Outside the Gates of Hogwarts
Of the three sisters in my family, only one of them is a tried and true hardcore Harry Potter fan. And she recently took a trip to Florida, just a few weeks too early to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Intense sadness commensed, as her dreams of sipping butter beer while dodging wand-weilding children and owl poop gloriously burst into flames like a phoenix just doing it’s phoenixey thing.
But she did manage to take some photos, which I have stolen and posted here.
While J.K. was very detailed in her descriptions of the Hogwarts grounds, her failure to mention the palm trees was a significant oversight which has been rectified during the construction of this park.
Once outside the gates of Hogwarts, young wizards can stop at the Jurassic Park Popcorn stand, where they can try their newfound spells on unsuspecting velociraptors.
Okay, the only sarcastic comment I'm going to make here is that they decided to go with the snowy depiction. Interesting choice, seeing as the median temperature in Universal Studios is approximately 150 degrees. But hey, it's magic!
Just thought I’d share. Let’s see how long until Val realizes I ramsacked her photo album…
Sarcastic or not, it’s funny!
Hogwarts doesn’t belong in Florida. Period.
Clearly, I’m not into making massive amounts of money.
The mayor of London agrees…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/7807589/Now-heres-a-wizard-idea.-Why-not-bring-Harry-Potter-home.html
He has a point. While we Americans love the bespectacled fellow, Harry Potter is most decidedly British. The whole series is very distinctly British. Ron Weasley could not possibly be more British if he physically ate the Queen with a side of Earl Gray tea.
But tourists are far more likely to go to warm Florida than rainy London. For starters, Florida has Mickey Mouse…
“My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain – and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place.”
{applause} Well said.
Well maybe Eddie Izzard, fabulous British comedian that he is, put it best:
“We got tons of history lying about the place, big old castles, and they just get in the way. We’re driving– ‘Oh, a fucking castle! Have to drive around it…’ Disney came over and built Euro Disney, and they built the Disney castle there, and it was, ‘You better make it a bit bigger, they’ve actually got them here… And they’re not made of plastic!’ We got tons of them, ‘cause you think we all live in castles, and we do all live in castles! We all got a castle each. We’re up to here with f*cking castles!”
Maybe Hogwarts just wouldn’t be as impressive in England. Besides, the island (or park, or whatever they’re calling it) is based on the movies more than the books.
“Those few unsuspecting visitors to Universal Orlando’s Islands of Adventure who had not heard that the company spent more than $265 million to bring the world of “Harry Potter” to life might be a little surprised to find a Scottish castle rising in the middle of the park.
“Daniel Radcliffe, who has played the title character in the films for about half his life, isn’t entirely concerned by the incongruity of the snow covering the surrounding village of Hogsmeade that does not melt in the 90 degree Florida weather. But he was excited to share how real the Wizarding World of Harry Potter experience felt to him.
“‘It does look like 700 feet of rock and castle,’ he marveled as he gave MTV News a tour of Hogwarts.”
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1641953/20100621/story.jhtml