Fest caters to fans of pop culture
This weekend’s Kelowna Fan Xpo celebrates anime, comics, sci-fi
Apop-culture festival celebrating anime, comics and science fiction returns to Kelowna this weekend.
The Kelowna Fan Xpo will be held Friday and Saturday in four locations downtown.
Last year’s expo attracted more than 1,000 people, most of whom dressed in costume.
This year’s expo will kick off with Charles Ross’s One Man Star Wars trilogy performance Friday at the Kelowna Community Theatre.
Throughout the weekend, the Kelowna Community Theatre stage will feature celebrity guests, panels, live performances and question-and-answer sessions.
Performances will include lip sync battles, improv shows and costume contests.
Kelowna’s John Delaney, an artist for graphic novels of The Simpsons and a past artist behind Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Scooby-Doo, will be one of many artists featured at the festival.
The Rotary Centre for the Arts will be full of vendors and artists all day Saturday.
The downtown Kelowna library will feature themed areas, including a Harry Potter day and a Lego display.
During the expo, there will be authentic props on display from various shows and movies, including Star Wars, Terminator and The Day After Tomorrow.
This year, organizers acquired several large hieroglyphic gold panels from the Stargate SG-1 TV show. They have turned them into 1.8-metre gold pillars, which will be on both sides of the fullsize Stargate.
There will also be a 1.5-metreby-2.1-metre pyramid next to the Stargate, to give visitors the feeling of being in a different world.
Celebrity guests in attendance will include Aleks Paunovic and Van Helsing from Supernatural, Katie Stuart from X-Men 2, Kirby Morrow from Dragonball Z and Transformers, and Lee Tockar from League of Super Evil.
The expo ends Saturday night with the Canadian premiere of the sci-fi movie The Recall, which was filmed in Vernon.
For more information and for tickets, go online to kelownafx.com.