Comic-Con has taken over San Diego, as it does every year, with the entire spectrum of humanity — from eye-meltingly attractive celebrities to obese introverts from the Midwest dressed in homemade Batman costumes — descending upon Southern California in droves. There are all sorts of events taking places during the festivities, but one of the coolest ones I’ve heard about so far is an obstacle/escape course based on The Walking Dead, set up in and around Petco Park (the home of the Padres). From THR:
Staged by a team of nearly 600 crewmembers — in addition to the scores of zombies expected to scare the daylights out of fans as the creatures swarm and jump from out of nowhere — the event took six months of planning and two weeks of building preparation before the four-level course was assembled in four days.
“What we’ve really done is build big builds, and the first one you get to is really challenging — it’s cargo nets, and you climb up a 10-foot ladder, go up another 10-foot cargo net, come back down and then go back down a slide,” Liam Brenner, producer of The Walking Dead Escape: San Diego, tells THR. “Our goal was to create the apocalypse in an urban setting, and that’s where all the zombies are going to be when the world ends. Here, as you’re running through the stadium, every obstacle is themed to be something that should be very urban-like and apocalyptic.”
I can’t decide if this is actually going to be great, or if it’s one of those things that looks cool on paper but underwhelms in real life. The THR article goes on to say that they expect something like 10,000 people to participate when the course opens up tonight, and that there will be about 650 zombies “lurking under cars, in huge nets and underneath ‘safe’ passages hung from the rafters,” so at the very least it should be something to behold.
Now if someone could just please set up a Mad Men themed obstacle course where I can drink whiskey at lunch under the guise of a socially acceptable interactive fan experience, that would be delightful.
