For the past few years, the arrival of a new Harry Potter book has been met with the kind of celebration usually reserved for the Boston Red Sox when they win a World Series. Billions of pre-teens stampede into their local Barnes & Nobles to buy the inevitably massive tome at midnight…only to pass out at page 10 on the way home (and their parents don’t make it past page 15 after tucking the tykes in). There’s almost as much hoopla created whenever a Potter movie is released, thus making the arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) on July 21 and the movie of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book/Film 5) a mere eight days earlier a multimedia one-two punch. By the time July’s over, millions of muggles will be all Pottered out.
In the decade since the first book debuted, Potter fandom has become its own cottage industry. There’s fan fiction (harrypotterfanfiction.com brags it has over 38,000 stories on file); novelty bands like Harry & The Potters, Draco & The Malfoys and The Remus Lupins release albums and tour libraries; and perhaps unsurprisingly, plenty of events that stradle the line between fan conventions and academic symposiums have sprung up, like New Orleans’ intriguing Phoenix Rising in May; Toronto’s Prophecy 2007: From Hero To Legend in August; and for those with Time-Turners, 2005′s The Witching Hour, Accio 2005 and Lumos 2006. Even a book by fans, Mugglenet.Com’s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End, is a bestseller with an Amazon sales rank under 1,000—despite the fact that all it does is guess what’s in the last book (plus it’s saddled with that terrible title).
Yet, with all this, there’s barely any fan films about Potter and his posse. It’s rather stunning if you think about it; after all, this is a series where in the U.S. alone, Hallows is getting a first printing of 12 million copies. How many fan films are there where Harry’s the star attraction? Six. The level of disconnect is remarkable.
The earliest Potter fan films, made circa. 2004 or so, were created by German Lego fan Mario Baumgartner, who came up with the idea of animating his own fake movie trailers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) and Phoenix (Book 5) as a project for he and his son to do together. The Goblet trailer borrows dialogue from the first few ‘real’ movies while he crudely animates his cast; its sequel is far more ornate, but is voiced entirely in German. However, fans will undoubtedly be able to pick out scenes being presented.
Two other Potter flicks readily found on the net, Harry Potter Comes To Amityville and Harry Potter and the Killer Seal, are strikingly similar. Both were filmed in the suburbs of New York City on Long Island; both were clearly made up as they went along; and both portray Harry as the biggest idiot on the face of the Earth (In Amityville, the young wizard can’t even figure out how to use a urinal). Both flicks are also rather repetitive and painfully unfunny for long stretches of time, plus the Amityville one, while clearly a semi-affectionate take on the character, totally misses the boat: Why did they pass up making Potter at least walk by the most famous landmark in town, the Amityville Horror house? The mind boggles (a bit).
As for dramatic Potter fan flicks, there’s only two, and they’re both from Erin Pyne. Her first effort was 2005′s Sirius Black and the Secret Keeper, a fan interpretation of the duel between Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew on the day that Black finds Pettigrew after the Potters are murdered. Her other flick is the upcoming The Marauders’ Worst Memory, set to debut at Phoenix Rising in May. Sadly, Sirius Black isn’t available online and Marauders hasn’t been screened yet, but in a rare exception to FanCinemaToday policy, I’ll note that there’s (For the record, we never mention unfinished movies, much less their trailers).
Seeing as Potter’s saga concludes this summer, can we expect to see more fan films featuring the Boy Wonder Wizard in the future? With 377 million books sold around the world (so far), yet only six completed fan flicks in 10 years, one would be inclined to say “no.” However, one would be wrong.
Fan films traditionally spring up once a franchise is completed or is lying dormant. After all, Troops came along after Star Wars had been MIA for 14 years; New Voyages achieved unprecedented levels of popularity once “real” Star Trek shows ended production; and Batman: Dead End dramatically filled a void in the early 2000s after years of unsatisfying feature films. As a result, don’t be surprised if more Potter fans take up amateur filmmaking in the years to come; there’s bound to be many new adventures after Harry, Ron, Hermione and the rest of the crew ride their brooms off into the sunset.
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