As Well As Arthur Weasleys Flying Car
The flying Ford Angliawhich Harry and Ron flew into the Whomping Willow and later saved them from Acromantulas in the bookscan be found in line for the Dragon Challenge roller coaster, just over the bridge and before entering the castle.
A version of this story ran in 2015 it has been updated for 2021.
In 2016 Rowling Released A Harry Potter Prequel Play And Sequel Movie
Last year was another landmark year for “Harry Potter.” The play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” premiered in London, with a book version released around the world in July. Finally, “Harry Potter” fans had another chance to go to a bookstore at midnight and buy a new entry in the series.
The play was written with John Tiffany and Jack Thorne. Its story begins 19 years after the events of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” and it concerns the next generation of wizards that followed in the wake of Harry, Ron, and Hermione.
“It was 17 years and just because Ive stopped on the page doesnt mean my imagination stopped,” Rowling told The Guardian. “Its like running a very long race. You cant just stop dead at the finishing line. I had some material and some ideas and themes, and we three made a story.”
Then She Released A Treasure Trove Of Trivia
Rowling had long promised an encyclopedia that would index every factoid from her wide-ranging magical universe. In late 2011, it came in a different form than expected: as a website. Pottermore launched as a sort of hybrid game and “Harry Potter” Wikipedia, where users could sign up, get sorted into a Hogwarts house, and win points while also reading bits of information about different elements of the “Harry Potter” universe.
Some of the entries were illuminating, like the tragic backstory on Professor McGonagall. Others, like the ingredients that go into different potions, were more trivial. Still, it delighted hardcore fans. Since 2011, Pottermore has moved away from the game component and acted more as a depository for Rowling’s material. She’s expanded it, and added things like short stories about the founding of Ilvermorny, the American wizarding school, and a family history for Harry Potter.
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The Plants In Harry Potter Come From A Real Book
I used to collect names of plants that sounded witchy, Rowling told 60 Minutes, and then I found this, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, and it was the answer to my every prayer: flax weed, toadflax, fleawort, Gout-wort, grommel, knotgrass, Mugwort.” The book was penned in the 17th century by English botanist and herbalist Nicholas Culpeper you can read it here.
First Harry Potter Film Opens
On November 16, 2001, the British author J.K. Rowlings star creationbespectacled boy wizard Harry Pottermakes his big-screen debut in Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, which opens in movie theaters across the United States. Based on the mega-best-selling fantasy novel of the same name, the film, which starred Daniel Radcliffe in the title role, went on to become one of the highest-grossing movies in history.
The first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, debuted in Great Britain in 1997 and was released in the United States the following year under the name Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone. Children and adults alike were captivated by the story of Harry, his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, their adventures at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and Harrys struggles against his main enemy, the evil Lord Voldemort.
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Harry Potter Fandom Also Paved The Way For The Mainstreaming Of Fandom And Geek Culture
Harry Potter has a tremendously outsized cultural reach: One 2011 survey suggested that a third of all American adults ages 18 to 34 at the time had read at least one of the books. But what really makes Harry Potter stand out is the way people loved Harry Potter.
First and foremost, the series helped make it cool to be a geek. People generally didnt read the Harry Potter books in isolation they wanted to talk about it with their friends, and then find more friends who loved the books as much as they did. This pattern coincided with the rise of Web 2.0 that is, an increasingly interactive and social internet. As more Harry Potter fans became more active online, they made discussion of YA fiction, fantasy, and science fiction seem commonplace.
And Harry Potter fans creativity is still being felt in and outside of the fandom. In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fan forums, fanfiction and fan art archives, and email discussion groups exploded across the internet. Harry Potter conventions drew thousands of fans, and Harry Potter cosplay became a well-known sight at larger geek and comic cons.
A number of Harry Potter fans also went on to make significant marks on mainstream culture. As a member of the University of Michigan theater troupe Starkid, a young Darren Criss starred as Harry Potter in the viral YouTube video A Very Potter Musical, and his popularity catapulted him into the role of Blaine on Glee and a career on Broadway.
Rowling Owes Her Success To An 8
Like many first-time authors, Rowling struggled to get her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone published. The book was rejected by over a dozen publishers. Finally, a small British publisher, Bloomsbury, said yes. Bloomsbury saw the potential of the book because the chairman of the publishing house gave the first chapter to his then 8-year-old daughter, Alice, to read. Upon finishing, she immediately demanded the rest of the book. However, Bloomsbury was not convinced that it had a bestseller on its hands. Rowlings editor, Barry Cunningham, warned her that she needed to get a day job because it was impossible to make a living writing childrens books.
