Wonderfest 1998

My first Wonderfest was back in 1998.   I’ve just located the old, original web pages and photos that I posted back in 1998.  I’m sorry for the quality of some of these.  Back in those early days, we were compressing photos and shrinking them so they would load faster and we could upload more of them.   This was back in the days of slow dial up connections and America Online.

In 1998, the internet was still in its early  primitive days, but there was something magical happening.    Model builders were starting to find each other and build the first online communities.   I launched CultTVman’s Sci-Fi Modeling on AOL.   John Lester had launched his site.   A number of us were getting together every Friday night on AOL to have a “chat.”   One of the things we talked about was this hobby show called “Wonderfest.”   I’d read about it in Amazing Figure Modeler magazine (which was another one of those treasures that we could never find). We’d missed the 1997 show, but a number of us plotted and planned to attend.    I promoted this through the old Sci-Fi Modeling Digest that I would email out every Saturday night to 50 or 60 people we had connected with.

Wonderfest in 1998 was a little smaller than the shows today.   The contest was actually in the dealers room, on a row of tables that ran right down the middle of the room.   Figure models dominated the show, with barely 2 tables of spacecraft and science fiction.   Federation Models was about the only table which sold anything science fiction related.  Some of the people that attended were me, John Lester, Kirk Schermerhorn, Marc King, Larry Wherthey, Erin Lantz, David Merriman, and Jay Chladek. Here’s a little video from way back…

We had a lot of fun.   And we were committed to coming back.  We talked about the show in our chats, emails, and websites.   We invited all our friends.  And each year more of us came.

So here are just a few photos from the show.  Hopefully I’ll dig up some of the original prints and get better scans some time.