Video Review: Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart

This entry by guest blogger Jette Kernion. Jette is a film journalist (and a fan of the Harry Potter series). She blogs about the Austin film scene at Slackerwood.

I write about movies a lot, so I watch plenty of trailers online. With the fifth Harry Potter movie out in theaters and the last book in the series about to be available, I thought I should refresh my memory by watching some of the Harry Potter trailers. I ran across a trailer on YouTube for "Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart," a title I hadn't heard of—had I missed something? And the Dark Lord ... why is his hood concealing a big yellow smiley face?

It turns out that Wal-Mart Watch has created a fun spoof of the Harry Potter movie trailers to promote their new site, WaldeMartWatch.com. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are fighting a new nemesis, the evil Lord WaldeMart, who plans to replace Hogwarts with a gigantic—well, I don't have to tell you which big-box store, do I? The teens have to fight to save all of the small independently owned shops in nearby Hogsmeade. Evil Waldemart discriminates against giants, enslaves house elves, and yet still manages to have support from the Ministry of Magic, the wizard world's government entity. Does any of this sound familiar?

A comedy group called The Late Night Players does a good job in twisting some of the well-known scenes and quotes from the latest Harry Potter film in amusing ways, although their Hermione is a bit scary. The video is meant to encourage you not to buy your copy of the latest Harry Potter book, or any related merchandise, at Wal-Mart. Here in Austin, independent store BookPeople has actually sold out of all of its copies of the book for the midnight release party, but the store's website says they should have more books available Saturday afternoon.