The new Harry Potter cast faces an impossible challenge. Can they win over an entire generation that grew up with the movies and the books? Can a TV series do justice to the story in a way that the movies never could? Will the controversial casting decisions alienate fans, or are people just overreacting? We're gonna get into the good, the bad, and the ugly of the new HBO Harry Potter series on an all new episode of Unbinged starting.
Alfredo Brown:So today's episode is gonna be a little bit different. It's still gonna be an open discussion, but, Jag, you decided to get into the trenches. You're giving us the good, the bad, and the ugly with this new Harry Potter series and how it can be a success, why it might be a failure. Why don't we start out with the good?
Jagger May:Let's start out with all the good things that this series has going for it. For starters, TV is a far superior median to watch a long running book series like Harry Potter rather than movies that have strict run times, all the challenges of the modern box office, as well as consistent studio interference. Now don't get me wrong, TV still has these challenges. Folks are disappointed with television all the time, especially as streaming grows. But both fans, new and old, can get a fresher and more detailed take on one of the world's most famous IPs and universes.
Jagger May:Example, George R. R. Martin made the decision to make Game of Thrones a television show instead of movies after the failure of the Golden Compass, which was meant to be the first movie in the His Dark Materials series, which, yes, became an HBO show years after the movie flop. Under the constraints of cinema, the original Golden Compass movie was just Chronicles of Narnia knockoff with a magical compass and armored bears. It was vapid.
Jagger May:It lacked all the original details of the book that made it more than just a child's epic. Fast forward to the HBO show, we still have a magical compass. We still have armored bears, but the overarching part is about a little girl's dad who abandons her to go and literally kill God. So do the original Harry Potter movies capture the magic of the books? Yes.
Jagger May:Harry Potter isn't as deep or telling a less like his dark materials did, but we're missing key moments of character development or just plain missing characters. Let's say, like, Hermione's big influence over the liberation of house elves with SPEW or Ludo Bagman in the goblet of fire who was a key in plot point that helped Lynch Pan Fred and George get the money for their joke shop. And from the same book, Winky the House Elf, who's a key character to help discover Barty Crouch. Spoilers, by the way, if you've never read the books. Or even less small details that are more charming and just help us relate to the character and their struggles that aren't exactly about Voldemort, Death Eaters, and Deathly Hallows.
Jagger May:Like, the one time Harry Potter actually wins the Quidditch World Cup in the Prisoner of Azkaban. Which brings me to my last point in the good. We have an opportunity just to see how vast, expansive, and magical the Harry Potter universe is. A lot of us got into the movies, but we don't get to see details of the day to day life of a Hogwarts students or specifically our protagonist Harry, Ron, and Hermione with such tight viewing windows. We can have full hour long episodes that explore areas like Hogsmeade or just how vast Hogwarts is and the wonder of first discovering both Diagon Alley and the shock of Nocturne Alley.
Jagger May:Say what you want about Rowling, but she built a rich universe that you could feel through the pages, and now we get to see that on the small screen. So I'll kick it to you guys. Do we think that this is enough to carry this show for what we are gonna assume is seven seasons? I don't know.
Alfredo Brown:This series is gonna have a lot more space to explore things. Jag, I think you did a really good job pointing out all of the things that's gonna make this series potentially special and better than the movies in many ways. Sam, I know you are maybe the biggest Harry Potter fan out of all of us, so I'm curious to hear your take on this.
Samatha Holt:There's so much good stuff in the books that just had to get left because obviously movies are such short format. But really quickly, I think one of the main things that I'm most excited about has to be the full lore of the Deathly Hallows as well as all of the in-depth parts of Quidditch that we miss out as a part of the movies. Quidditch just becomes a throwaway. They have to very quickly get through the bullet points of the Deathly Hallows. We miss the lore behind them.
Samatha Holt:So I'm really excited for them to get into that more because it's gonna give so much more context to the viewers if they haven't already watched or read Harry Potter.
Matthew Kopfhamer:As an adaptation medium, TV shows just give you that much more, like you've been saying, space. And I think that's what novels especially need because you have a lot of stuff that gets left in the cutting room floor with movies because you can't you just don't have the time or the budget. So unless they're doing some bullshit, like, five or seven episode seasons, look at you, last of us. They're gonna be able to include things that the movies just could not.
