One Excellent Night in Amsterdam
By Raymond T.
For the second time in as many years a name from Transformers history graced the streets of Amsterdam. June 4th 2006, Amsterdam had the voice of Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Armada, Energon and Cybertron Transformers Megatron in its midst. David Kaye was ready to make the streets unsave.
After last year's succes with voice actor to RiD's Optimus Prime, Neil Kaplan, Hans and myself decided to try and pull it off one more time. Thanks to the UK convention of the Auto Assembly, the opportunity arose to ask David Kaye for a visit to our fair little country. Unfortunately, due to some unforseen circumstances, the confirmation of this event didn't come about until very late in the preparations. So the response of people actually able to go turned out to be a bit less than we had hoped, but that didn't suppress our fun.
Getting David Kaye after Neil Kaplan last year last year was a logical step. What else do you follow Optimus Prime with, then Megatron. David kaye turned out to be a very cool person to meet. He was only in Amsterdam for one night. He arrived the day of our meeting and would be returning the next day. We had arranged for him to visit the Van Gogh museum in the afternoon, while hans and I made the final preparations for the evening.
Basically we wanted it to be like last time, but fate dealt us other cards. Amsterdam is a ancient city. For anyone not familiar with the city, it layout can be rather confusing. The streets in the center of the city are still lined out the way as they were back in the middle ages. Where all those centuries ago there were city walls, there are now the canals of Amsterdam. The old city walls would surround itself around the innercity. So these days the canals still run in a circle.
The little fact, caused our special guest to run a little bit late to our little get together. Unfortunately, by the time David Kaye had arrived at our Tavern, the pre-games to the soccor championships had started on TV. It was the soccer champion season. And so the whole of Amsterdam was in a Championship craze. By the time we had set up the camera and started shooting, the tavern was already filled with crowds of soccer fans. With alot of screams and honking and yelling and music, it soon became impossible to record our Night in Amsterdam session there. We tried for as long as we could, but as we were getting to talking about Transformers, the background just over took anything anyone of us had to say.
We still let David do the talking, and had our fullest attention. The man even still remembered tfdutchie from a short interview shoot she did with his three years ago at the OTFCC of 2003. But at a certain point, the noise behind us just too loud. As the meeting was progressing David and the rest of us really wanted to get into it. But it was not to be. Of course if did give David an excuse to have us show a bit more of the city.
So we decided to pack up and see if we could do this else where... Unfortunately, the whole city was captivated with the soccer craze. So we ended up just talking with the man, as we walked up and down the city and its canals. We did talk Transformers, and David Kaye was nice enough to devide his time with each of us, as it is difficult to talk to a whole group of people when walking along the narrow streets of old Amsterdam.
As it turned out, although the original concept of the day got a bit ruined by the Soccer fans, the day spend itself turned out to be a great experience. David was willing to talk about just about anything on a one on one basis with each one of us. For me personally it was it was a pleasure sharing my own stories as a day-player actor with him. As he himself also shared some stories when he was just an extra in what ever tv or movie production he could find as he started out in his home country of Canada.
But not only we, the dutch fans, enjoyed the evenening. David Kaye also had the time of his life! Yes, he shared some Transformers stories with us, but after talking nothing but Transformers the day before at the UK Auto Assembly, he really enjoyed the fact that he could also talk with us about other things. And without us missing a beat. (Which he feared might be a problem since English is not our native language).
We showed him many of the inner city sweet spots, that Amsterdam had to offer. We even showed him the comic store we always go to, to get our Transformers stuff! Yeah it was closed, but we just had to show him the glass-in-lead window of the decepticon logo that hangs above the entrance!
"BotCon, OTFCC, AutoAssembly,... All those conventions are fun to do! But this!!! This is the BEST convention in the world!" David told us as we walked along the banks of the Amsterdam canals, as we passed the windows of the buildings that run along side them, as the people inside waved from their warmly lit rooms....
It didn't exactly go according to the planning. But we all enjoyed ourselves extremely well. Already David Kaye promised to come visit Amsterdam again somewhere in the future. He wants to bring is family along then too. But also, he really wanted to do this meeting over again and do it right, as you can see from the clips I did shoot, it didn't completely work out as we wanted.
Even if the turn out was not that big, and the setting was not at it's best. We all gained another experience we will never lose. I know I enjoyed this tremendously! I'm not sure what next time will bring, but I can assure you... There will be a next Night in Amsterdam!
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