Look: We usually try not to be this blunt when we make a request of you, our beloved and intelligent A.V. Club readership. But we need you all to promise us that you’re not going to spend “$15-$20″—which, we helpfully note, could be otherwise exchanged for either goods or services, of which the following pitch seems to qualify as neither—to go into a 1,500 square foot Comic-Con booth where a hologram of Well-Loved Dead Person Stan Lee says “Excelsior!” and then rattles out some AI-generated dialogue. It has been a really rough couple of weeks in terms of believing that humanity, as a whole, is still basically okay, and we need y’all to not rock our personal brain boats any further by supporting the Stan Lee Hologram Booth.
This is per THR, reporting on the “innovation” coming to Los Angeles’ Comic-Con, scheduled for next week. The Stan Lee Experience is being organized by Kartoon Studios, the company that owns the rights to Lee’s likeness, name, and signature, and which previously used said rights to make Stan Lee NFTs a few years back. This time, they’ve teamed up with a company called Proto Hologram to make a Lee avatar that will be entombed within its own little paywalled section of the Con. Visitors who have ignored our dire warning and ponied up the twenty bucks to see the hologram will then be offered further paid opportunities to take a photo with it (“Who’s that in the picture with you, Daddy?” “That’s the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!”), or “have a three-minute, one-on-one conversation with it,” with the hologram’s dialogue generated by AI.
And, sure, that sounds hideous and ghoulish. But Kartoon Studios’ Bob Sabouni (“Head of Stan Lee Legacy Programs”) promises that they’ve done their best to keep Holo-Stan from saying anything that the real, actual human man, who died in 2018, after living 95 years of genuine human existence while walking this vale of tears, wouldn’t say. “We’ll never put words in his mouth that aren’t in line with things he spoke about in his lifetime,” Sabouni promised. “Fortunately, with decades of footage capturing his thoughts on so many subjects, we can build a voice that stays true, not always word for word, but always faithful in spirit, context, and intent.” Excelsi-fucking-or!