Alfredo Brown:And, Koff, that's one of those things that stands out to me. I'm one of the people that have never read the books. I was only an avid movie watcher. I just started listening to the audiobooks, and I'm almost done with Sorcerer's Stone in just a day. But you you're so much context that is left out of these stories that you really don't get.
Alfredo Brown:And there's a lot of, like, the memes and the jokes and stuff on Instagram and various social media platforms where it's like, Hermione's actually kind of a little crazy person. Not gonna lie. And you and you never really get that.
Jagger May:I love it.
Alfredo Brown:You never get that in the in the movies. And a lot of it, I think, was just trying to cater to a younger audience. I think that with this show, you get the opportunity to be a little bit grittier, to explore a lot of those themes that we didn't get the chance to just from the first chapter alone, seeing how, like, how different the Dursleys were in the book as compared to the movie, it actually added depth and made you hate them even more and made them a little less clunky and and silly. They were almost cartoonish to that point in the movie. Whereas in the book, you can kinda see like, man, these people really
Jagger May:suck.
Alfredo Brown:And and and spending more time with them, I think that's where the show is gonna be able to really elevate all these characters in the story.
Jagger May:Yeah. And I love that you brought up the Dursleys because JK Rowling actually had to write, like, reasoning on why, like, why Dumbledore would just allow child abuse. Like like, look. I will say JK Rowling is a master of fucking up and then correcting it later. She's like, I did this the whole time.
Jagger May:Just not midlife. What I what I really like as a fan is that, one, the younger generation has an opportunity to feel the magic that I did in high school that I don't exactly have now. Meaning that you got a high school teen drama at times. That's like and and I know that's very reductive, but I love Harry Potter, but that's kinda what the story is. You know, Harry Potter's learned how to kiss a girl in, like, the fifth book and shit.
Jagger May:And whereas in the movie, it's just like one sweet moment of just, like, chuckling, whatever. You actually get to relive what it's like being an awkward high school boy or girl through that. So I think that's pretty beautiful.
Matthew Kopfhamer:So what I'm excited about for this format is just the expansion of the universe, and, hopefully, they can take the time to explore some of the set pieces that they kinda have to go really quickly through the through the movies. So, like, Diagon Alley is so expansive, and we spend a lot of time with it in the books that we just we don't get in the movie, especially the first one. It's it's it's kinda like he's rushed through it. So I wanna hopefully get, like, a full episode where they're just in Diagon Alley. He's going through the different shops.
Matthew Kopfhamer:He's seeing all the different things, and that's really as an audience in the books. That's our first introduction to this new world. So I'm really excited to see how that translates to a to a show.
Alfredo Brown:With Diagon Alley, like, that's something I noticed immediately in listening to the books is that we could do an entire full hour of episode where it's just Diagon Alley, and it's him going through all the different shops. And, honestly, I love the fact that you get the inclusion of how he gets Hedwig in in the book. Like, we never got that in the movie. It's just a fucking owl that's there. And then when Hedwig spoilers eventually dies, just like, oh, damn, the owl's dead.
Alfredo Brown:Like, you don't there's not really that connection. So at least there's something there. You kinda see the origin of of all of it, every little thing. Even there's a small fact too where after Harry gets all of his books and all of his supplies at Diagon Alley, he goes back to the Dursley's and he's got to almost prep before going to school. That's completely left out of the movies and that he's got to convince the Dursley's to then take him to the train station.
Alfredo Brown:And then when he shows up to school, Hermione and all these other people know stuff in classes. Harry's got no idea. This is just like the smallest ways that they can enrich the story and actually give us better plot lines in a show.
Jagger May:And then, like, I know, Sam, you want to talk about this too. There's like an expansive expansion on the Deathly Hallows, the House of Gaunt, where I think I think, the half blood prince might be one of my favorite books besides Goblet of Fire. And the movie doesn't even do it justice because you get so much backstory on Voldemort and and his mentality. More moreover, just his past and and why he's so obsessive over, like, his lineage and being a pure blood red wizard. And I know it's I made the joke about him being a wizard who's just obsessed with an 11 year old, but the I think the sixth book does a good job at making Voldemort a relatable villain.
Jagger May:I'm not saying a valid villain to where you can be like a full blown Hitler, but you really get an understanding of how he develops his own thinking and mentality to get where he's at. And then like you said, Koff with the sets of the burrow. Like, we don't even get the burrow. And, like, how Ron grows up poor, but poor for a wizard is still like this magical, homely place that is wonderful, whereas you live in a literal fucking closet if you're Harry Potter. And and that and that's something that's magical.
