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If you were an internet kid circa 2009, you are probably familiar with A Very Potter Musical. The student-made musical parody, which came out at the height of Pottermania, became an early viral hit and rocketed star Darren Criss to fame.

So when Popverse video producer Veronica Valencia (and musical theater nerd) got to chat with Criss at C2E2 '24, she asked if the same magic (heh) could be captured again.

"It's hard," said the Glee and StarKid leading man, "because the paradigm like of being mainstream or having any sort of accessibility moves so much faster than the rate of content creation, that it's kind of hard to say what would happen. Anything that's a 'lightning in a bottom moment,' if you can use that as comparative image, the lightning happens so fast that the bottle has to be in a specific place that if it was moved a centimeter to the right, it wouldn't have gone in the bottle."

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"Like if the Beatles came out 5 years later," he continued, "and they weren't the boys they were from a certain class from a certain part of the world... There are so many things that happen in culture that are completely predicated upon a specific amount of circumstances."

Indeed, A Very Potter Musical was quite particular lightning in a quite particular bottle, as any fan of the YouTube sensation can attest. So would the weather/glassware conditions be correct for it today? Criss's answer might disappoint you.

"No," Criss concludes, "I don't think there would be any place for something like A Very Potter Musical now, because it would have been conceived different. It wouldn't have even been considered."

It's a bit of a bummer, but Criss has a point. Despite its beloved status in the hearts of many fans, the grand heyday of Harry Potter fandom is, if not over, at least waning. But could the conditions be right for something similar? Could a StarKid musical based on, say, Stranger Things work?

We'll just have to monitor the clouds and make sure we know where our bottles are.

Re-live the majesty of C2E2 with our the C2E2 2024 Main Stage panel videos on-demand, all the major things Popverse found at the Chicago show, and C2E2 2024's best cosplay.