Harry Potter may be the most famous movie magician to ever pick up a wand and yell something incomprehensible before kicking some serious ass, but he pretty much pales into insignificance compared to some of the other cool and mean muthas who are fond of wearing silly pointed hats and strutting around the silver screen muttering mumbo jumbo.
Admittedly puny Potter may have banished Voldemort to the abyss of no return, but “he who must not be named” always seemed rather camp and peculiarly pathetic when compared with real shit hot spell-casters such as Gandalf and Merlin. Besides Potter’s only magical power seemed to come through his wand, which he was forever waving in people’s faces like a jumped up two-bit bitch with a stolen gun.
It’s time to put Potter properly in his place and compare him with some real bad bastards capable of rustling up some bona fida kick ass elemental magic which would make the likes of Voldermort and Harry boy squeal like two-bit pigs in a cheap suits borrowed from Paul Daniels and David Blaine.
Gandalf
Let’s be honest, you wouldn’t fuck around with Gandalf. He’s one mad, bad, pipe-smoking, hobbit loving hippie terrorist. And what’s more, before he got himself killed by the Balrog and was resurrected as Gandalf the White, he was known as Gandalf the Grey. That’s some serious out of this universe magic right there. J.R.R. Tolkien was rumoured to have got his inspiration for the creation of Gandalf from a German postcard entitled ‘Der Berggeist’ (mountain spirit.)
The postcard depicts a bearded figured in a wide-brimmed hat sitting in a forest beneath a mountain and feeding a fawn. Tolkien referred to Ganalf as an ‘angel incarnate’ in a 1954 letter, and also called him an “Odinic wanderer.” In fact, Gandalf’s habit of disappearing and appearing at the drop of an hat is very similar to the wandering habits of the Norse God Odin who also liked to dress up as an old man and wander the countryside confusing people by talking in riddles and giving them stern looks. Gandalf is often portrayed as a bumbling, foolish old pot-head who doesn’t know the bottom from the top, but is essentially a good-hearted, if slightly eccentric and irritating old fool obsessed with rings. And therein lies the true and secret power of this wayward wizard. Whereas Potter behaves the way he looks - like a plummy public school boy, Gandalf’s appearance is merely an ingenious guise. Although why you’d chose to look like a decrepit Grateful Dead roadie, when you’re in fact over 2,000 years old and capable of magic so fierce and fantastic it could make the earth spin on its axis, is a mystery in itself. Needless to say, in Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy Gandalf comes across as the real deal and could take on Hogwart half-wit Harry Potter and that perfumed ponce Dumbledore with both hands tied behind his back - whilst being completely off his head on a heady mixture of opium and acid and reciting the complete works of William Blake to boot!
Merlin
Best known as King Arthur’s right-hand man, Merlin is as old as the hills. He made his first public appearance in 1136 when Geoffrey of Monmouth came him a mention in Historia Regum Britanniae. Although born of woman, Merlin’s dad was an incubus, which to those who don’t know, are demons that seduce ladies. So being lumbered with those tricky half-mortal, and half-demonic genes, Merlin really had no choice but to opt for a career in wizardry. Merlin has been portrayed in numerous films and TV productions, and nearly all of them are terrible and twee efforts which depict Great Britain’s best sorcerer as a kind of fun-loving homely sort of chap who probably eats Mr Kipling’s cake and watches the Antiques Roadshow. All of them that is apart from John Boorman’s 1981 epic Exalibur. Played with exquisite menace and just a subtle hint of psychopathic campness by Nicol Williamson, the Meriin in this darkly dramatic retelling of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is to put it bluntly, a complete nut-job. When he’s not busy helping Uther Pendragon impregnate an unsuspecting fair lady with the “once and future king of Britain” by summoning up “the breath of the great serpent”, he’s wandering around misty forests looking mean, moody, and magical. Merlin’s eventually seduced and trapped by budding sorceress Helen Mirren, who plays the crazy bitch Morgana. Yet fear not, for the mighty magician’s hysterical tones return later on in the film to inspire Arthur and the boys to some proper old-fashioned carnage of the sort that would turn young Potter’s bowels to liquid quicker than you can say ‘Hocus pocus!’
The Wizard of Oz
Now I know what you’re thinking. The Wizard of Oz is at the end of the day, or film as the case may be, just a ‘smoke and mirrors’ regular kind of guy and not an actual bona fida magical bastard. But it doesn’t really matter because anyone who is wise and cunning enough to make the whole of a crazy dream land filled with green-skinned witches, dancing robots, singing lions, flying monkeys, merry midgets and philosophical scarecrows, think that you’re a great and famous wizard, then you could easily deal with a puny punk like Potter. Right? What makes the Wizard of Oz so dangerous is, like Dorothy, he actually came from Kansas, and flew to the land of mad Munchkins on a hot air balloon. Only difference is the Wizard, or Morgan as he was formerly known, is obviously a con-man par excellence. This shyster of sorcery ends up ruling the Emerald City through the power of sheer illusion, and a few complicated looking mechanical contraptions. This terrible trickster hasn’t got a magic bone in his entire body, but what he does have is self-belief by the bucket. He’s got so much of the stuff it even rubs off on the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, who eventually realise they had a brain, heart and courage all along. The whole film can be viewed as a testament to the power that faith and belief have when it comes to changing both perception and reality. Now compared with half-blood princes and goblets of fire that’s proper magic, and if you got it you can charge through any walls, not just the ones on platform nine and three quarters.