Jagger May:Yeah. A lot a lot of a lot of, cool places that we don't even get to see. Like, even the House of Black, you know, that that's something that gets glossed over.
Alfredo Brown:Dude, I I found out in the book that that's how Hagrid gets his motorcycle. He gets it from a young, serious Black. I heard that, I was like, oh, shit. He gets referenced immediately. And then I start to ask my well, why is he not going to his godfather then if his parents just died?
Alfredo Brown:And then, like, I'm sure that the books will touch on that, but, like, one of the first things is Dumbledore saying he should probably be outside of this world of magic and grow up a little differently in the meantime. So it's like, oh, okay. Excellent context that was needed.
Samatha Holt:There's just lots of little Easter egg things from plot point from the first book all the way up until the last as well. And I think we'll finally start to be able to get those threads in the show to tie everything together and make it all fully come full circle as opposed to what we got in the movie, which was like something that I was really disappointed in when we when he's going after the goblet. It's not even mentioned that it's a Hufflepuff goblet that was from, you know, that's the original goblet and how Voldemort went about getting it. And spoiler for you, Alfredo, because you didn't read the books. But basically, Voldemort is young.
Samatha Holt:He's, like, in his really post Hogwarts era. He goes and he charms her in order to get it away from her, and he performs some crazy magic in order to take it. But there's just this obsession that he has with Hogwarts because it becomes his home that I think is so important. Again, kind of off of what you just said, Jack, too, about his history, what makes Voldemort who he is, and what really shapes him. And I think all those ties as to why Voldemort is so obsessed with Hogwarts, you get that all in the books.
Samatha Holt:You don't get that in the movie. Mhmm.
Jagger May:Voldemort tried to be a teacher, like, every year. He was Snape before he was Snape. He's like, hey. I heard Dark Arts position opened up.
Matthew Kopfhamer:Now there's that. He literally cursed the position because he didn't get it. And that's why every year, a new one has to get hired because he's like, fine. I can't have it. Nobody can have it.
Matthew Kopfhamer:And that's not mentioning
Jagger May:And the dark
Samatha Holt:All the flashbacks to him every time he tries to go and be a teacher and, like, you can Dumbledore is seeing him descend into madness right in front of him, watching him wither away snaky. Turn more snake like. All of these things, he's like, I still want a job here. He's like, no.
Alfredo Brown:You don't.
Matthew Kopfhamer:No. You're I. You need
Jagger May:a doctor's with you're just like so
Alfredo Brown:I think that when we we look at a show like this and how it can give more context, we've seen this happen before where and I I hate to compare IPs, but with Star Wars, The Clone Wars, the animated show, like, it added so much more context to those Star Wars prequels that were never really there and honestly kind of poorly written and had poor dialogue and everything and a lot of stuff that just wasn't there and a lot of characters you didn't care about. You were just waiting for Anakin to turn into Darth Vader, and that's kind of what I hope that we can get out of this show. Now there's tons of shows where there's examples of it not working out. And so I think we've expanded on what the good is and how this show can really give us the context of the Harry Potter books. But, Jag, let's jump into the bad.
Jagger May:And now we'll take the negative angle and just look at the bad things that this series has going for it. Starting with one major factor, the movies still hold up. Yes. 2011 was the last time we had a new Harry Potter movie, not including magical beast series, but the production. And the time when they were making movies like this was a different era.
Jagger May:People both new and old can watch these movies not unlike Lord of the Rings and don't feel that dated. Let's say when you watch something like the original Star Wars trilogy. Their beloved, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson are still alive and fresh in our minds, which begs the question for a lot of millennials not unlike me, is this something that we even need right now? Usually, when you're gonna do a series like this, it's because something has become stale and more just nostalgia for a much older generation than just people in their thirties, and it's because we want a modern take, more importantly, a modern look out of old material. With the exception of more story, I don't know how they're gonna top the level of production that the movies have already given us.
Jagger May:Because as we know, comparison is the thief of joy. We have entire theme parks that are built from the image of the movie. So we already have this monolith image that millennials worship. It makes it difficult to think that it's not gonna get passed just because people like their old movies. Let's take our beloved Sam.
