Making Sweden 5% nerdier than it has to be.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Swedish Nerd and A Staple of his Childhood

Two days ago the first official trailer for the final installments of the Harry Potter film franchise. It's a good trailer. Plenty of big bombastic scenes with the heroes looking desperate, large amounts of fire, a dragon, armies of wizards and witches rushing into battle and plenty of confrontations between Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). But it wasn't any of the larger than life special effects or dramatic scenes or epic music that got to me. It was these two tag lines.

The Finale of the Worldwide Phenomenon

The Motion Picture Event of a Generation

More specifically it's the words Finale and Generation. It just sort of dawned on me that I'm part of that generation that's refered to there and that this will probably be the last big thing regarding Harry Potter. It was just a bit of a surreal moment for me.

Even if I've always been a bigger fan of the books than the movies I've appreciated most of them and have been looking forward to them, just knowing that the franchise would live on in that form was sort of nice. But now it's all coming to an end and I feel a bit nostalgic. How can I not? Like many other young people the Harry Potter books are the things that more or less got me into... well... reading books.

I remember it so clearly. I was eleven years old and by that time my parents had bought me several books in vain attempts to get me interested in reading. The time when my mother gave me the swedish edition of Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone conincided with my teachers dedicating an hour each morning to having the students read a book of their choice in the classroom. Figuring that I might as well humor my mother and that I didn't have anything better to do at those hours I brought the book along with me. So I started reading it and after the first bits of confusion cleared up I suddenly found myself reading it in my bed before going to sleep or whenever I had a chance to read it.

Then, to my surprise, I actually read through the entire book and I wanted to read more. So much so that I reread the book itself once or twice. And just like that I was hooked and every birthday and christmas wishlist now included the next Harry Potter book, even when I didn't know title. Then came the really long wait between The Goblet or Fire and The Order of the Phoenix. It got to the point where I got tired of waiting for the swedish translation and just bought the english version a day after it got to the stores. I never looked back to the swedish translastions. In the end I waited in line for the last book, as I've descirbed in a previous post. The rest is history.

That's my Harry Potter story. Pretty much every Harry Potter fan I've asked has one like it and I felt like sharing mine.

The movies have always been a mixed bag. The first two were good but not great. The third was awful, lamest werewolf I've ever seen and that includes the Twilight werewolfs. The fourth felt rushed overall. The fifth and six however were not only good movies but also kickass adaptations of the books. It's the same people that made those that are making the two movies that will make up the last installment for the series, it took them this long to make two movies out of one book, so I'm confident that it will be a high note ending for the movie franchise. I'm looking forward to it.

Hmm... I have quite a few unread books on my shelf that I plan to read through. But I think that before that very last movie premieres I'm gonna have to reread seven books that have had a large influence on my life.

1 comment:

  1. The HP thing has never worked for me but I'm sure Rebecca could share a similar story.

    ReplyDelete