Pop culture fanatics were perturbed after a college student tweeted that he overheard a conversation that the character of Dumbledore was from Lord of the Rings. Oh, the ignorance!
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Sure, the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books may share the same literary genre, but any similarities between the two worlds end there. However, not everybody is cognizant of the fact that Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore is a fictional character from the universally beloved Harry Potter series and not from Lord of the Rings.
"ChristianCollegeKid" tweeted "I just overheard someone walking by say, 'yeah, Dumbledore. From Lord of the Rings.' And now I’m going to be mad for the rest of the day."
The root of the confusion could lie in who portrayed Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films.
Irish actor Richard Harris played the headmaster of the wizarding school of Hogwarts in the first two Potter movies: the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), until his unexpected death in 2002 at the age of 72. The Dumbledore torch was passed on to actor Michael Gambon, who played the Hogwarts headmaster for the remaining six Potter motion picture films.
Ian McKellan, who portrayed the character of Gandalf - the wizard and leader of the Fellowship of the Ring and the army of the West from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies - was tapped to succeed Harris in playing Dumbledore. But McKellan refused, citing that Richard Harris would never approve of McKellan.
According to Telegraph, Harris criticized "McKellen, Derek Jacobi, and Kenneth Branagh as 'technically brilliant but passionless.'"
During a special BBC recorded interview on HARDtalk, McKellan said, "I couldn't take over the part from an actor who I know disapproved of me." He added, "When he died, he played Dumbledore the wizard. I played a real wizard."
When HARDtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur asked, "You could have been Dumbledore?" McKellan quipped, "When I see the posters of Mike Gambon, who gloriously played Dumbledore, I think sometimes it's me. We get asked for each other's autographs."
So even though, McKellan did not play Dumbledore, some may have assumed he did. Dumbledore and Gandalf are both exceptional wizards with long white beards and are an authority figure of organizations, but they are dynamically different characters.
Besides, one brandishes a wand while the other holds a stick.
Twitter shared a collective gasp over the confusion.
Someone thought that Dumbledore was something else entirely.
Muggles should know better than to confuse the two different wizards. Dumbledore and Gandalf are not interchangeable.
The rage is real.
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