Jagger May:White girls everywhere have been getting the Deathly Hallows symbol tattooed on him since 2010 when the Deathly Hallows part one actually dropped. These movies were so huge, even despite them being well over ten years old, they're near and dear to our hearts, which leaves people both scared that they're gonna ruin something magical, both literally and figuratively, or be just plain hated. I fall into the former because the second bad thing this show has going forward, HBO, particularly Warner Brothers, has been taking the l's. From the failures of The Last of Us season two all the way back to season eight of Game of Thrones, we've seen a company that has tried to milk its audience out of every view they can. This means that stories that should be tight and rich, making a lot of their viewers wait one to two years between seasons, and then only getting seven episode seasons on top of that.
Jagger May:Yes. Eight hours is much better than the two or two and a half that we get from the movies, and this is assuming they're gonna break up one book per season, but they could still set themselves up with poor pacing. Because if they wanna keep up with the production value of something like the movies, big budgets normally mean shorter seasons. Shout out to House of the Dragon and Dune Prophecy. Dune Prophecy didn't even look that good, and that's because they couldn't afford to match the movie's production.
Jagger May:Most of that was set within hallways, a building, one room. Luckily, Hogwarts is the main setting for much of the books, but we're at risk of what looks like a stage production where we're limited to a single backdrop and characters doing whatever they can within the means of their budget. Now I know you guys are more positive than I am, but with all these negative factors, they have to matter, don't they?
Samatha Holt:Okay. So I'm way too excited about literally everything we just covered in the good to be too upset about the possible bad. Now there are some moments where I wanna have a pause. Like, obviously, we just went through last of us, and we kind of all feel like seven episodes is not enough. I'm hoping we don't get shortchanged on the number of episodes.
Samatha Holt:Don't just give me a seven episode season one. I feel like we need a good sizable amount of seasons just to get us through the chapters. And I think as all of us are gonna go and do rereads, Alfredo, you're doing a relisten right now. We're gonna find these moments where it's like, well, all of this feels like that would have been an episode, and we're gonna want to jump to the next chapter. There's gonna be stuff that's gonna be left behind, and that's gonna be a bummer.
Samatha Holt:But because they have so much more time, I'm hoping that they don't do that. They just get to the bigger plot points and those little Easter eggs. Just just weave them throughout so that way we don't miss out on anything.
Jagger May:Sammy Sunshine, you're always so positive. Nothing's We're we're
Alfredo Brown:in the bad, and she's like, it's gonna be great.
Samatha Holt:It's Harry Potter. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be great. I'm so excited.
Jagger May:I loved it, actually. I loved it.
Samatha Holt:It's not gonna be bad at all.
Alfredo Brown:Honestly, I get it for why a lot of people might be really apprehensive because I was. The second that this was announced, I was like, dude, we don't need more of this. And actually, Sam, what we looked at yesterday was my tweet from a year ago where I was like, you know what we need is all of the original Marauders and, like, let's do a gritty series with that. Let's go back to to Lillian James and Sirius and all these other people when they were younger. I'm about that.
Alfredo Brown:That would be a really cool series that could add context. The only thing that I think I'm I'm willing to give this a shot for is that whatever the opinions might be on J. K. Rowling and her opinion of people, she's heavily involved with this and wants to do something where she can add a lot of what was not in the movies. So it could almost feel like even though it's the same story, it could be a very different story.
Alfredo Brown:And the fact that we're gonna get so much more that wasn't there, that's why I'm willing to give it this chance.
Matthew Kopfhamer:And it's weird because, like, I am excited for the show, but I can absolute I definitely have apprehension, and I can see where it could fail. And the biggest thing for me is we've seen it now with a couple of even HBO adaptations, where I was excited going in, and it just you could see that it was more of a cash grab than it was an actual passion project or something created by people who love and and really harbor this, safeguarding of the the IP. And the biggest and the most egregious in recent history is Doom Prophecy, that pile of garbage. I'll never not be mad at that show. But if we have the time and the care taken with this story that gets adapted well, even if there are changes from the books, if it makes sense for the visual medium, I could be happy with it.
Matthew Kopfhamer:But again, studios fuck up all the time. Money gets in the way. People's egos get in the way. And let's be honest, JK, she's got some worrying opinions. So, you know, there's a lot of
Jagger May:reasons We're gonna cover that.
Matthew Kopfhamer:And there's a lot of reasons why this show could fail spectacularly. So I go in with a healthy amount of apprehension, but I am I am pretty excited to see how they pull this off, if they pull it off.
