Darn that Superman! Sometimes I feel like my hands are tied when it comes to celebrity encounters when it relates to that franchise. I was excited to see that Callum Blue was going to be attending the Hollywood Show when I was there on Saturday, August 4, 2012. He had portrayed General Zod in 13 episodes in the greatest Superman series of all time, Smallville. He did it well and all, but not well enough that I was going to shell out his asking price without putting up a fight worthy of the caped superhero himself.
I didn’t really know much else about Callum Blue’s work that would have merited that he would command such prices: $30 for an autograph, and the only photo op available was the professional one that was $40. He had been in some other series like The Tudors and Dead Like Me, and films such as The Princess Diaries 2 and a microscopic part in the Jim Carrey version of A Christmas Carol. But certainly none of that merited such prices.
Still, he was Zod…so I at least had to try my best to meet somewhere in the middle. I made the offer of $50 total for an autograph and photo op with my camera, to which his handler promptly turned me down. So I walked. Zod or not, he wasn’t getting $70 of my hard earned kryptonite.
Later I noticed that Zod wasn’t doing a lot of business. He was mostly just sitting there appearing quite un-Zodlike. Perhaps he hadn’t yet realized that the Hollywood Show was not quite like the Wizard World Comic Con where people might turn out in droves to empty their bank accounts for their superhero portrayers. This time I waited to strike when the handler had his attention elsewhere. I went directly to Zod. He remembered me and was very quick to snatch up my original offer.
He posed for a couple of photos and signed the autograph in a friendly manner, then plopped back down to await the next occurrence. As an afterthought, I asked if I could get a photo of us with the signed photo. He obliged, but it wasn’t worth standing up for apparently (as seen at the top of the posting). After all I had only given him $50; I hadn’t actually given him the earth and all its people.
So that’s my Zod story. I’m hoping that if I ever get to meet Terence Stamp he’ll be ever so much more Zodlike in his resolution. Now him – I might just be willing to shell out the $70 for.
Celebrity encounters from the Summer 2012 Hollywood Show will continue…
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