Son of Monsterpalooza runs Friday 9 October through Sunday 11 October 2026 at the Marriott convention centre in Burbank, on North Hollywood Way. It bills over 150 exhibitors selling one-of-a-kind creations, live makeup demonstrations across the weekend, and a theatre programme of panels and presentations with guests from horror, science fiction, and fantasy.
It is not a Lost in Space show. There will be no B9 track, and in most years there is nothing on the floor from this corner of the hobby at all. Go anyway — the reason is what the show is about, not what it is themed around.
Why a creature show is the right show
Monsterpalooza and its autumn Burbank offshoot are built around practical effects rather than CGI. The main spring event in Pasadena carries a museum of screen-used props, masks, and creatures from Hollywood FX houses; the Burbank show is the smaller sibling, with the emphasis landing on the vendor floor and the demonstrations.
That focus is the whole argument. The skills a B9 build actually consumes — sculpting, mould making, casting, surface finishing, paint and weathering, and the unglamorous business of making a large object that can be moved without destroying it — are the daily work of creature-effects people. They are not the daily work of anyone at a media-guest signing convention.
A builder walking this floor is surrounded by practitioners solving the same problems in a different genre. The mould that pulls a foam latex appliance and the mould that pulls a resin bubble section obey the same rules about undercuts, keys, and release.
What to actually do with the two days
Work the materials vendors first, before the floor fills. This is the highest-value hour of the weekend. Silicone and urethane suppliers, pigment and flocking sellers, sculpting-tool makers, and small-batch specialty vendors are all present, and — the part that matters — you can put your hands on the material before buying it. Shore hardness on a spec sheet tells you a number. Squeezing a cured sample tells you whether it is what you want.
Ask about pot life and cure temperature for the conditions you actually work in. Vendors selling to professionals will answer precisely, and a garage in July is a genuinely different environment from a climate-controlled shop.
Watch the makeup demonstrations for the technique, not the subject. A demo producing a creature face is teaching colour layering, translucency, and edge blending. Every one of those transfers to a painted prop. The specific thing worth studying is how FX artists build depth in thin layers rather than mixing the final colour and applying it — the reason a well-weathered prop reads as an object with history rather than as a painted shape.
Ask about failure, not process. Anyone demonstrating will happily narrate what they are doing. The valuable question is the other one: what goes wrong with this material, what does the failure look like, and what do you do when it happens mid-pour. Practitioners answer that question generously and it is not written down anywhere useful.
Look at scale and transport. Large creature suits and full-size figures have the same problem a full-size B9 has — the thing has to get from the shop to the venue and stand up when it arrives. Look under and behind the big pieces on display. Internal armatures, breakdown seams, and mounting hardware are all visible if you are the kind of person who looks, and this show has a floor full of people who will explain their solution if asked.
Setting expectations honestly
You will not find B9 parts, plans, or vendors. If a screen-accurate component is what you need, this is the wrong event and the club forums remain the right resource.
The crowd skews horror, and the aesthetic is not this hobby’s. That is a feature for a builder shopping for technique, and it does mean the show is a poor use of a weekend if what you want is to talk to people about the specific project you are working on.
Costs stack up in the ordinary convention way. Burbank in October is pleasant, parking at the venue is the usual airport-hotel arrangement, and the vendor floor is where the real money goes — the materials are cheaper than mail order in the sense that you avoid hazmat shipping on some of them, and more expensive in the sense that you will buy things you had not planned to.
The timing argument
Early October is a good moment for this show to land. It is late enough that a summer build has revealed its problems and early enough that a winter push can still use whatever you learn. If you have a section that has fought you all year — a surface finish that will not sit right, a mould that keeps tearing — bring photographs of it on your phone. Showing a stuck problem to someone who solves that class of problem professionally is worth more than any panel on the schedule.
