Geek Exposed

Chris Ransdell builds a business from his pop culture obsession

Chris Ransdell is a geek. 

“[There’s a] holy trinity of sci-fi: ‘Doctor Who,’ ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Star Trek.’ A lot of things are important in geekdom, but those three are the pinnacle for me,” said Ransdell, as we sat in his office, festooned with set photos, sci-fi art, and other nerd tchotchkes. “The earliest memory of my life is going to see ‘Return of the Jedi’ in a theater when I was three years old.”

A not so long time ago (2013) in a galaxy nearby (Tulsa), Ransdell started Geek Expos with close friends Wade Balzer and John Michael Peyton. In 2013, Balzer built a Tardis, the blue call box time machine made famous in “Doctor Who,” which has since become known as the “Tulsa Tardis.” 

“[Wade] showed up one day right around my birthday and gave me a key, which I recognized as a Tardis key. Little did he know he’d actually built the most screen-accurate Tardis in North America. The BBC said they could use it for filming. It was that accurate,” Ransdell said. “That Tardis started the whole thing as far as our involvement with comic conventions.”

Since then, Ransdell and company have worked with over 30 conventions spread across the country, wrangling props and supporting showrunners. They built a solid reputation, and soon various talents from “Game of Thrones,” SyFy Channel, and “Star Trek” were approaching them, expressing confidence in their work. 

“They were like, ‘If you guys are at a convention, we’ll be there,’” Ransdell said. 

Armed with the approval of the only audience that mattered, they set about building their own convention.

“Comic cons became a place of acceptance, beyond comics to pop culture, and then cosplay. It was a world of acceptance. That’s what plucked my heartstrings. It played to my faith. It played to my beliefs, and the idea that we should love everybody, and we should accept everybody. I’m like, ‘There’s a world that’s actually like that?’ Especially with cosplayers because for a while they get to escape reality and be who they are inside on the outside.”

Their maiden outing, Geekinomicon in OKC, took place last Labor Day, and for it, they assembled the cast of the 1996 Doctor Who movie in honor of its 20^th anniversary. 

“We did something even the BBC couldn’t pull off. It took us eight months to orchestrate that moment. The cast said it felt like a family reunion to them.” Ransdell said.

“But the weekend date killed us. There were twelve other major comic cons that weekend. We’re friends with those convention chairs. It sucked for them, too. We just happened to be the new kid on the block. But it didn’t matter that we lost money because everyone that went said it was the best convention they’d ever been to. The celebrities walked away saying, ‘I’ll be here next year, this was amazing.’” 

Promotion might be Ransdell’s natural gift, but filmmaking is his passion. 

Originally from Ft. Lauderdale, he moved to Tulsa at the age of 10. As a child, he acted, and by age 13 he’d developed a solid resume of local productions, including the Christian variety show “Fire by Nite,” and a few ‘90s era religious Westerns starring Willie George and Kenneth Copeland—yes, that Kenneth Copeland—in addition to local plays and musical theater. 

He later became a 3D animator and SFX artist, then got into video production, which led to television. All of that knowledge came from being, in his words, an “overachieving homeschool kid.” He landed a lead position at a 3D FX firm at 18 and then freelanced through his 20s. 

“My claim to fame right now is we entered a production for  a ‘Who’ spinoff … Unofficially the BBC was giving us the nod, [like], ‘if you do a good job we’ll include you, if you make money we’ll want you.’ … We made two episodes, entered into the Florida Supercon Film Festival, and won.” 

Ransdell then did some FX work with Balzer on a film called “Addiction: A ‘60s Love Story.” Directed by another Okie, Tate Steinsiek—who did make-up FX on “The Soldier Stories”—the film went to Cannes where it was bought for distribution. “They filmed in New York and we did post production here. It was edited in L.A. Everybody working on it never even met each other.”

This weekend, Ransdell and Geek Expos will be at Wizard World Comic Con. Though he’s working the convention, Ransdell is looking forward to one major geek moment: meeting “Addiction” star Evanna Lynch, who also played Luna Lovegood in “Harry Potter.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting her, since we physically never met,” but, he emphasized, the logistics of working the convention render any usual “Potter” nerdery an afterthought.  

Ransdell may be a geek, but he’s also a professional.