Jessica, we voted in email. Where we support you.
Watched the HP teaser today. I definitely think it would be ok, nay, necessary, for this movie to be PG-13. After all, the books are written on consecutive reading levels. So if you start with 11, IIRC, then GoF is written for 14 year olds. Bring on the dragons, baybee.
Also, am I misremembering, but wasn't Cedric black? And is he not now?
Cedric? I don't remember.
Wikipedia says that Cedric has dark hair and gray eyes and his father -- brown hair.
Nothing about hair texture or skin color.
[link]
It caught my memory because I remember someone being referred to as "Black", and it jarred me until I remembered that you can't really be "African-American" if you were born in England. I thought it was Cedric, but I could be misremembering. Will have to check my copy when I get home later. (Unless someone beats me to it.)
There is somebody on the Gryffindor Quidditch team who is black. I can't remember his name.
I think he is Harry's year!
This is from wikipedia:
Dean Thomas is a black male who is taller than Ron and was sorted into Gryffindor house; he is good at drawing and forging signatures. He shares his dormitory at Hogwarts with Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom and Seamus Finnigan.
Dean comes from a Muggle family which is evidenced by him being a fan of the football team West Ham United and using the word "cool" a lot. Dean was raised by his mother and stepfather, because his original father left the family when he was young. Dean was raised with a number of half-brothers and sisters. When Dean got the letter inviting him to Hogwarts, his mother wondered if his father had been a wizard. The truth, which they never discovered, is that Dean's father was killed by Death Eaters when he refused to join them.
(Bold-face mine.)
I don't remember that bit.
That's because it was never in the books. At JK Rowling's website, she has a section called Extra Stuff, and there's random things there that got cut, never made it, etc. Dean's story is there. And if you see it in the Sun, it's so.
Sorry about no direct link... it's a popup kind of website.
Isn't Angelina Johnson (on the Gryffindor team) black, too? I think she is in the movies, and I'm pretty sure Rowling mentions her hair being cornrowed at one point in the books. She was Fred's date to the Yule Ball in Gof, IIRC.
I'm wondering if they cast that new Gryffindor student in PoA as a semi-replacement for the actor who played Dean. Dean was still there (at least he was in the first-night-back scene with the joke candy) but he got hardly any lines at all. Actually, the directors have been pretty inconsistent with the class size throughout all the films. There are only eight Gryffindors in Harry's year (Dean, Seamus, Neville, Ron, Harry, Hermione, Lavender, and Parvati), but the films fill up the classes with a few dozen Gryffindors onscreen.
Of course, Ray kicked my crippled ass up and down the street because a lot of the things were relatable...including some eerie synchronicity with a conversation with Hec.And Bunk Moreland was in it(Y'all might be able to look him up as "Wendell Pierce")