Harry Potter: World Wide Attraction!

As a last hooray for our management class, we all decided to go on a Harry Potter Studio Tour.  It was amazing to see so many behind the scene things from the movies.  One of the workers on the tour said that the majority of the items, either small or big, were in the films themselves.  Talk about clever recycling by the studio.  Several of us went and did green screen shots of us riding in the Weasley family flying car and on broom sticks, though not many actually bought the pictures.    After seeing all the inanimate/ still-life props there was an open area where they had Sirius’ motorcycle with side car, a Butterbeer stand (not real beer, more like cream soda), the Nightbus, # 4 Privet Drive, Potter Cottage, and Hogwarts Bridge (which you could walk across!).  After that were the living props, creepy yet cool.  Then there was the art and scale models, and after that a walk down Diagon Alley.  To finish the tour you got to walk around a large scale model of Hogwarts and then through a wand shop with the names of every person who was a part of the film on a box (I found J.K. Rowling’s pretty easily).  You end up in the gift shop at the end where you send a lot of time and money getting things.  Personally I got a scarf, a pin for a friend, and a book called “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” and spent a large amount of money, so worth it.

Now it may seem like the great icon of Harry Potter is just that, an icon meant for one nation to capitalize on.  But it is so much more.  It started as a book in Scotland that no one thought would explode to the size it is today.  While on the tour I saw people who were from all over the world there.  Old, young, couples, families, school trips; I’m pretty sure just about every type of person you could think of that likes Harry Potter was there.  Harry Potter is so much more than a book about a young wizard saving the world; it’s a book that brings people from all over the world together through just the connections of loving that heroic young man.  I bet if there is one thing that the far off future will remember is that Harry Potter was a book the took the world by storm and became an icon, not just for a country, but for a generation of people found across the globe.  Talk about a real victory of overcoming social boundaries.