Funny Video Imagines Harry Potter as the Villain

Move over, Voldemort, there's a new villain in the wizarding world--and it's none other than Harry Potter.

That's the message of this funny new video from BloodBlitzComedy called "If Harry Potter Was The Villain." Watch the video below to see how things would be different if the boy who lived was actually the boy who lived and then turned evil. It's quite funny, and the last image of Potter is pretty chilling.


The video splices together footage from the various Harry Potter movies and mashes up dialogue to make Harry Potter look like the bad guy. One of my favorite lines comes from Dumbledore, who says: "It is not in the nature of Harry Potter to be forgiving." Of course, that line was originally meant to describe Dementors.

Harry Potter will live on through a spinoff called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the name of an in-universe Hogwarts textbook being adapted by J.K. Rowling for the big-screen. Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne will play the lead role of Newt Scamander in the movie, which recently began shooting.

THE GENIUS OF MR BEAN (AND WHY WE’LL NEVER SEE ANOTHER SHOW LIKE IT)

As is the case with many great British comedy acts, Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean eventually got too big for his boots and didn’t know quite when to hang them up. With his two high-grossing but poorly received spin-off films Bean (1997) and Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007), Atkinson arguably tarnished the legacy of his physical comedy hero and let us all forget just how great Mr Bean was when he first appeared on the small screen.

One can only hope that Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley’s Edina and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous don’t suffer the same fate when their much-anticipated movie is finally released (although some would argue that they already have, given the three latest lacklustre reunion episodes).

But now that it’s been nearly a decade since the last major appearance of Mr Bean, it’s easier to look back at this character’s legacy and acknowledge just how high the high points really were. The full series is available to watch for free on YouTube, if you’re in the mood for some retro fun. It also contains the animated series which, while made primarily for younger audiences, still has a fair bit of charm.

The first ever episode of Mr Bean aired on the first ever day of the 1990s, and became a defining comedy of the decade. The half-hour pilot episode titled simply “Mr Bean” featured three memorable acts, but it was the last that became legendary, in which Bean tries desperately to remain awake in church and sings a hearty ‘hallelujah’. It wasn’t until November 1990 that the second episode aired, and it then took the next five years for the full 14 episodes to be created and broadcast on disparate dates.

Atkinson was, by this point, very well known amongst British audiences for his performances in Blackadder and Not the Nine O’Clock News, but in Mr Bean, he found a genuinely unique character with whom his face would be forever recognised. The character developed over several years with sharply choreographed routines and was inspired by silent film legends and Jacques Tati’s comedic creation Monsieur Hulot.

The series became an international success story, largely because it contains almost no dialogue and the physical comedy translates to practically any cultural context. Atkinson and his co-creator Richard Curtis have never given much hint as to the character’s background, although the opening credits, in which he falls from a shaft of light to the earth, does suggest there’s something alien about this person.

And there’s also something immediately, recognisably British about Mr Bean. Consider the episode where he dines out at a top-drawer restaurant and accidentally orders steak tartare, having no idea what the dish actually is. Then, rather than enduring the slightly awkward moment of returning the dish or simply not eating it, he finds every possible place around the restaurant to hide the uneaten raw beef. While it’s Bean’s childishness and occasional selfishness which provides plenty of laughs, he’s at his funniest when he’s just trying to avoid minor embarrassments and social faux pas.

It seems pretty unlikely that in this day and age any network would give a half hour comedy special (as the first episode of Mr Bean was, essentially), based around an entirely untested character, a primetime slot to see if viewers connected. It seems even more unlikely that a network would then be patient enough to air 14 episodes over five years, most of them months apart.

But the thing which makes a series like Mr Bean seem almost impossible today is its content.

While there have been a few attempts at physical comedy-driven television (Frank Woodley’s recent Woodley bought physical comedy into a new template), a show based entirely around physical comedy seems almost impossible now. The concept of Mr Bean was such a simple one and none of the sketches linked together in any meaningful way; it was just show about a man not made for this world trying his best to find happiness and, more simply, a way to exist. We do laugh at him and his extraordinary solutions to life’s problems, but he also reflects back the social anxieties that so many people hold.

No comedy series has ever matched Mr Bean for sheer simplicity, and I’d be surprised if any series did in the near future. Networks are now searching for shows with, if not a complex plot then at least a complex premise, and that doesn’t necessarily leave a lot of room for a creation like Mr Bean: a comedy icon with a singular goal to endear and entertain.