Jagger May:I think they out of any adaptation from book to movie with the exception of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter did probably one of the best jobs ever. And those movies and the universe is still I don't wanna call it perfect, but it's still great, and it's something that isn't marred by any type of extraneous bullshit. And I look at someone who I feel is just as strongly about Star Wars as Harry Potter, and then we have the prequel trilogy. And then anytime you talk try to tell anyone, I like Star Wars, they're like, really? Rey, Kylo Ren, and that that stupid fucking mask?
Jagger May:It's that just comes along, and I don't want that. I still like having this one little thing that kind of relates you to even a stranger. Like, oh, you like Harry Potter? We at least have a thirty minute conversation. We we kind of lose that magic when we do these things.
Samatha Holt:I really think that one of the other things that could go bad, and I'm hoping it doesn't because it does seem to have a good amount of budget if you watch or you're seeing any of the news, you're seeing they're building an entire village. They're building a city to really make Harry Potter live in in addition to the sound stages they already have. So I feel like there's gonna be some things from the movie because everything's still built. There's so so many parts, but they should be expanding on it. But that's a great amount of budget for the physical.
Samatha Holt:I'm really concerned about the CGI and what they're actually gonna do to make things feel magical. And what I mean by that specifically is the house elves and the way that Dobby looks, we have what he looks like in the movie. If you read the books, it's very different from what we see in the movie. And there's gonna be a lot of people that get upset if he looks different. I'm gonna be okay with them going back to the book and making things look book accurate rather than movie accurate.
Samatha Holt:Because there's a lot of things in the book that are really scary and really uncomfortable in a lot of these creatures. And I think they had to soften that for the films, but I'm hoping that they don't do that in the books. I'm hoping that we get it to be a little bit grittier, a little bit truer to what these things should actually look like. And I hope that they have the money to spend to make it look good.
Jagger May:Yeah. You you're speaking my language. And this is a point that I brought up when, you know, when I when I broke down the bad, is that big budgets mean short seasons a lot of times. And what we had with the movies is that they opened the pocketbook up. Things like the dragon look nice.
Jagger May:Thing like, every set looks perfection. For them to achieve that for a movie and to give us, let's just say for the usual, the usual model, eight episodes of that. We've seen with house of the dragon how that doesn't work. And like you said, Sam, it actually me as a book viewer, like, I don't wanna hate on Toby Stephens and what he did as Dobby. But, like, they kept that nigga Dobby in a a pillowcase, the tire series.
Jagger May:Homie liked his clothes. Yeah. As soon as he got a snot, he was wearing, like, 10 hats at the same time. He had multiple socks on. Yes.
Jagger May:Homie was popping multiple collars before it was cool. Yes. Like and they did them dirty. They're like the the movies are like, Dobby, you you gotta rock the fit, dawg. Go on and put on your Dobby's a free elf.
Jagger May:Kid dog.
Samatha Holt:Dobby's free elf, and he gets to wear whatever he wants to wear. And if it's just trash, it's trash, and he's his, and he's happy to wear it. Yes. Oh my god.
Alfredo Brown:See, so this is the thing is, like, I'm hoping that a lot of fans can think this way, but we see this where the the this type of, I guess, we just call it toxic fandom. It transcends movies and shows and all this because we see it in sports. All of us are fans of football. Right? Koff, you and I are dolphins fans.
Alfredo Brown:There's not a single quarterback that's been on the dolphins that has not been compared to Dan Marino. Jag, you're a fan of the patriots. It's gonna be the same thing with Tom Brady.
Jagger May:Tom Brady.
Alfredo Brown:Sam, steelers always goes back to, like, how many rings we got, and we did that with Terry Bradshaw, and the Steelers were the best back then. And it's like, okay. Cool. But now we are that generation of fans where it's where we've seen the books, we've seen the movies, and now we're gonna see a show. It's gonna be impossible for us to not compare it to all of these things.
Alfredo Brown:I think the hope is, though, is that most people will compare it to the books and say, man, this is so much truer to the books. Even though we have, JAG, like you mentioned, an entire generation, it's like, oh, let's go to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios, and you've got a specific look. And those, like you don't you've I I'm worried that we're gonna get a not my Harry, not my Hermione type deal because We already
Matthew Kopfhamer:have a not my Hermione bullshit.
Jagger May:I've already booked my tattoo appointment. I don't
Matthew Kopfhamer:know what you're talking about.
