10 Profoundly Depressing "Celebrity" Sightings at This Year's Big Apple Comic Con

The special guest line-up for this past weekend's Big Apple Comic Con read a lot like a wish list for VH1's The Surreal Life: classic TV-show refugees (Different Strokes' Todd Bridges, Silver Spoons' Erin Gray, Dukes of Hazzard's Tom Wopat); cartoony wrestlers (Ric Flair, The Iron Sheik, Bushwacker Luke); actors known for sci-fi kitsch (William Shatner, The Terminator's Edward Furlong, The Original Boba Fett); washed-up Billboard charters (Naughty By Nature, Taylor Dayne). Not all those advertised made it--"Smoking" Joe Frazier and bad Terminator 2 cop Robert Patrick were, for example, no-shows. But for the ones who did, the overall vibe was perplexing, sometimes costly (Shatner charged $80 to pose for a photo) and occasionally sad, sort of like that autograph scene in The Wrestler. "When there were fans around, they were cool taking pictures and signing autographs," our photographer Paul Quitoriano e-mails, "But then there would be times where they'd just be sitting there, staring into space." Quitoriano managed to sneak some candids of the scene. The results weren't exactly uplifting.

10. Linda Hamilton. Please ignore the film version of Sarah Connor, surrounded by a grinning family and a meditating child. Let's instead focus on the neon-green tee in foreground while we both ask ourselves this: Why do people who aren't at band camp get their T-shirts autographed?

9. Ernie Hudson. Hey, that's the guy who fixed our catalytic converter last week! Awesome to run into you here, buddy. Nice job, it doesn't smell like farts in the front seat, anymore, high-five! Oh, wait. You're, you're . . . holy crap! . . . Winston from Ghostbusters! Can you autograph this totally awesome neon tee for us?

8-7. America's Top Model's Adrianne Curry and Christopher Knight a/k/a Peter Brady. This barracuda couple, who actually met on The Surreal Life, always struck us as a low-rent TomKat: young, gorgeous beauty falls for a much-older, markedly shorter, double-whammy divorcee simply because she grew up taping vintage Tiger Beat centerfolds of him on her bedroom walls. Of course, AdBrady is far less scary, far less moneyed, and these two actually have sex. Anyway, what is Alexi Lalas doing getting his picture taken with them?

6. Loretta Swit (and Chewbacca). That, on the top far right, is the world's most famous Wookie. That, on the bottom left, is "Hot Lips" Houlihan from M*A*S*H. In unrelated news, we're gonna be such an ugly old woman, fuck.