BWW Interviews: Lou Ferrigno & More at 2016 Wizard World ComicCon Chicago!

Wizard World's ComicCon Chicago was in full swing this weekend, August 18-21 and this year's event was jam-packed. This year, celebrities gathered at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center for a weekend full of dress-up, photo-taking and much more. BWW's Kevin Pollack shares his impressions of the event as well as his exclusive interviews with some of this year's participants. Check out his podcast in full HERE!

Fans dressed as their favorite characters from Star Wars, Suicide Squad and many other unique creations. The artist gallery was chock-full of artists including some from MAD Magazine, THE SIMPSONS (Phil Ortiz), Disney (Tom Bancroft) and others like Guy Gilchrest, who worked on The Muppets, TMNT and Tom & Jerry, C. Martin Croker, who voiced characters on Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast & AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE and Emmy Award winner Mark Kistler.

As for the celebrities, the event was jam-packed this year with such stars as Carrie Fisher, the Back to the Future Reunion feat. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson, the cast of The Flash, ARROW and the reunion of Muldar & Scully, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

When it came to the panels, I noticed 2 of the most interesting and popular ones were "Using the Force with Carrie Fisher," which had lines around the corner and was probably the most popular one all weekend and "Revisiting Pride Rock: A Screening of Disney's The Lion King with Live Commentary by Director Rob Minkoff and Animator Tom Bancroft."

I was lucky enough to chat with some celebrities including Tom Bancroft, Rob Minkoff, Jason Mewes of Jay & Silent Bob and The Incredible Hulk's Lou Ferrigno, who was honored by the Rosemont Public Safety Department.

Tom Bancroft is a Disney animator from Long Beach, California who is best known for his creation of the Mulan character, Mushu. He stayed with Disney for about 13 years, working on approximately nine features including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin (Animator of Iago), The Lion King (Animator for Young Simba), Pocahontas (Animator of Pocahontas) and Brother Bear (Animator of Rutt and Tuke) before leaving in 2000. He also has a brother, Tony Bancroft who also has a Disney animation history.

Rob Minkoff is a director and animator best known for directing the double Academy-Award-winning animated feature The Lion King. He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1980s in the Character Animation department. While he was working his way through CalArts, he was hired by Walt Disney Animation Studio in 1983 as an in-between artist for The Black Cauldron (1985). He was then a supervising animator for The Great Mouse Detective (1986), before being a character designer for The Brave Little Toaster (1987). He also wrote the song "Good Company" for Oliver & Company (1988), before BECOMING a character animator for The Little Mermaid (1991). Since directing The Lion King, Minkoff also directed his first live-action movies Stuart Little (1999), Stuart Little 2 (2002), THE HAUNTED Mansion (2003), The FORBIDDEN Kingdom (2008) and Flypaper (2011). He directed DreamWorks Animation's computer-animated film Mr. Peabody & Sherman and is producing Blazing Samurai, an animated family film inspired by Blazing Saddles and scheduled for a 2017 release.

Jason Mewes is a TV, film actor, film producer and internet podcast radio show host. He's best known as playing Jay, the vocal half of the duo Jay and Silent Bob, in longtime friend Kevin Smith's films. He has starred in such films as Clerks, Clerks II, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob STRIKE BACK and voiced Jay for Clerks: The Animated Series. Mewes co-hosts a weekly podcast with Kevin Smith called Jay & Silent Bob Get Old and is co-Executive Producer on Smith's Hulu-exclusive series Spoilers with Kevin Smith. Recently, he co-produced and voiced Jay yet again in the 2013 animated movie Jay & Silent Bob's Super Groovy Cartoon Movie.

Lou Ferrigno is an actor, fitness trainor, fitness consultant and retired professional bodybuilder. As a bodybuilder, Ferrigno won an IFBB Mr. America title and two consecutive IFBB Mr. Universe titles, and appeared in the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron. As an actor, he is best known for his title role in the CBS television series The Incredible Hulk and vocally reprising the role in subsequent animated and computer-generated incarnations. He has also appeared in European-produced fantast-adventures such as SINBAD of the Seven Seas and Hercules.

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