Good golly! The DS Forums are back and looking more spiffy than ever! Io Evohe!
MSC, the 1991 stars did attend the first DS Festival I ever attended which I believe was the 1993 one in NYC. I remember Lysette Anthony, Jim Fyfe, and I think Barbara Blackburn was there as well. I saw a lengthy autograph line at Lysette's table when I arrived.
My impression was that the 1991 stars were either too busy working or simply were not sufficiently courted by the DS Festival machine (I vaguely recall Nancy writing about how the thing is organized but I can't remember the details sufficiently to know whether one should speak of a committee, a volunteer-run thing, or a top-down business run as a side venture by Dan Curtis Productions--this has never been something I understood, just as I have never understood all the legal rigmarole about who owns the DS master tapes and where the tapes lived during the years between the end of DS and the beginning of syndication in the mid 1970s). I have read several times that only some actors have their plane tickets and hotel rooms paid for by the Festival. If the 1991 stars did not fall into that privileged category, there may have been no real incentive for any of them to want to have anything more to do with the Festivals.
Again, it's been noted in the past, but my understanding is that at most conventions these days, you pay the star for their autograph. Some are charging very high sums for their John/Jane Hancocks--I've heard upwards of $50 for some actors. I'll never forget how at a Lost in Space event held in Boston in circa 1995, you could pay $99 and get a large color photograph signed by all the surviving cast members (obviously Guy Williams was no longer with us then). At the time this seemed unbelievably exorbitant to me, but I went just to gawk and people were lining up with memorabilia in hand to meet the stars and pay their money for the signatures.
G.
