Arts & Entertainment
Once a Potter Fan, Always a Potter Fan
Teenage Muggles were the first to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I at Clearview Herricks Cinema midnight showing.
Attendants of the Clearview Herricks Cinema midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I were mainly the people who had literally grown up with Harry Potter and therefore could stay out until the movie ended at 3 a.m. and didn't need their parents to drive them to the theater.
Several Potter fans still had some baby teeth when the first movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone opened in the U.S. Nine years later, those fans are in or have graduated college, but they still come for the midnight showing of the film, proving you can grow up without growing out of Harry Potter.
Fans themselves have aged into adulthood, like the characters of the series. Their maturity may be most evident in their taste for viral videos about the boy wizard. The hugely successful YouTube series "Harry Potter Puppet Pals" satirizes Harry's high school aged moodiness. Harry graduated to college level humor with A Very Potter Musical. Written and performed at the University of Michigan, the play creates an alternate yet similar Harry Potter universe set to original songs. The musical was so successful that A Very Potter Sequel was written the next year.
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The final installment of the Harry Potter movie series was split into two films perhaps so filmmakers would have to cut less, but true Potter fans could tell what was missing.
"I was a little bummed that scenes were cut down, like the Bill-Fleur wedding," said midnight viewer Siobhan Watson, 22. "But I get it. You can't do everything like the book or the movies would be hours and hours longer."
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No one at the Herricks midnight show broke out their Gryffindor scarves or drew lightening scars on their foreheads. Perhaps they thought themselves too cool or too old. But the lack of costume to the midnight showing didn't seem to diminish the viewers' appreciation of the movie and series.
"It's been a part of my life since I was in fifth grade," said another midnight viewer, David Tamke, 22. "The end of the series will be the end to an important chapter in my life."
