#antebellumfilmschool: Special Episode - Harry Potter, and the Order of Existential Dread
And so I feel like this is where this oddity comes in. Because to see us this old, and we still love, love, love Harry Potter and all these other different intellectual properties the way we do, it's not 100% rooted in just fandom to me. It's rooted in an absence of true transition into adulthood. And that may sound like I'm overanalyzing it, but it's too broad of a circumstance in this culture
If it left an impression on you in whatever shape or form, why can't you carry that forward? That doesn't mean that the person can't adult, can't have serious conversations, can't do fill in the blank. They can also embrace childlikeness, imagination, creativity, the wonder of and want to share that with other people, let alone other people who also appreciated those things. This is something else that's strange to me
We're only going to continue to create hollowed out pieces. I can't call them art, but hollowed out movies, TV, et cetera. It seems more and more like when I come across something I really enjoy, I find out it was based on a book, the movie or TV series, and then it stands out as something above the mark, so to speak. But it's not often embraced because it does sometimes require more thought or paying attention. And that just simply isn't
Evelyn Phipps
@LadyFi · 3:42
This was a woman who used to be on food stamps and government assistance. And she sat on the train on the way to work and wrote, you know, that is a Cinderella story right there. And just the fact that she wrote this as a Cinderella story and then her mind was so open to such creative characters. I enjoy it. I do. And I'm very glad for her because like I said, she opened up the world to reading once again
I mean, a lot of these actors won't watch their own movies. They don't watch movies in general. Like some of these actors won't even watch movies in general, which I understand they're in the business of manipulating people. And again, fantastic beasts. I don't know if it was for an older audience, I didn't care for them. I mean, there's some parts of them that I liked, but it was not Harry Potter
I think he just was like, oh, this would be cool to make these movies and out of this book series, somebody, let's figure this out. But when you read the Lord of the Rings books, I don't see the movies in the books at all. Harry Potter, you could definitely see in the books. The other thing is, let's get this out of the way. Everybody knows this to be true. Gandalf versus Dumbledore. Dumbledore would destroy him
I do think that you're correct in bringing up sort of the money making side of this and why people might take issue with it, like the Hayes code and transition to television. That was really IP driven and merch driven. You're spot on. Right. And we know that a lot of companies today are taking advantage of the purchasing power that that generation has. My brother is like 52, 53 right now
It. Now, the one thing that I will say that I sort of do understand, and I've been guilty of at times, but I am really trying to move away from actively, is that I don't love when a person's personality is sort of inextricably linked to IP of any kind. And I say that as I'm standing here with multiple different tattoos on my body from various films and series. I have a Bioshock tattoo. I have two Star wars tattoos
So that might be my old man like yelling at cloud moment, but I see that there is an absence of balance to where a great deal of the things that we enjoy that used to be just for kids that we are welcome to revisit, have now become the default status of what can be enjoyed and what can be invested in as an adult. You said yourself, and I was with you, I used to get bullied for wearing my Batman t shirts because I used to get Batman forever
So I hope I didn't come off to anybody on here as a way of saying I agree with Miriam, because, again, I agree and I disagree. I think the whole point of antebellum film school, in many ways, was to kind of find the simultaneous avenues of why these things exist, to be able to debate about them
A prime example was that one of my favorite kids books from years ago that I don't hear anybody talking about anymore is encyclopedia Brown. And Encyclopedia Brown was, I guess you could say. You could argue that he's the contemporary to Nancy Drew and the, you know, where you had these kid detectives that were kind of solving things that weren't necessarily a big deal
I don't remember how many books there were, quite a few of them, because for those that don't understand what Encyclopedia Brown was, they had a case in the front of the book and you would read it and then they would tell you and you would read it and try to figure out what the clues were in the story and try to figure out what the answer to the riddle was or what the answer to the case was