After a year-long hiatus, Neil Cicierega‘s Potter Puppet Pals series is back. Best known for the “Mysterious Ticking Noise” episode, of which Daniel Radcliffe himself is a fan, Potter Puppet Pals was one of the charter viral video series of the 2000s, beginning with two Newgrounds animations in ’03 and expanding into real-life puppetry in 2006, when it became one of the first videos we remember watching on a then-new video service called YouTube.
Cicierega hasn’t been slacking off since “Snape’s Diary,” the most recent Potter Puppet Pals episode, which aired in July of 2009 (and which managed to rack up an impressive 4 million-plus views): You may remember his delightfully insane BRODYQUEST video from last month, which features Adrian Brody “vibrating in harmony with the universe” as per usual. But with the revival of Potter Puppet Pals, he’s returning to his roots. The brand-new Potter Puppet Pals YouTube channel features three videos uploaded on the 28th (and available in HD!), the first of which is a very special announcement from an oddly self-referential Harry Potter, in which he announces the new channel as a source of “lots of fun adventures” and asks you out on a date:
And then: Ron Weasley writes a letter to “Dear Mr. and Mrs. My Parents,” and Harry Potter just may be a little jealous:
Lastly, Voldemort bother bother bothers Snape, attempting to peer pressure him into growing a mustache:
The Potter Puppet Pals series doesn’t have quite the same topicality it did back in the day when everyone was driving themselves crazy waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to drop and finally finish the series, but with fan anticipation building up for the two movies based on the book to drop and finally finish the movie franchise, Cicierega has picked as good a time as any to reboot Potter Puppet Pals. What we’ve seen so far isn’t in the lofty realm of “Mysterious Ticking Noise” or “Bothering Snape,” but it’s a fine return to a nostalgia-inducing series, and we’re throwing this one into our RSS feeds to see what comes next.