Jagger May:It's something very
Alfredo Brown:real that's gonna happen. Alright. So we've had the chance to discuss the good, the bad. Unfortunately, we've gotta talk about the ugly.
Jagger May:And now to the final angle of this. We've had the good. We've had the bad. Now there's just pure ugliness attached to it. Starting with JK Rowling herself.
Jagger May:Now I could flood the screen with as many hateful tweets, gay bashing, or whatever trans hate that she's been saying lately, but there's a real problem when your main demographic tends to be one of the most progressive demographics. I know that politics doesn't seem to matter in your viewing experience, but it does. Again, I've referenced something like The Last of Us or an even bigger franchise like Star Wars, where you have one side that is just okay to have a rich story. They don't care about race swapping or gender swapping. And then you have the other side of the coin of a group of folks that take any movie that has a black or woman main character and labels it as woke.
Jagger May:You've already set the series up to be smack dab in the middle of a culture war. So when you think about making something with such a large budget, every eyeball matters to recoup and regain a lot of that budget. So now you have the perfect shitstorm to both piss off two sides of the aisle just because of one central creator's IP. There is a shot that a lot of people who wouldn't watch this because of Rowling could be replaced by the demographic people who would watch it just because they agree with Rowling. Regardless, because this is an IP made by a controversial figure who is very much still prominent, you're alienating a big portion of your audience.
Jagger May:Like I said, this is mainly one side of the aisle, but goes to my next point of the cast themselves. Now I've already kinda alluded that conservatives hate the race swapping and gender bending. The Harry Potter series continues with this trend with casting Snape as black and Hermione as another person of color. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not one of the anti woke mom, but key themes in the books make this kind of ugly, considering that we're gonna have a snobby rich blonde boy calling a girl of color mudblood for seven seasons straight.
Jagger May:You feel it to mudblood. Not a great look. More of when we look at the Snape angle. One, because of the race, Snape becomes a much more relatable character, but James Potter, who is a central figure and hero in Harry's life, kinda looks like a racist. So you're gonna tell me you're gonna take Snape, hang him, call him poor and greasy haired, and that's gonna convey the same message?
Jagger May:There's a huge worry that this is gonna be too on the nose of a topic for people who may not find this as palatable, and then you're just gonna, again, piss off the anti woke mob. So in conclusion, yes, we have a lot of good things, and there's a lot of room to tell a compelling story that we might not have gotten with just movies. But what we have is a series that's right smack dab in the middle, and that's not a great thing Because now we have reasons for all sides of every aisle to poke at this series and hate it. And when you think about big budget IPs that need CGI, large sets, need to recreate magic, you need every eyeball and every edge to recoup a lot of that money from the budget. So now when you have 30 year olds who make up the largest amount of your demographic and you're pissing them off by altering their nostalgia bait, then you have the culture war that we live in now with all of our media, it makes you wonder, are they setting themselves up to actually fail?
Jagger May:And I know we've discussed that through this entire time, but we haven't focused on the real factor, and that's the money. Profits matter. Margins matter. And what we have is a show that managed to edge away at every margin of every demographic. Call me crazy folks, but I think this is doomed to fail.
Matthew Kopfhamer:So, I mean, it it's hard to especially hindsight being 2020, look back at these stories and not have some sort of tainted view because of JK's recent remarks about trans people. Her viewpoint, I disagree with. I I think she's wrong, and trans people are people. They deserve all the same rights that that everyone else does. So for her to put so much time, effort, and money into combating that stance, It's a little weird, and it definitely definitely hurts my viewpoint of the story and takes away a little bit of the magic.
Matthew Kopfhamer:I'm still gonna watch the show. I'm still gonna try to enjoy it for what it is and and try to distance the art from the artist, But I can absolutely understand why someone would not wanna watch this, for, you know, for those moral reasons. And if you don't wanna support a creator who has, in my opinion, some abhorrent views about people, then that's absolutely your right as a consumer, as a, as an enjoyer of content and and entertainment. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a story. And if you don't want to watch it, you don't have to.
Matthew Kopfhamer:Like, no one's forcing you to. So I I think it will succeed overall, but I I definitely understand where the backlash is gonna come from.
