Ok so my partner and I also have rewatched the Very Potter Musicals. If you haven't heard of these, they are productions that a student run musical group put on at the University of Michigan in the early 2010s. They were super popular when I was in high school and honestly, they hold up really well. You can find them all on YouTube! I'd highly recommend them all.
-A Very Potter Musical: The first one is definitely the best. It has the most iconic music ("Gotta Get Back to Hogwarts") and some really great gags. Ron constantly eating on stage and Malfoy rolling around on the floor are my favorites, but the physical humor with Voldemort strapped to Quirrel's back are incredible too. The decision to start with their second year at Hogwarts I think was an excellent choice, it means that we're already familiar with the world and time doesn't have to be wasted explaining magic and things. Which of course everyone in the audience already knows, I have no idea why you'd watch this is you weren't a Harry Potter fan.
-A Very Potter Sequel: It does have its moments, but it does feel like they were trying to capture the original and do it all again. The music definitely isn't as good, and the decision to go back to their first year does make it pretty obvious that they wanted to include characters that died in the first musical. Having said that, I love the Red Vines gags, and a lot of the technical elements improved with better sets and props. Still worth the watch, but a step down.
-A Very Potter Senior Year: This one was more of a staged reading at Leaky Con years after the other two were made. So technical elements aren't as good, but that isn't the purpose of this one so I'm going to ignore it. Other than the scenes where they clearly lean into the fact that this is never going to be an actual show so they put ridiculous things in the stage directions. The music is much better than the Very Potter Sequel for sure, and it was made my fans so the plot is an interesting statement about the impact of Harry Potter's story more than anything else.
Overall I love how they modify the plot of the books to make these stories. There's aspects of all the books that have been remixed to fit their plot ideas. Additionally the villains are much more sympathetic here. Part of this is that scenes are from their point of view, the books are entirely Harry's perspective. But the result is that there isn't a truly hateful character in the musicals, they're all super fun. Also they have aged really well, I think the writers here were the first to realize that calling a character Cho Chang is SUPER racist. So they have her cast as a girl with a Southern accent.
It's a great watch, I'm glad that we went back to revisit them.
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