Saturday's launch of J.K. Rowling's Pottermore, the new website about all things Harry Potter, comes after an extended test drive. Some see crass commercialism. Others see 'amazing' world.
Spoiler alert. If you?re not a Harry Potter fan, run!
Skip to next paragraphPottermore.com launches Saturday, and if you don?t already know what that is, run! (It?s evidence that so far, you?ve escaped Pottermania and don?t want to get sucked down the drain of more to come.)
More likely you do know, and all you want to see is exactly how this ?unique online reading experience from J.K. Rowling? will allow you to study her characters' backstories more deeply, including those of Dumbledore, Professor Minerva McGonagle, and Hogwarts Castle itself. In her own YouTube video, Ms. Rowling promises to tell fans all the information she has "been hording all these years,? in this, her response to the hundreds of fan letters she says she still gets every week.
Now that Pottermore.com has been fine-tuned over 2-1/2 months ? with the help of 1 million specially-selected fans, seeing what they like and what they don't ? its unveiling promises avenues for fans of all ages to interact, blog, suggest story lines, play video games, and more.
?They?d been pumping this up for months as this ?amazing, online, digital, interactive experience,' and we were all scratching our heads, ?What does that mean?? ? says Amy Shook of the Harry Potter Alliance, a not-for-profit organization that tries to engage young people in activism using the stories in the Harry Potter books as a model. Now, as one of the 1 million who've explored the new site, Ms. Shook affirms, perhaps unsurprisingly, ?It is amazing and really neat.?
Shook and other fans, as well as moviemakers, marketers, literature mavens, English teachers, sociologists, and academics, are also asking the harder questions: With all that is going on in the world, will this be the tool that Rowling hopes it will be? Will it be new and different, or just another niche universe for the rabid Harry Potter fan?
Or, perhaps most momentously, is this the moment from ?Puff the Magic Dragon? in which Jackie Paper moves on and grows up? (?Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys?.?)
Their answers show Pottermore to be a media/marketing/movie/literature event that has the potential to be a social Rorschach test for years to come.
?This is a far different situation than when Jackie Paper moved on,? says Robert Thompson, founder of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York. Because 14 years elapsed between Rowling?s first Harry Potter book (June 30, 1997) and the last movie this year, many young fans had never experienced a time when there were no forthcoming Potter books or movies.
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