Sort of. Wednesday was a Preview Night lottery for Funko Fanatics boardmembers. Thursday-Sunday was a ****show. If you wanted a chance at Funko, you had to line up in the Everything Else line shoots in the morning before. So if you want a chance at Friday, you'd basically have to be in line Thursday morning. My friends had a group, where you know, laying down three sleeping bags becomes 10 people the following morning. So when the sails pavilion finally opens up you're marched from the side of the convention center (where you camped) to the back of the convention center known as the Sails Pavilion area. And you touch an IPAD to see if you win the chance to purchase Funkos that day. Where it becomes an absolute ****show is the line becomes so long it overextends down the stairs of the backside of the convention center onto the marina where it can't be monitored by security anymore. And that is where people who arrived at 630/7 in the morning, cut the line. And all those people who camped overnight and weren't in the first shoot, are somehow now hundreds of people behind all those people who cut in the marina area. So yeah, 18 hour waits for nothing. You're supposed to tap out with your RFID chip when you go down the stairs onto the backside of the marina, so it gives you a green light when you tap back in. But you have basically three unpaid comic con volunteers monitoring that area, and they are completely overwhelmed by the amount of the people down there in the morning. So all those line cutters when they tap in it's red, but still go through anyways. And if you do happen to get a ticket, if you have a later ticket, you're not guaranteed what you want. You might have a 2 PM return ticket, and some items may be gone by the time you get to access the shop. And this year, I think on Saturday, the purchase line got like super backed up. So 2 PM people got pushed back to 4 PM and what not.
And the popup shop, well. It opened Thursday at 10 AM, and people started lining up with ghost chairs from Tuesday morning. I guess if you're used to sneaker releases and ghost chairs, this shouldn't be a problem. So yeah, unless you have a group of people, and you don't lay down ghost chairs, Funko is almost impossible. I've passed on it the last two years not wanting to deal with that nonsense, and just copped share exclusives online. I know Funko doesn't like the current procedure, so hopefully it will change next year to a lottery. But SDCC doesn't know how to handle it. It doesn't help when they have three separate security firms running the operations independently of each other either too.
