A Reboot of Harry Potter: The Forbidden Journey

JK Rowling has done the unthinkable. Am I referring to her obvious admission that a man can't become a woman and a woman can't become a man? Nope. Everybody already knows that whether they like it or not. What I'm talking about is her decision to reboot her Harry Pottery film franchise into a TV show. It's happening fast. Production is set to begin in August of this year and the cast has already been hired.

The casting of Severus Snape's character is causing a bit of an uproar, since Papa Essiedu (who is black) has been chosen to play the part. Interestingly enough, this doesn't create the same problem that we see in the Rings of Power. In the Tolkien films, all characters were fair-skinned. However, a decade after the Hobbit prequels came the Rings of Power TV series and it featured several black characters who popped up out of nowhere. Unless there was some kind of racist purge (was Saruon a Nazi?), there seems to be no explanation to what happened to them in the films.

This is the closet thing to Harry Potter pic that we could come up with.

On the the other hand, black characters already existed in the Harry Potter films. Presumably, JK Rowling was already aware that people of different skin colors existed when she wrote the Harry Potter books, but she still decided to describe Snape with pale skin and long black hair, which means Paapa is going to need to invest in a lot of hair straightener. He'll also need to purchase a multitude of Hostess powdered donuts to complete the white-face transformation. Why not? They found a way to make the Wicked actress green. Or perhaps I'm just too cynical. Perhaps Paapa is just good at what he does. Maybe he's such a great actor that he can make us forget that he's not white. Now that would be worthy of an Oscar.

The real question is do we really need this show to happen? After all, the Harry Potter books sold 600 millions copes and the series is the greatest-selling of all time. The eight movies in the film series (let's pretend the Fantastic Beast movies never happened) grossed over 7 billion dollars worldwide. Every year, the Wizarding World at Universal in Orlando brings in millions of tickets and Harry Potter merchandise sells in the millions as well, not to mention Hogwarts Legacy selling 2 billion dollars worth of games.

Isn't that enough? We already know what Harry Potter looks like in live action. Do we really need to see a drawn-out soap opera version with shoddy, AI special effects? While we are at it, why don't we just reboot the Wizarding World at Orlando into a carnival and turn the Forbidden Journey ride into a tilt-o-whirl? At least then JK Rowling will have an excuse for making us puke. Vendors can sell Busch Lite Butter Beer and Quidditch can be played on tractors instead of broomsticks Or if we are really lucky, the JK in Rowling's name will be revealed and we'll realize that we were all just victims of one big joke.