Alfredo Brown:I agree. I I I wanna look at this where I'm not even looking at what JK Rowling and and I know that's loaded to say it like that, where I'm not looking at what JK Rowling has said or done, but strictly looking at what the show is, who has been cast. Because to me, that's what I've seen more recently where that is where a lot more of the backlash is coming from. And, Sam, you and I joke that, like, oh, man, the surprise is gonna be gone in the recording because we were saying it via text is, you know, even me just listening to the first book, people are not outraged that Dumbledore doesn't have this gigantic crooked nose, finding out people were not outraged about Dobby and the way he dressed. People were not outraged that Dudley wasn't blonde.
Alfredo Brown:People were not outraged that that Hermione in the movies didn't have big buck teeth. It kinda seems like the only thing that fans are truly getting outraged about is what's the color of your skin and what are your genitals? Like, straight up. Like, that's where we're at. That's where we're at with Fate.
Jagger May:What do you think about genitals and the color
Matthew Kopfhamer:What are your
Jagger May:thoughts on genitals? And
Alfredo Brown:it's it's honestly it's it's very frustrating because it it gets us to a point here where not only are we going back and comparison comparing a show to to the movies and to the characters we've had before, but now we're comparing it to what we want in our mind as and I guess fans, you do have every right to do that. But at the same time, like you said, Koff, I don't agree with all of JK Rowling's thoughts on people in general. She also created this. Right? We're getting to a point where us as fans, we get so toxic where we don't even let the creators create anymore.
Alfredo Brown:If she's a part of this show and she was a part of the casting choices, I would have to believe there are reasons she is doing that. Could they be problematic in today's society and today's discussion? Absolutely. But I'm willing to let creators create even when I don't like them. Let's see what their art is.
Jagger May:Yeah. And I guess to bring I'll keep my point short for this because, like I said, I put a lot of this together. And where I'm at is I'm I'm where Sam is at inside, where I'm just excited. There's a lot of room for them to do well. I my biggest concerns is really just Snape.
Jagger May:Like, the Hermione calling her a mudblood thing. It's just weird calling a little girl any derogatory term no matter what. So and that's kind of the point. But the Snape stuff really does detract from the story, but that is it's a small portion of screen time, but it's a big crux to plot development. That is my only worry.
Jagger May:What I don't want is I'm so tired of having discussions like this. I know that's ironic because I felt like we needed this discussion, but it gets in the way of the things that I actually wanna talk about and what is actually a failure. Whereas something like Dune prophecy was a failure because it just fucking sucked. It was not good. It was not a compelling story.
Jagger May:There's a thousand reasons why it just sucked. This is gonna fail because, and like I said, when I was breaking down, like, the ugly is that it's money that's a factor here. When we look at something like the Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power, and all these other things where you're cutting away into a profit margin, the more you alienate more and more people to where we could have this really fucking awesome day, and it's gonna get canceled after one season because of dumbass conversations like this. And I know I'm being ironic, but that's kind of the point.
Matthew Kopfhamer:Culture war stuff. It's so dumb at the end of the day because it's so unnecessary. And we let it infect all aspects of our lives instead of just being like, hey, people are people. Move the fuck on. We sit here.
Matthew Kopfhamer:We discuss like, oh, what's gonna happen if they use the wrong bathroom or what's gonna it's such fucking nonsense. Like, why do we let it affect politics and entertainment and sports and, and just everything in general when at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter because, again, people are people. Just let them be. Let's move on and enjoy things or not It's a world
Alfredo Brown:of magic because Exactly. Magic where everything is pretty unbelievable. And then when Right. The most believable of things happen where someone just looks a little bit different than they did in a movie or than how they were described originally in the book, we freak the fuck out. Like, I I I can't with this, man.
Alfredo Brown:It's it's it's too much.
Samatha Holt:Yep. Yep. I mean, I again, it's hard for me to be negative because I'm just so excited about what this can possibly do to show all of the world of the book. And I'm trying to I I'm I've gone back and forth on how I even feel about the casting, specifically about Snape. I feel like I'm back into the positive too because what this means is they're taking it seriously in terms of the acting, and this actor must have put down an amazing tape in the audition that just convinced a lot of different things.
Samatha Holt:Maybe it was something they were looking for in terms of casting, but I think that people would be more upset if they cast someone that looked like a carbon copy of Alan Rickman
Alfredo Brown:Mhmm.
Samatha Holt:And he couldn't act. I think people would be far more upset. So I think why not give this to a really good creator, a good artist, an amazing actor that can pull off the role and give us all the layers of depth that we really want from it? Because Snape is an incredibly pivotal character that you need to have so many layers on to tell the story correctly. And if we're gonna get that from an amazing performance, I'm gonna be far more excited.
