[Hat Tip to Sad-Ad-9273 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for these screen catches!]

Nick and John got together to discuss three HogwartsProfessor posts about the All New Hogwarts House Emblems and Rowling’s commentary via three emojis about the recent trailer for the Bronte Studios adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. 

• HBO+ Harry Potter Roll-Out is Heavy with Traditional Symbolism

[Hat Tip to LightAngel452 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for the brilliant graphic! LightAngel also picked up on the alchemical symbols.]

You can read those three posts, the subject of their conversation, via these links:

• The HBO+ Potter Trailer: The Meaning of Rowling’s Heart, Owl, and Lightning Bolt
• HBO’s Harry Potter and the Alchemical Symbols
• The New Hogwarts House Emblems and Their Alchemical and Plant Symbolism

Or you can just jump right into the conversation via the questions, notes and links to be found at the Substack page!

Just want to know what they discovered?

Rowling, Inc., is of course following a professional marketing pathway to foster interest, anticipation, even excitement among Harry Potter fans around the world. The Bread Crumbs they are dropping in the Forbidden Forest to draw us in include Rowling tweets, HBO+ trailers, and feature events in all of which we get something like contact with the new Hogwarts as imagined by Bronte Studios and HBO+.

What Nick and John found and explore at some depth is the quality of these glimpses and what they suggest is Team Rowling’s intention and priority in these adaptations done fully under auctorial control as compared with the Warner Brothers film adaptations of yesteryear. To their delight, the three emojis Rowling deployed and the four new Hogwarts House emblems are rich with traditional symbols.

Have a listen for what they discovered and what it means for the second wave of Potter Mania!

Yesterday, Rowling tweeted the new trailer for the HBO+ Bronte Studios adaptation of the Harry Potter novels for television. She included a heart emoji, an owl, and a lightning bolt as her only commentary. Nick Jeffery will be sharing his thoughts about the new Hogwarts coat of arms and four House heraldry recently posted (lots of alchemy, I’m told) at the HogwartsProfessor Substack site tomorrow.

I just wanted to put up this brief comment today that the heart can mean Rowling is pleased with the trailer, the owl can just be a reference to Hedwig or that this is an important message for you straight from the Hogwarts owlery, and the flash of lightning could just be a signature of The Boy Who Lived, whose facial scar is in the shape of a jagged line.

I think they’re all those things, but, as with ‘Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweek,’ there’s a lot beneath what Rowling offers as throw-aways that you can see by taking a second longer look.

The Heart to Rowling is a lot more than a token of sentiment. It is a Golden Thread in her work that the Heart is a pulsing symbol of the human spiritual capacity. Only the Eye does as much heavy freight of meaning lifting in her work and I think the Heart surpasses the Eye ultimately in importance except insomuch as she elides their meaning. Read  The Heart is Not About Emotions and Affection but the Human Spiritual Center for discussion of the symbolism and the Golden Thread.

The Owl, too, is an ancient and dynamic symbol, the reason frankly there is a Hedwig rather than Hedwig being the meaning of the token. Rowling clearly draws on her experience of owls in Greek mythology (and reading of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad drawing on the same source) in making the owl the vessel of communication and supernatural perception in her Wizarding World. None of the letters written by her witches and wizards need to be addressed because an owl is so attuned to everyone and everything that it is able effortlessly to understand where it needs to go, God’s own GPS. What is usually described as a symbol of Wisdom is clearly much more a revelation of a mind able to grasp the great interconnectedness of things which in turns takes us back to the Eye and the Heart — and what Rowling is trying to bring to readers in her transformative literature. (Contrast this Greek mythology symbolism with what owls represent in Christian scripture; quite the gulf between Athens and Jerusalem there!)

And the Lightning Bolt? The forehead scar, the mark of Orestes, the Greek hero who avenged his father’s betrayal and murder, is another polyvalent and profoundly spiritual cipher as a lightning bolt. In it simultaneously the reader experiences simultaneously as we do in a thunder storm albeit imaginatively (1) sudden illumination or enlightenment, (2) from above, the heavens, the super-conscious realm, and, most important, (3) a reorientating shock, a cathartic shaking, the jolting moment that jars us out of our psychological rut and cage to see the world afresh with our ‘eye of the heart.’

