admission to "Gold Level" $859 per ticket... and all the Gold, Silver,
and Copper tickets were sold out, proving that there were insatiable fans in the Minneapolis area. Both Gold & Silver got "complimentary in-person autographs", while the Copper ($200) only got entrance to the Saturday night concert featuring Louden Swain.
 Vendors Area
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The vendors area was a small, modest room with about 20 dealers selling mostly Supernatural official merchandise. I didn't peek in during the panels, but I think it would have been pretty empty as all the fans were sitting in the theatre. The good news is that after the show, everyone flooded into the tiny vendors room.
Misha Collins, who plays Castiel on the hit CW series, did not appear on stage on Saturday or Sunday, because he was beaten up and mugged after leaving a restaurant in Minneapolis on Friday evening.
Sunday's main event started at 2pm with a Castiel fan-made music video, played to cheering crowd, showing much love for the recovering actor. Shortly after the video,
Louden Swain (featuring singer/guitarist
Rob Benedict, bassist Michael Borja, guitarist Billy Moran, and drummer Stephen Norton) came on stage to play a cover of
Prince's "Let's Go Crazy". You may know Benedict played prophet turned writer Chuck Shurley on the
Supernatural show.
Richard Speight, Jr.
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"The Trickster"
Richard Speight, Jr. came on stage shortly after the song and basically emceed the event. Speight, Jr., would sometime tell these Supernatural conventions and would bring up the "brown or gray" story from a fan interaction with Benedict (which I'm still a little confused why that was funny). He also laid down some house rules about filming and taking pictures: they want us to take as many pictures as possible ....
EXCEPT, ironically, when they are in the photo area.
Completely comfortable on stage, I thought Speight, Jr., was a natural MC. It felt like he's been doing this type of event hosting for a long time now.
Twenty minutes later, Louden Swain started to play something called "Sweet Imagination", based on
Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion"... then medley into
Roy Orbison's "Oh Pretty Woman" as an introduction song to 'opening band'
Alaina Huffman (Abaddon).
 Alaina Huffman with Louden Swain
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Huffman's 40-min Q&A session featured some fan questions like her favorite episode ("Mother's Little Helper") to one world to describe Supernatural fans ("passionate"). Highlight of her session was a little 5-year-old boy dressed in the Flash costume asking her how she liked "working with these guys". That got lots of laughs and Huffman said lovely and hugged the boy before he left the front.
Of course, the main attraction,
Jensen Ackles and
Jared Padalecki (Sam and Dean Winchester) got the loudest cheer when they entered the stage. The questions started with a fan asking to have the actors ask each other questions. Padalecki asked which season was Dean's favorite Sam haircut, and Ackles, in turn, asked Padalecki which season was Sam's favorite Dean haircut.
The best part was hearing Padalecki talked about a fight choreography that went wrong. The guest star was supposed to do two punches and a knee kick, but when 'action' was called, the actor forgotten the punches and went for the knee. Padalecki, who was expecting a punch in the face, moved his head back and his waist thrust towards the fighter in anticipation to the fist... instead, getting a knee straight to the groin.
My favorite Ackles moment (who actually had bad memories when it came to specific seasons, which you can't blame the guy) was on a recent filming of a three-man fight sequence in the back of his car. He improvised his best Clint Eastwood impression by saying, "Get out of my car." Ackles hoped that they use that one line for the yet-to-be aired episode, but he wasn't sure since they recorded four different lines.
A good question about voice acting was asked, which had two very different answers from Ackles and Padalecki. Ackles, in his Jason Todd (Robin) role, had a director asking him to read lines (in different tones). He read the entire script without ever meeting any other actors and had no idea of how the story would unfold. Padalecki, on the other hand, came on
Supernatural: The Animation with pre-existing animation, so his primary goal was to match his words with the animated mouth movement.
Some fans didn't even have questions when they came to the front of the microphone. Some cried, some could barely get a word out, some only commented about how they were friendly stalking Padalecki's recent boating pictures ("we haven't released the nude pictures yet"), some just thanked the actors for their anti-bullying campaign. I personally felt these type of comments do not belong to a Q&A, and perhaps they can save it when they got personal time and/or autographs from the actors.
You can tell watching the two on stage that they had great chemistry, which was one of the reasons why
Supernatural ran for over ten years. Seeing these guys live, it made me excited about watching
Supernatural again.
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