Samatha Holt:And again, I think people will be way more upset if they just were to get some guy that looked just like a young Alan Rickman. Everyone wanted Adam Driver to do this role, for that reason. And I think that
Matthew Kopfhamer:Adam Driver's a good actor, I think.
Samatha Holt:He's a good actor. He's a good actor, but he's I think he's too old. Like, he's he's not quite right in terms of, I think, performance. I think he could have done it, but I know that they're also looking at a lot of English actors for this. And I think they wanna stay true to that too.
Samatha Holt:Yes, John Lith goes in there, but still. Again, I feel like that's gonna make way more sense to go with someone new so you don't have to have this dry comparison of he's not Alan Rickman. He's not Alan Rickman. I think that would have been far more He's going to.
Matthew Kopfhamer:Comparison no matter yeah.
Alfredo Brown:03/1994. For Lily and Sam, you you bring up the thing attention. You bring up the thing where so many people were fancasting Adam Driver. And it's not the first time that we've had this where fancasts, we we want them so bad. And then go and look at Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness after people just kept clamoring for John Krasinski and Emily Blunt to be mister Fantastic and and Sue Storm.
Alfredo Brown:And then we got John Krasinski, and then everyone was like, that's not how mister Fantastic would have been. He's the smartest guy in the universe. And people see? And people immediately hated it, which is why I I go back to exactly what you said.
Matthew Kopfhamer:But that wasn't if That wasn't the actor, though. That was the writing around the actor that ruined that. John Frisco is a
Jagger May:terrible mister fantastic because he's too cool. I think Pedro Pascal is almost too cool for mister fantastic. I'm sorry. It's But we've we've seen this too
Alfredo Brown:where a lot of people can't separate the writing from the actor either. Like, it's happening with with Last of Us. I'm not gonna get into it. We've done enough videos on that. But if this actor who has been cast to be Snape can do a good job and even, I don't know, expand on what Alan Rickman did.
Alfredo Brown:Dare I say, maybe even improve it. I know Alan Rickman's a phenomenal actor, but there was a lot that he wasn't given the opportunity to do. If he can improve on this, he could be fucking purple for all I care. I I don't care what color the actor is. If he can do a good job at this performance, I'm all the way in.
Samatha Holt:Alan Rickman, at the time when they were recording the first movies, JK hadn't finished the final books. So Alan went to her and asked about his character and he got the little nugget about always at the end about himself that he needed to in order to give his performance. So he always had that to fall back on. We obviously have all of that material now. So this is gonna be a very different performance because he was also in something where the readers and viewers were discovering at the same time while these things were coming out, all these little moments and Easter eggs.
Samatha Holt:So we've had twenty years to sit with all of this amazing, you know, literature and these films. We're gonna get a very different look into all of that. And all of the actors have that as well. They have perspective, whereas the original cast did not.
Alfredo Brown:There's gonna be so much more depth to every little thing he does going into potions class year one. Snape's not just some dickhead. It's it's a very different performance. Everything.
Samatha Holt:No. My favorite Malfoy quote Potism. Is one that the actor gave in the movies where he said, I didn't know you could read.
Jagger May:That's so good. Was it Crabber Boyle? Which one? I forget. Yeah.
Jagger May:Why are
Alfredo Brown:you wearing glasses? Reading.
Jagger May:I don't
Samatha Holt:know you could read.
Matthew Kopfhamer:So great.
Samatha Holt:Brilliant. So great.
Alfredo Brown:Alright. Well, I think that's gonna be a wrap for us. We've been able to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly with this new Harry Potter cast and the new series. I think the overwhelming conclusion here is that we're still very excited for this this series despite maybe some of the apprehension that lingers there. But let us know what you guys think in the comments down below.
Alfredo Brown:We're gonna be back again later on. We've got a bunch of other shows that are coming up. Jack, we got guys predator killer of killers. The movie is is releasing soon as well. We'll be back next Monday to talk about that.
Alfredo Brown:We've got all kinds of other great shows coming up throughout the summer. The bear, squid game, so many other cool things that have been announced as well. So, make sure you're subscribed to unBinged here on YouTube and as well on the podcast platforms, Apple and Spotify. As always, I wanna thank you guys for watching or listening all the way through myself, for Koff, for Jack, for Sam. We'll see you next time.
