Secchan's Corner: Harry Potter on HBO

So since HBO got the rights for all the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies they've started to add a bunch of new Harry Potter related content, and I took today to watch through all of it :)

Harry Potter: The Reunion Return to Hogwarts 20th Anniversary. Ofc I watched this when it was brand new, back on January 2nd. But after having watched it and spent almost 2 hours being teary-eyed I still felt like I had to watch it again. So today I re-watched the whole thing and just like anything Harry Potter it filled me with such a warm cosy feeling. Harry Potter has been part of my life since I was nine years old and it still remains a big part to this day and I really deeply feel all those feelings the cast talked about. I remember back in 2000 when they were doing the casting for the first Potter movie and I was following it more closely than I've ever followed the casting for anything else. I remember searching online for rumours for the fifth, sixth and seventh books (with the msn search engine because Google was barely a thing back then) years before they came out. In the Reunion Robbie Coltrane talks about the massive lines of kids who'd queue for blocks to get the new book on the midnight release. I only got to do that once, for the last book when I was 16, and I had finished the book by the next day even though I tried to go slowly. I've read those books more times than any other books. I've watched those movies more times than I've watched any other movies. Harry Potter is more a part of me than any other series or franchise ever will be. I can't find the words to convey what this franchise means to me, but the actors in the Reunion did a pretty good job trying to convey the special feeling that is Harry Potter. Having been in it from the very beginning, having grown up with it... I wouldn't trade it for anything. The quote from JK Rowling on the premiere of Deathly Hallows part 2 in London still makes me very emotional to this day: "Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home." And that's what this Reunion is all about. Aside from me wishing they'd include more of the actors, this was absolutely perfect.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses. I had heard a lot about this and thought it seemed foolish. But I decided to watch it anyway. It was kind of entertaining at times, although mostly cringe, and the majority of the questions were too easy. The only questions I struggled with where the ones that asked for specific details in movie scenes, because I always look at the whole and not the details. Watching all four episodes I also realized that I'm way more confident in the first four books/movies than I am in the later ones. I haven't watched OotP, HBP and DH1 as much as I have the other films and OotP is probably the book I've read the least amount of times, so that makes sense. It kind of bothers me that the show's host, Helen Mirren, proudly says they have contestants from all over the world and then it turns out that every single one on the teams is either American or living in the US, and only two of those 12 people on the teams were originally from other countries but living in the US. Not very "all over the world", is it? It was very cringe to watch the players come up with an argument or explanation for how they arrived at their answers, when most of them probably just did like me and looked at the question and thought "That one." This entire season I was sat either nodding at the screen when both me and them got a question right, sighing in exasperation when they got a (to me) obvious question wrong, or frowning very hard trying to come up with the right answer when it was one of the more intricate movie questions. As cringe as this was, and as ridiculous it sometimes seemed, I had a pretty good time watching it. ~~I may have been talking to the screen a lot.~~

Fantastic Beasts: A Natural History. Every Harry Potter fan knows Stephen Fry as the guy who narrated the British audiobooks. In this kind of documentary he explores the myths behind some of the magical creatures that show up in Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts. I studied these old legends a lot when I was a teenager and had the book called The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter. This book is over 20 years old now but it taught me all the basics. This documentary was very interesting and also very cosy. It poses questions around storytelling and why humans tell stories and where do these magical creatures actually come from? He presents different theories, but of course nobody knows for sure. What I do agree with Stephen Fry and J.K. Rowling on is that it's incredibly fascinating that people all over the world share a lot of similar myths and similar magical creatures, no matter how different the cultures. We'll probably never know when or why it started, but it's interesting to think about. I really enjoyed this trip into the land of legends and shared history.

Fantastic Friends. This is only related to Harry Potter in the very loosest sense, but since a lot of the actors from Harry Potter shows up in this, it's been on the radar for a lot of fan groups. So this is a show where James and Oliver Phelps (better known as the Weasley twins) take friends on trips around the globe. This was a very wholesome show to watch. My favourite episode was probably the one on Iceland with Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley), but the one in Dubai with Luke Youngblood (Lee Jordan) was a lot of fun too. More than anything this show was a great way to get to know the twins as individuals and not as a set. Looking forward to more of this show because it was a lot of fun.