This was really good. Nicely balanced between fan nerdery and film analysis.

Very nice timing, was just wondering when you guys were going to tackle the Potter films.

Before I listen, I will say, I'm a bit o fa defender of this one. I know some don't like Columbus' Potter films, but I like the intro to the characters.

Whimsy is a good word for it I guess.

Because the publishers assumed that American kids would be too dumb to understand what a "Philosopher" was.

I thought it was because Philosopher has a different definition in America than in Britain. In Britain it means essentially "wizard," while in America it more means "guy who thinks about stuff for a living" and would invoke images of Socrates or Plato rather than Merlin.

With all due respect Redxavier, we don't have to justify our renaming of a book title to anyone that spells color with a "u".  Just be happy the Dursleys weren't renamed the Thompsons and relocated to Ohio.

I'm not sure if it has a different definition -- Jimmy says no -- but the second part is the important bit. The publishers wanted to make sure the potential readership knew, from the title, that the book was about wizards and not philosophers. Both for the sake of more accurate representation of the content, and also because American culture has a strong anti-intellectual streak and they wouldn't be interested in a book about faggy Greek brainiacs.

I got into HP in a roundabout kind of way.  I saw HP&TSS when I was stationed in Germany, just because I had heard it was kind of a big deal, and it was the only thing showing that week at the base theater.  I liked it well enough, but I don't think I realized there were a series of books at the time.  Then the teaser poster for Chamber of Secrets came out:

My sister had read the books, so I asked her "Who the heck is this Dobby?" "Dobby's a house elf." "What's a house elf?" "Just read the books."

So I did, which brings us to today.

Oh, and if anyone's interested in the MST3K type thing Teague, Brian and Chris did for this movie back in the Geekza days, you can get it here.

Enjoy!

Yeah, but I think we did it wrong.

We would watch the movie from the beginning, get up to a certain point, stop, and then when resuming, start from the beginning. As a result, we've seen the first five minutes of Harry Potter like 15 times.

I think we did Tron the same way, we just muscled through that one.

But I don't think they start and stop as much as we did and don't reset to the beginning each time they do. They watch it start to finish a few times, where as we watched the beginning of Harry Potter (and Tron) no less than 10 times and the end quite a bit less.

He founded it, to my knowledge.

WHAT?! Chris Hanel is Disembaudio?! Are you fucking my mind on purpose Matt????!?!??!??! Does it feel good???!?!??! Now I'll get brain-pregnant!!!!

On a side note, this commentary needs some Levelator. Trey and Michael are mixed way lower than Anthony and Teague. It's hard to listen to.

And I'm listening for two now that Matt has gotten me brain-pregnant.