PopCult Rudy Panucci on Pop Culture

ToyLanta Starts Today

The PopCulteer
March 8, 2019

Friday, March 8, ToyLanta 2019 kicks off. This is the annual huge, gigantic, epic toy show that is also a fundraiser for The Cody Lane Toy & Diorama Museum. This will be your PopCulteer’s seventh trip to the big show, and all week long we’re going to offer you special previews of what you can expect at the show. ToyLanta will run March 8 through 10 at The Marriott Century Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The show is open to the public on Saturday and Sunday, March 9 and 10, and attendees who purchase the Commander and Cadet packages get in to all sorts of cool pre-show and after-hours events.

Before it grew into ToyLanta, this huge toy convention began life as JoeLanta, devoted to the original 12″ GI Joe. Today we’re going to look at some of the highlight videos I’ve made for previous years of JoeLanta/ToyLanta.

Today we’re going to link to some of the many (and many, and many) articles and videos we’ve posted over the last six years, so you can trace the evolution of The South’s Biggest Toy Show (That’s not an official slogan, by the way. It’s just what I call it).

My first time as a guest of JoeLanta was in 2013. I was just wrapping up a twenty-year stint as a caregiver for my parents and various relatives, and was able to get away to travel to my very first big toy convention. You can see video of me on the Hobby Roundtable Panel HERE, and watch my very first JoeLanta wrap-up video HERE.

The next year I was able to go to JoeLanta more prepared to chronicle the trip. I posted about all the cool stuff I got HERE. We had a great collection of videos from the show HERE, not all of which were by yours truly. I did manage to bring you videos of The Joe At Fifty Panel, The State of the Hobby, The Marx Toys Panel, Video of visits with two collectors, and a wrap up video that was twice as long as the one from the year before.

In 2015 I posted tons of videos, but was smart enough to collect them all into one post, which makes my job here, much, much easier. However, I did produce a bonus video of the dioramas after that, and also featured the Saturday Night Radio Cult Jam on The RFC Mini Show.

I was also smart enough to collect a bunch of videos into one post in 2016, which was the first year that I shot so much video that I never really got around to editing it all. Much of that was because that was the year I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis–just a few weeks after JoeLanta, and dealing with that greatly reduced my video output. However, I did manage to crank out videos of the panel on Star Wars collecting, Big Jim and the Parachute Drop. And then, eight months after the show ended, I finally got around to finishing the wrap up clip.

In 2017 JoeLanta became ToyLanta, expanding it’s scope to collectible toys of all kinds. 2017 was also the year that Mike Gardner assembled a spectacular Marvel Superhero diorama, and we covered its construction in photos, in two parts, HERE and HERE. We offered up more photos of ToyLanta HERE. You can see all the videos of panels I produced in 2017 HERE. However, I did get the wrap-up video posted in a timely manner that year. Plus we had even more photos.

Last year I attempted to produce a wrap-up video for each day, but that was an experiment that must go down as a nobel failure. I managed to crank out a video for day one of the show, but it took more than a week for me to get around to wrapping up the whole show.  On top of that, complications with my eyes kept me from digging into the videos of the panels until last week. You can see the two that I did get edited HERE and HERE.

I hope these posts and videos give you an idea why this show is so special to me, and maybe entice you to make the trek to Atlanta one of these days (if not this weekend). This year the plan is to try to have the wrap-up video ready by Sunday. Wish me luck, and check PopCult to see if I pull it off.