Sunday, October 28, 2001
Harry Potter fans can't wait for movie
Big-screen Hogwarts Express arrives Nov. 16
By Margaret A. McGurk
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The title of World's Biggest Harry Potter Fan is still up for grabs. There are just too many contenders. With less than a month before the movie version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone hits theaters (Nov. 16), devotees of J.K. Rowling's boy wizard are wild with anticipation. They're also happy to share the evidence of their attachment to the hero of Ms. Rowling's four blockbuster novels.
Kendra McCombs, 14, a freshman at Jacobs Center in Winton Place, indulged her fascination with a trip to the Public Library downtown on Oct. 20 to join some 30 other youngsters making Harry-themed crafts, including paper wizard hats and ribbon-bedecked wands.
“Harry is different from any ordinary kid,” she explained. “He's more adventuresome.”
Among Harry's friends and foes, Kendra says, she particularly likes young Mr. Potter's classmate Hermione because “she's smart and she's into books, like me.”
One trait common among Harry fans is a determination to be first in line when the movie opens.
Consider 60-year-old Marshall Hacker of Covington, a Cincinnati Gas & Electric retiree who is coming to terms with his disappointment that his wife refuses to give up the couple's symphony tickets for the evening of Nov. 16. “Harry Potter reminds me of Huck Finn in a way, a kid finding where he belongs in a hostile environment,” Mr. Hacker says.
Mr. Hacker was one of dozens who responded when we invited readers to tell us about the biggest Harry Potter fans they know. Read on.
Shane Pullins, a 9-year-old fourth-grader at Bevis Elementary, sounds a near-universal refrain when he says, “I'm gonna be the first person to see it, I hope. They'll probably change it too much, but that's OK with me.”
He, like other Harry fans, infected others with his enthusiasm. In his case, it was his mother. “I told her they were really good books, and she has to travel a lot for her work and she read them while she was traveling,” he says.
Shane is surrounded by reminders of his hero. “I collect the little stones they have, and I have one of those statues of him. I have pillows and a blanket. And the soap dish. And the soap dispenser.” Aside from himself, he says, the biggest Harry Potter fan he knows is “probably my mom. 'Cause she's the one who bought me all the Harry Potter stuff.”
Though only in the third grade at St. Bartholomew Consolidated School, Kevin Burwinkel of Columbia Township coaxed Harry Potter books into the hands of his grandmother and his sister, a senior in high school.
“It was very difficult for her to complete the required reading of King Lear when Harry Potter was calling,” says the siblings' grandmother, Maryann Burwinkel of Norwood.
Total immersion
Harry-mania expresses itself in a dozen different ways.
For example, 11-year-old Allison Baker of Georgetown is making it her mission to read the Harry Potter books to her 8-year-old brother, Anthony Patrick, and cousin Kyle Jodrey, also 8.
Leah Whitman of Cheviot, who is 13 and an eighth-grader at St. Aloysius Gonzaga School, lays claim to supreme fanhood by virtue of her vast Harry collection (books, figurines, games, puzzles, stones, posters, calendar, planner), as well as her pet's name (Hedwig, same as Harry's owl), and especially because, she says, “When I read these books, if someone talks to me, I don't even hear them.”
Then there are the St. Ursula seniors, Anna Strum and Elise Adams, who so love the young wizard that they wore Harry Potter T-shirts for their senior class photos.
Or Allison Hinkel, a 12-year-old who invented her own Harry Potter game along with fellow fanatic Mary Maas, who also threw a Harry Potter party where everyone dressed as characters from the books.
Even the dog
How about the Witte siblings of Upper Price Hill? Hannah, 10; Luke, 8; and Olivia, 6, named their dog Scholar of Gryffindor (nickname Gryffin) after their favorite Hogwarts house. Or Mary Anne Frey of Dent, who spent two weeks with her 9-year-old niece in North Carolina turning an unused junk room into a “Harry Potter haven”?
Lisa Meck, a 16-year-old Potter trivia whiz who attends Talawanda High School in Oxford, turned her obsession to good use by helping to run a mock Hogwarts school for wannabe-wizards ages 8-11 at Hamilton's Lane Library. She decorated all her school supplies with Potter themes, collected covers from European editions and is thinking about dressing in costume to wait in line for a movie ticket come Nov. 16.
She has read all four Potter books repeatedly, because, “The characters are dynamic and fun to read about. I love how the kids always outsmart the grown-ups.”
Big Pig Gig salute
Patricia Allen and Natalie Hellman of Colerain Township and Saleha Ghani and Donna Ostendorf of Green Township are four 18-year-old graduates of Mother of Mercy High School who consider themselves “the most extreme fans we've ever seen,” says Ms. Allen.
Dressed in wizard outfits made by Ms. Hellman, “We will see the movie at the first showing at the first movie theater to show it,” says Ms. Allen.
A lasting testimony to the Harry Potter craze is Hogwarts, a product of last year's Big Pig Gig, sponsored by Rumpke Consolidated Cos. The firm is a Business in Education Partner to Pleasant Run Middle School in the Northwest School District, and it asked students there to choose a name and theme.
Eighth-grader Liz DuQuette came up with the winning name, and honors art students painted the pig statue, now permanently ensconced in a pen near Rumpke headquarters on Hughes Road in Colerain Township.
Will movie go by the book?
Sixth-grader Daniel Toberman, 11, is a Harry fan who, like most of his classmates at Sacred Heart Elementary in Fairfield, got hooked in school. “Our teacher (in third grade) read it first. Every day at the end of the day, if we were good, we would sit down and she would read Harry Potter.”
Daniel's relatives are similarly hooked. “My grandma is a really, really, really big fan of Harry Potter. For Halloween last year she dressed up as one of the professors.”
Aside from himself, Daniel names classmate Paul Gruenbacher as the leading fan. “The fourth book that was out, he read that in about 2 1/2 days, because he really, really likes reading”.
Paul, naturally, says he can't wait for the movie to come out. “I'm just wondering how long it's going to be, because there's so much in the book.”
Paul also considered a Halloween costume, but discarded the idea. “I thought of wearing a Harry Potter costume,” he says, “because I've got the black hair like him and I've got glasses and stuff. But I thought I might look a little goofy in it.”
He predicts the movie will be a huge hit. “No one doesn't like Harry Potter.”
Allyson Dierker, 11, a Sacred Heart sixth-grader, thinks the movie “is going to be really neat,” but based on her study of Web sites and movie previews, she foresees some details will be altered.
“I think there was like a problem with Harry Potter's head. I think his scar should be in the middle of his head, because that's how they describe it in the book. I liked how they had (Headmaster) Dumbledore (Richard Harris) older than in the book; (Professor) McGonagall (Maggie Smith) is way different from the way I pictured her in the book, but it's better. I pictured her small and pretty and with a smaller hat. But it still looks cool.”
Going to sell out
Tyler Styons, 10, a Sacred Heart fifth-grader, also expects the movie to differ from the books.
“It's gonna have mostly all the stuff in the book,” he says. “But you know how in the book it tells how the character might be thinking in their head? The movie won't have that.”
Ashley Dean, 11, also in sixth grade at Sacred Heart, worries that “I'm never going to get to see it because it's going to be sold out, and when it comes out on video everyone's going to buy it and it will fly out of the doors.”
She feels a special affinity for Ms. Rowling. “My dad is from England. He's from the land of the lady who wrote the books. I think that's cool. ... As long as she keeps writing books I don't think anybody is going to get sick of it.”
Ashley's tactic for recruiting new Harry readers? She says, “You haven't read Harry Potter yet?! You have to read this!”
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