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Jk Rowlings Wizarding World
The first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, was published in 1997 to immediate popular and critical acclaim. Six further best-selling books and eight blockbuster films followed. The books have been translated into over 80 languages, won multiple awards, and sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, becoming the best-selling book series in history..
In 2016, a new era of the Wizarding World was unveiled with the launch of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, an original screenplay by J.K. Rowling and the first in a major film series for Warner Bros.
How Jk Rowling Created Harry Potter
Newsweek Special Edition CultureHarry potterJ.k. rowlingWritingEngland
In honor of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Newsweek celebrates 20 years of the magic and mystery of J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter phenomenon.This article, written by Senior Editor James Ellis, is featured in Newsweek’s Special Edition, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
Most people spend their daily commutes trying desperately to shut out the world around them. Whether it’s bumper-to- bumper traffic on the highway or body-to-body passengers on the subway, getting from point A to point B often means zoning out to preserve your sanity. But instead of losing herself in a pop song, Joanne Rowling took advantage of a long train ride to come up with an idea that would generate billions of dollars and bring countless joy to fans around the world.
“In 1990, my then-boyfriend and I decided to get a flat and move to Manchester together. We would flat hunt every once in awhile. One weekend after flat hunting, I took the train back to London on my own, and the idea for Harry Potter fell into my head,” Rowling told Urbanette magazine. “Coincidentally, I didn’t have a pen and was too shy to ask anyone for one on the train, which frustrated me at the time, but when I look back it was the best thing for me. It gave me the full four hours on the train to think up all the ideas for the book.”
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The Fans Have Taken Over
The wizarding world is ever-evolving. And even if it isnt canon, the vast and unfathomable wealth of Harry Potter fan fiction is what unites us in our nerdity. These go from origin stories, future predictions, fan theories, successful spin-offs like Rainbow Rowells Bestselling YA novel Fangirl, hilarious comics that explore what it would be like if the sage-like Albus Dumbledore was in fact, a jerk, and what is life as a background Slytherin, the high school-comedy-like life of the Marauders before the time of Voldemort, to list just a few. Owing to their singular brilliance and also the size of the fandom, the fanfiction often becomes as wild and viral as the original stories.
Case in point, wonderfully sticky The Mysterious Ticking Clock by Potter Puppet Pals, a Youtube content creators channel which consists of short hand-puppet videos of all the major characters from the books.
The Mysterious Ticking Noise has been viewed over 17 million times, and is such an integral part of Potter-inspired pop culture that when Alan Rickman arrived at at the screening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the huge crowd serenaded him with the Potter Puppet Pals version of Snape Snape, Severus Snape
Harry Potters Popularity Completely Changed The Publishing Industry And The Effect Spilled Over To Hollywood
Here are just two of the ways Harry Potter changed publishing, and how those changes affected the rest of pop culture:
1) The books made it possible to publish long works aimed at children. Prior to Harry Potter, the accepted wisdom was that kids didnt have the attention span to read long books. And anyway, the thinking went, kids werent buying their own books. Their parents were paying for everything, and they would never be willing to pay an extra dollar or two for a longer book, with its extra printing and binding.
But after Harry Potter became an unstoppable cultural force, and it was clear that fans would keep buying thebooks no matter what, it started to expand. The last four volumes of the series are all doorstoppers that clock in at well over 700 pages each.
Publishers and childrens writers took notice. Booklist found that middle-grade novels expanded 115.5 percent between 2006 and 2016, the decade in which the Potter novels were at their longest.
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2) Harry Potter made childrens literature an unstoppable force. Before Harry Potter, childrens literature was often considered an afterthought. Sales were falling. Children, analysts would say wistfully, just werent reading anymore.
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According To Jk Rowling The Malfoy Family Once Hung Out With Rich Muggles
Until the imposition of the Statute of Secrecy in 1692, the Malfoy family was active within high-born Muggle circles, and it is said that their fervent opposition to the imposition of the Statute was due, in part, to the fact that they would have to withdraw from this enjoyable sphere of social life, Rowling wrote on Pottermore. In fact, one Malfoy might have had designs on the British Throne: There is ample evidence to suggest that the first Lucius Malfoy was an unsuccessful aspirant to the hand of Elizabeth I, and some wizarding historians allege that the Queen’s subsequent opposition to marriage was due to a jinx placed upon her by the thwarted Malfoy, Rowling writes. The Malfoys gave up their Muggle fraternizing when the Ministry of Magic, the new heart of power, was founded.