Rowling’s three emojis on her tweet about the fun trailer below can be read as fan servicing variations on the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘hand-clapping’ using tokens associated with the books. No doubt about that reading.

I think it as important to note, however, the possibility that Mrs Murray is signaling to the HBO+ audience as well as the international of readers that this adaptation is about trying to reproduce as much as is possible in an iconoclastic medium some replica of the imaginative and transformative experience to be had in the books. The Heart, the Owl, and the Lightning Bolt all point to that experience and depth of meaning.

Cheers!

On 25 March, HBO+ released their trailer for the teevee adaptation of the Harry Potter novels in conjunction with J. K. Rowling’s Bronte Studios and with the author as an Executive Producer. Within hours, the Super Carlin Brothers had a ‘scene by scene breakdown’ of the very brief trailer up on YouTube for their 2.3 million subscribers to enjoy.

Is there anything a Rowling Reader and Potter-phile has to know in this pains-taking guide? Maybe not — but it sure was fun ‘seeing’ all the detail in each scene, details that only stop-action examination under a microscope reveals. The camp Carlin Brothers schtick gets old fast, but his enthusiasm and love of the books radiates off the man. Delightful.

Which is not to mention his great vintage silk jacket that the Gryffindor baseball team’s relief pitcher would have worn in the 50s as he walked to the mound from the outfield bullpen.

What has me excited about this video is what it reflects about the Harry Potter fandom’s excitement about this new adaptation.

If the Super Carlin Brothers first video is any indication, we’re right back in the era of Potter Mania, midnight book releases, and CinePlex madness. No comments about the radioactive author’s supposed ‘transphobic’ beliefs (on a day when she is both doing a victory lap on twixter after the IOC decision to preserve women’s sports as well as cursing those who cursed her and bent the knee in 2024). No calls for a boycott because Rowling is “literally killing people.” Nothing but the joy of re-entering a beloved story in a new medium and a fresh, closer-to-the-books perspective.

Expect nine months of this kind of fandom enthusiasm with the released-at-Christmas due date causing the largest of all Advent Calendar rolling on for nine months (with the inevitable priming of the hype-pump by HBO+ in every month).

Will the Kill Joy TRAs and Gender Theory Extremists wave their torches and pitchforks? Count on it.

Will anyone outside of the Old Guard Fandom Gate Keepers care? I doubt it. We certainly won’t.

I’ll be writing a Harry Potter for Grown-Ups: Philosopher’s Stone over at the Substack site which will be sent to Paid Subscribers every month; the real codex and eBook editions will be ready for Die-Hard Generation Hex fans that grew up with the novels and now have children themselves to buy for Christmas, a text with all the things we’ve learned about Rowling since the publication of Deathly Hallows in 2007.

Accio, 25 December!

Here’s another trailer breakdown if you doubt the true fandom is thrilled about the teevee adaptation:

Read the BBC article here. Three notes on the morning of release:

(1) It’s Beautiful. I’m thrilled. It’s been almost a quarter century since the film adaptations were made and it shows in the quality of the production. The Dursley scenes that were cartoonish in the Warner Brothers version of Stone here are haunting, hurtful, borderline horror. I think credit for this greater sensitivity to the text’s weight is due as least as much to the participation of the author and her film company, Bronte Studios, in this adaptation. If the shows are of the same brilliance as this teaser trailer, we are in for a delightful renaissance in Harry Potter fascination and study. Three Cheers!

(2) Note the Day of Release. As a maven on the Moderator Backchannels noted this morning, the trailer has been released on the western Feast Day of the Annunciation and the show will begin its run on Christmas Day. I struggle to think how the producers, marketers, and copyright holder could have signaled any more clearly the Christian content and the intentional transformational artistry of these stories.

(3) The Acting. I confess to being excited about having the faces of Daniel, Emma, and Rupert unfortunately imprinted on my imagination supplanted by the new child actors — and the new Dursleys being properly blonde! It’s only a two minute trailer but the little shown suggests that these child actors and the production’s decision makers might make the film adaptations of yesteryear an embarrassing memory soon.

Please share your first impressions in the comment boxes below!

A Shot by Shot Comparison of the Two Video Adaptations of the First Book