Comic-Con 2007: Simpsons, Cylons, and an army of Milla Jovoviches

The last full day of Comic-Con (Sunday is "Family Day," which apparently means "Hollywood Leaves the Town in Its Dust Day") was abundant with panels, clips and general geekery goodness, so let's just get to (but some) of the highlights, courtesy yours truly and my fellow reporter extraordinaire Nicole Sperling:

Fresh from the $30 million opening-day gross of The Simpsons Movie, several MVPs from both the movie and the show — including creator Matt Groening, current showrunner Al Jean, and voice-of-Lisa Yeardley Smith — stepped into the cavernous Hall H for the day's first panel, and, it turned out, the first time The Simpsons had ever commanded the Big Room. What was perhaps most remarkable, however, was that even though a good half the room had already seen the feature film — and the producers screened a brief deleted scene from it (a sausage truck driver discovering his passenger, Homer, had decimated his entire stock) — almost all of the questions were focused on the show. And we did learn a great deal about the upcoming season (number 19!): Jon Stewart and Dan Rather will guest voice in an episode about how Ralph Wiggum manages to become the front-runner in the 2008 presidential election (thanks, of course, to Homer); Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) and his brother Cecil (David Hyde Pierce) will return in an episode featuring fellow Frasier vet John Mahoney as their father; and country artist Lurleen Lumpkin (Beverly D'Angelo) will pop back into her former manager's life (that would also be Homer). The panel concluded with a clip from the upcoming annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode, featuring Marge taking her revenge on Fox's highly obnoxious on-screen promos for its shows by pinning Jack Bauer to her fridge, microwaving Dr. House, and pureeing Peter Griffin into a gelatinous (non-human) blob. That, and a singalong of the "Spider-Pig" song from the movie. But of course.

Next up: Focus Features and Rogue Pictures. Man-of-the-week Neil Gaiman got the ball rolling by announcing that he and Night Before Christmas director Henry Selick would screen footage of Coraline, a stop-motion film based on a Gaiman short-story. It features the voice talent of Dakota Fanning, John Hodgman (you know, PC from the Mac-and-PC ads) and Teri Hatcher, and it will be hitting theaters in late summer, early fall. Reno 911 dudes Ben Garant and Tom Lennon followed, revealing Christopher Walken's favorite on-set prank during the filming of their comedy Balls of Fury — seems the iconic actor would bring a cake into the make-up room and pout around the set until his co-workers started singing "Happy Birthday," whether it was actually his birthday or not. Good to know. The studio then trotted out Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman for the horror film The Strangers, and director Neil Marshall for his horror flick Doomsday. Tyler certainly knows the crowd: She treated her Lord of the Rings fans by speaking a bit of elvish.

Upstairs in the main ballroom, the women of Battlestar Galatica — Mary McDonnell (President Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Kara "Starbuck" Thrace) and Tricia Helfer (Cylon Number Six) — held court with showrunners Ron Moore and David Eick in a panel moderated by Entertainment Weekly's own senior editor Marc Bernardin. Who, it must be said, did a frakkin' good job, even after Lucy Lawless (pictured) jokingly flipped him off for accidentally calling her character, Cylon D'Anna Biers, a man. That's right, D'Anna (who'd been "boxed" — that's Cylon for "24/7 solitary confinement" — last season) will return for a two-to-three episode arc in which, Lawless said with relish, she'll "make some trouble." The rest of the panel was light on substantive revelations, though it is quite clear that the women on the show like to have themselves a good time. We did catch a glimpse of the November's flashback movie Battlestar Galatica: Razor, which will focus primarily on the late Battlestar Pegasus' journey and give us a glimpse at the first Cylon war. Which means, yep, the original Cylon Centurians and Raiders from the original 1980s series will be making an appearance!

Meanwhile, down in Hall H, Disney delighted fans with a healthy taste of the upcoming The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. While much of his behind-the-scenes department heads sat on stage, director Andrew Adamson appeared live via satellite from Prague, where he introduced the handsomely chiseled Ben Barnes, who will play Caspian in this film and the next three in the Narnia saga. They showed unfinished footage, brought out splendidly intricate costumes and showed off an animatronic saytr named Tyrus. Producer Mark Johnson also told the crowd that the studio intends to make all seven Narnia novels into feature films, bringing one to the screen every May starting in 2008.

Then Pixar proved once again to be the master of all things animation. Director Andrew Stanton presented Pixar’s next feature WALL•E, set 700 years in the future when a little trash compactor robot named WALL•E is left on planet Earth after all its inhabitants relocate to space because they've left the planet too dirty to live on. What makes WALL•E so unique? He doesn't speak English. Pixar recruited Star Wars sound master Ben Burtt to create a unique robot language for the movie, which Burke illustrated on stage with a keyboard. The result, as usual for Pixar, was awe-inspiring. Stanton screened a five-minute clip with no words save Burtt's sounds and a score by Thomas Newman (American Beauty, Finding Nemo), and it was as emotional as any of Pixar's past fare — if not more so.

The final two Hall H panels of the day, Marvel Studios and Sony/Screen Gems, were case studies on how to win over a Comic-Con crowd, and how not to. We've already told you how massively well the Iron Man footage went over during Thursday's Paramount Pictures panel. This time director Jon Favreau brought his cast to the party; Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and Terrence Howard were all clearly jazzed by the footage (which they'd never seen), and the crowd responded to their enthusiasm in kind. By contrast, the gang from The Incredible Hulk, Marvel's reboot of the Hulk franchise, was quite low-key, especially star Edward Norton, who's also writing the screenplay and clearly knows his comic books but nonetheless seemed nervous and tentative. To be fair, the film's only two weeks into production; all producer Gale Anne Hurd could show us was a working image of the Hulk's appearance, which is pretty much exactly as you'd expect it to be. But perhaps next time Norton should spend a bit less time lecturing the audience on his dislike for the term "origin story."

At least Marvel didn't try to march out 100 Bruce Banners on stage. To promote its newest entry in the video-game-zombie series, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Sony unleashed an army of Milla Jovoviches dressed-up in red dresses and dark-blonde wigs, and boy did that stunt bomb with the Hall H crowd. (The real Jovovich, who was quite pregnant, was far more animated than any of her fembot replicants, thank goodness.) The trailer and clip from the upcoming vampires-in-Alaska movie 30 Days of Night was just as violent as the debut of the RE:A trailer, but 30 Days producer Sam Raimi's presence and the film's graphic novel origin gave the panel an imprint of fanboy legitimacy that the previous panel kinda lacked. And all 30 Days needed was a single Josh Hartnett to get the women (and some men) in the audience to be all with the whooping and cat-calls.

But even Hartnett's hotness was blown away by the sheer magnetic power that is Superbad co-lead Michael Cera. "Moderated" by producer Judd "I Rule Hollywood Comedy" Apatow, the Superbad panel rapidly deteriorated into a barely contained chaos that traveled the gamut from women repeatedly throwing themselves at Cera to speculation stemming from a Robert Downey Jr. bathroom sighting about how Iron Man would take a leak. (Apatow suggested a CD-tray-like device, and the bleary-eyed, easily distracted panel seemed to agree that was the best option.) Apatow finally ended the insanity with two clips from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a parody of music biopics like Walk the Line and Ray out this December starring John C. Reilly (as Cox) and The Office's Jenna Fischer (as Cox's backup singer Darlene). It was not exactly a bang, but not exactly a whimper either — more like a lightly amusing period on what had become a thrilling and exhausting run-on sentence of geekdom.

Look for our Comic-Con wrap-up feature in the next issue of EW. Until next year, live long and prosper, Frodo lives, and nerds rule!