Harry Potters Us Publication Made It A Bonafide Phenomenon
Harry Potter did fine when it first emerged in the UK 20 years ago, winning a Smarties Award and garnering respectable sales for its publisher, Bloomsbury. But it only started to approach phenomenon levels when Scholastic bought the US publication rights for an astonishing $105,000, about 10 times more than the average foreign rights sale at the time.
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Arthur Levine, the Scholastic editor who acquired the books, had an excellent eye for British books that would work in the US, having already acquired the US rights to Redwall and His Dark Materials. But even he didnt know that Harry Potter would grow as big as it did. He just knew that he loved it and wanted to publish it. Scholastic President Barbara Marcus Barbara Marcus kept saying do you love it? and Arthur said yes, so we went for it, a Scholastic spokesperson recalled in 2002. I would have been willing to go further than that if I had to,” Levine said in 2007.
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The $105,000 sale granted Harry Potter two things: a built-in publicity hook, and a big budget.
The hook came from the press: Newspapers featured articles about the little English book that had garnered such a huge sale. Reviewers wanted to know what kind of book would justify that kind of money. It was a curiosity, and as such, it was a story.
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There Could Have Been An Official Harry Potter Musical
Rowling has turned down a lot of proposed Harry Potter ideasincluding, she told Winfrey, a musical that Michael Jackson wanted to do. Harry did get his Broadway moment, though, via Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which debuted on the West End in 2016 before making its way to Broadway two years later.
But Not All The Effects In The Harry Potter Movies Were Computer Generated
Animatronics were made for the actors to interact with on set, including baby mandrakes, Hedwig, the Monster Book of Monsters, and Buckbeak, which was used on-set for close ups. He could stare at you, his eyes could follow you, he could bow, and every one of his feathers was dyed and put in by hand, Newquist told PopMech. There are tens of thousands of them, and they look absolutely gorgeous. Other creatures were built to give the animators reference for lighting, like the giant Jack-in-the-Box from Prisoner of Azkaban and house elf Kreacher.
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The Next Year Rowling Released Her First Non
The release of “A Casual Vacancy” was anticipated with some uncertainty and trepidation. It was said to be about local politics in a small British town, and be decidedly about adult life and sex and other stuff that never made it into the books she wrote about child wizards. When it was released in September 2012, the reactions were mixed but mostly positive. Some dismissed it as an example of the limits of Rowling’s imagination, others praised it for an incisive, if sprawling, look at social issues that effect people living in the U.K.
Business As Well As Pleasure
Some of this wonderful fan-made content gets more than just views though. A fan made a Kickstarter project about the life of young Tom Riddle, titled Voldemort, Origins of the Heir, uploaded a teaser on YouTube and received over 30 million views within the first few days. The project was stalled till the filmmakers could get a go ahead from the Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. which owns the copyright to the stories, characters and everything Harry Potter. The overwhelming response to the teaser ensured they received the nod. There will be more of the Dark Lord in the days to come.
Potterheads are everywhere and so is the inspired content. There are a great number of podcasts discussing the wonders of wizardry and witchcraft. Pottercast and MuggleCast have both been around for a very long time and remain the most-followed and trusted sources of discussion and celebration, and for getting better acquainted with the actors and creators from the Harry Potter Universe.
And of course, as Harry Potter grew up, so did the readers. There exists an entire world of Harry Potter Erotica, which talks about what really happens when hundreds of excited teenagers live together in a castle that has only too many places to hide in there is literally a Room of Requirement on the seventh floor. Podcast hosts Allie LeFevere, Lyndsay Rush, and Danny Chapman discovered this genre and it is the basis of their NSFW Potterotica Podcast.
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Jk Rowling Debunks Harry Potter Inspiration Claims
J.K. Rowling with ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’
J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter stories are at the heart of many literary and film tours around the U.K., and various landmarks are now almost legendary due to claims that they were the inspiration behind Rowlings works. This week, the author took to to clear up a few myths around places claimed to be the birthplace of Harry Potter, and share the true inspirations behind her stories.
The Elephant House cafe in Edinburgh has long been known as a source of inspiration for Rowling, who sat writing much of her early novels in the back room overlooking Edinburgh Castle, according to the cafes website, and a sign outside the store claiming to be the birthplace of Harry Potter. Rowling, however, said shed actually been writing the series for several years before she started writing in the cafe.
Rowling has shared before that she spend significant time writing at former café Nicholsons in Edinburgh. Now a Chinese restaurant, Rowling said I once wrote an entire chapter in there in one sitting and barely changed a word afterwards. Those are the days you remember.
Another myth about the subway near Edinburgh University being the inspiration for a scene in Order of the Phoenix,and George Heriots in Edinburgh being an inspiration for Hogwarts was brushed aside by the author: