{"id":153,"date":"2011-07-28T15:12:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-28T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/harry-potter-film-legacy-great-storytelling-that-made-reading-books-cool\/"},"modified":"2013-08-05T12:39:31","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T12:39:31","slug":"harry-potter-film-legacy-great-storytelling-that-made-reading-books-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"Harry Potter Film Legacy \u2013 Great Storytelling that Made Reading Books \u2018Cool\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
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Photo credit: Warner Brothers.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part II <\/i>a week after its record-setting opening weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The opening scene\u00a0begins with Harry, Ron, and Hermione continuing their quest to find and destroy the Dark Lord\u2019s three remaining Horcruxes, the magical items responsible for his immortality. The movie’s\u00a0satisfying conclusion has the beloved main characters, now married with children of their own, sending off their\u00a0offspring to\u00a0Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.<\/div>\n
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It was the most anticipated film of 2011, according to a Fandango moviegoer survey, and smashed box office records, earning $168 million in North America alone. <\/span><\/span>By far the best of all the Harry Potter films, Deathly Hollows II is <\/span>getting early Oscar buzz and deservedly so.<\/div>\n
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But, for this muggle, the legacy won\u2019t be the films so much as the inventive storytelling and rich color that was brought to life on the page by J.K. Rowling in her fantasy seven-book series<\/span>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not alone in that view. I recently chatted with Lawson Cox, president of the Atlanta chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators, who weathered the long lines to attend a midnight showing of the movie with his two teenage daughters.<\/p>\n

For him, the mania brought back memories of the original Star Wars <\/i>movie that exploded onto the scene in 1977 followed by a series of hit sequels.<\/div>\n
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\u201cWhen The Empire Strikes Back <\/i>was released, people camped out for tickets and waited in line for hours to see the movies. But I never saw anything like that surrounding a book release until Harry Potter — especially the last book in the series,\u201d recalls Cox, whose family\u00a0attended a local Barnes and Noble book release party back in 2007.<\/div>\n
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\u201cIt was an even more enthusiastic crowd than the final movie. There were literally hundreds of people, mostly teens and younger, willing to wait in line for hours and fork over their own money…for a book<\/i>! In today’s multimedia-focused culture, that is simply unheard of,\u201d Cox enthuses, adding, \u201cHarry Potter introduced a whole new generation to the excitement of reading, and proved that books are certainly not dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I think of the lasting legacy of the Harry Potter books, I don\u2019t have to look any further than my children, who are avid fans of the book series (we are reading them together, one by one). <\/span><\/div>\n
Here\u2019s what one young person had to say about the book series\u2019 impact: \u201cTo me, Harry Potter is a defining piece of culture for my generation’s childhood and teenage years. Many of us who read these books as kids and then went on to read them ourselves. Some of our first real novels were the Harry Potter books. Just like ourselves, the stories matured and grew with their audience,\u201d writes Alex Corbett, a Canadian 12th grader on a Canadian online newspaper site, This Week<\/a><\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
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Rowling has done what another British-born author, C.S. Lewis, did with The Chronicles of Narnia<\/i> — capture the imaginations of a generation of readers, young and old. Last October, the best-selling author told Oprah<\/a> <\/span>that she was open to writing subsequent Potter novels, though she quickly followed up by saying, \u201cI feel I\u2019m done, but you never know.\u201d <\/span><\/div>\n
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Personally, I don\u2019t think she could do any better, except perhaps to write a prequel that more fully shapes the stories of the boy wizard\u2019s parents and their colorful contemporaries, including the complicated character, Severus Snape, played brilliantly by English actor Alan Rickman. Such a treatment would also give fans the chance to delve into the influences that drove the young Tom Riddle into becoming the villainous Dark Lord. <\/span><\/div>\n
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I, for one, hope there’s more to come.<\/span><\/div>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo credit: Warner Brothers. I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part II a week after its record-setting opening weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The opening scene\u00a0begins with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[313,334],"tags":[516,514,127,515,499],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-literary-trivia","category-films-pop-culture","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hollows","tag-j-k-rowling","tag-legacy-of-harry-potter","tag-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":699,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}