![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Potter's Cakewalk?
Jul. 23rd, 2007 06:24 pmI posted my bit about Leia's slave girl bikini on my starwars.com blog...hoo-wey, I don't think I've had that many responses before.
Well, back to the fun and games...
With the onslaught of HP hype over the past couple of weeks, I couldn’t help but compare it with the ROTS hype in 2005. Both marked the end of their respective series, though only God knows if JK Rowling will wait 16 years and write the back story of Harry's parents. Am I nuts or was the press surrounding the releases of OoTP and DH a lot more positive toward the source material and the fandom than the press for ROTS?
The local paper had a warm glowing story about kids in the hospital getting their copies of DH, a front-page story about eager fans raiding the bookstores at midnight, and very positive reviews of both the book and the movie OotP. They were certainly wild about Harry. The stories that appeared in the local paper for ROTS were by and large skeptical of the movie, gave it terrible reviews (I even wrote to the paper at one point), and certainly didn't have warm, fuzzy views of the fandom. Maybe these reporters live in mortal fear that their kids will put them in the 60 Minutes nursing home one day if they're too harsh on HP. In any case, the stories I've seen online and in other sources have been almost uniformly positive. It does compare in a lot of ways with the very positive press the OT got back in the day, although it did start to sour a little bit with TESB and ROTJ.
I'm not saying HP deserves a public scouring nor do I mean that nobody has ever written anything negative about the young wizard and friends. I've seen a meh review of OotP and another article knocking Rowling's writing skills. It's not to say nobody wrote anything positive about SW recently; Celebration IV and Celebration Europe got mostly good press as far as I can tell.
But there's a clear distinction between the way few sources have mentioned HP's merchandising while everybody took notice of SW's merchandising (and not in an entirely positive way) or that HP is this magical tale encouraging a generation of youth to read while SW singlehandedly ruined movies.
I'm leaving comments open but I'm screening them.
Well, back to the fun and games...
With the onslaught of HP hype over the past couple of weeks, I couldn’t help but compare it with the ROTS hype in 2005. Both marked the end of their respective series, though only God knows if JK Rowling will wait 16 years and write the back story of Harry's parents. Am I nuts or was the press surrounding the releases of OoTP and DH a lot more positive toward the source material and the fandom than the press for ROTS?
The local paper had a warm glowing story about kids in the hospital getting their copies of DH, a front-page story about eager fans raiding the bookstores at midnight, and very positive reviews of both the book and the movie OotP. They were certainly wild about Harry. The stories that appeared in the local paper for ROTS were by and large skeptical of the movie, gave it terrible reviews (I even wrote to the paper at one point), and certainly didn't have warm, fuzzy views of the fandom. Maybe these reporters live in mortal fear that their kids will put them in the 60 Minutes nursing home one day if they're too harsh on HP. In any case, the stories I've seen online and in other sources have been almost uniformly positive. It does compare in a lot of ways with the very positive press the OT got back in the day, although it did start to sour a little bit with TESB and ROTJ.
I'm not saying HP deserves a public scouring nor do I mean that nobody has ever written anything negative about the young wizard and friends. I've seen a meh review of OotP and another article knocking Rowling's writing skills. It's not to say nobody wrote anything positive about SW recently; Celebration IV and Celebration Europe got mostly good press as far as I can tell.
But there's a clear distinction between the way few sources have mentioned HP's merchandising while everybody took notice of SW's merchandising (and not in an entirely positive way) or that HP is this magical tale encouraging a generation of youth to read while SW singlehandedly ruined movies.
I'm leaving comments open but I'm screening them.
