With Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe making the cover story of Out magazine, I’d be thinking about Harry even if I wasn’t in the middle of reading the series with my son and playing the new Lego Harry Potter Wii game. (And I’m not the only queer parent to be doing so, as Paige Schilt’s post at Bilerico proves.)
The best Harry news I’ve heard recently, however, is that the Lego Harry Potter sets coming out in October will include a minifig of Madam Hooch, the broomstick-flying instructor and Quidditch referee. (Image here; right-hand side of third row.) She’s an athletic coach with spiky short hair, played to perfection by Zoë Wanamaker in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. Granted, Madam Hooch’s sexual orientation is unknown, unlike that of Albus Dumbledore (whom author J.K. Rowling outed in 2007). And having short hair and being athletic is no guarantee of being a lesbian, of course, as Elena Kagan has taught us. But if Wanamaker’s portrayal doesn’t remind you of the gym teacher you had a crush on in eighth grade, then you weren’t paying attention to either the movie or eighth-grade gym class.
Now I just have to convince Helen to buy me the Lego Quidditch stadium for the holidays. (And I’m sure Santa will get our son a Lego HP set, too.)
Who else is looking forward to the release of Deathly Hallows in November? Anyone else have kids reading the books (with or without you)? Am I the only one ridiculously excited about the Lego/HP combination?
What an awesome looking lego/Madame Hooch figure. I can’t say we’re very into the Legos and my son isn’t into Harry Potter yet. We started to read the 1st book but he was too upset about the way the Dursleys treat Harry to go on (and that was before learning anything of Voldemort).
I absolutely can’t wait for the release of the next two movies as I love book 7. At the same time, I’m concerned about all the information they left out of movie 6 about the Horcruxes. Given that book 7 is really about two things: searching for the Horcruxes and searching for the Deathly Hallows – it will be pretty hard to do if they don’t know much about the horcruxes yet.
Still, I’m cautiously optimistic and excited.
We’re still on Duplos (the big Legos) and the most evil thing in our bedtime stories is the Big Bad Wolf. But my partner and I will set up a date night to see the Harry Potter movie ourselves. Actually, I think we owe ourselves date nights for movies 5 through 7 :-)
I’ve been leery of the more advanced Lego sets because some of them look like they’re designed to build one thing only, and then what do you do, especially after Mama vacuums up that one special funny-shaped brick? So the action figures seem like they would add flexibility and make things more fun.
Oh, I agree–many of the Lego sets lately have gone down the “very specific item” building path, and the parts are way too specialized. Seems like a lot of kids end up taking them all apart and mixing the parts together in a box anyway, though, so maybe the end result is the same. Some of the “Creator” and “Education” sets seem more flexible to begin with, however.
I like the Madame Hooch figure, and she does remind me of a certain teacher I had (ah, 9th grade English….) But the Lego figure that really made me laugh was “Harry with Cloak.” Looks more like “Harry with Full Bridal Veil.” I guess a pair of disembodied feet to represent invisibility would have been too creepy.
My son and I both enjoyed the books, but after movie #4, he decided they were too scary to watch on the big screen. So the last two he waited to see until they were out on video, and will probably do the same with the next one. He’s old enough to have read the last few books as they came out, and was beyond eager waiting for those. But the movies just haven’t grabbed him as much.
Yes, I’m wondering at what point the series will get too scary for my son. I think the movies/DVDs are scarier than the books, and I’m trying to stick with a “book before movie” rule, so I’m guessing we may pause both for a while after Book 3. (I’m still reading them to him at this point.) But he has enjoyed the Sorcerer’s Stone movie quite a bit, and is now fond of quoting lines from it in rather a good English accent. Cracks me up.
I think we need to book a sitter now for November 19, though, so Helen and I can go see Deathly Hallows when it comes out.