It’s the ultimate showdown between worlds, as The Racka Racka’s amazing fan-made FX video pits characters from the Star Wars and Harry Potter universes against each other.

If you’re a geek, this may be the best thing you see all day.

Pause the SCIFI.radio music stream while you watch this. There’s a lot of clever dialog in this, and you’ll want to catch everything – maybe even replay bits of it here and there, because there’s a lot to unpack.

Danny & Michael Philippou describe themselves as “wannabe film makers on a rampage”. There’s nothing wannabe about what these two are creating. It’s true, the short films they make are little more than excuses to do cool visual effects shots, but they have gotten really really good at making them.

Note that starting at about 04:55, the whole thing becomes an ad pitch for a commercial tutorial site called SkillShare, and in the about section for the video is a link that gets you two free months of this premium service. This is how the film makers are making their money (it has to come from somewhere).

There is so much going on in this video that it’s hard to keep track of it all. Highlights to watch for are:

  • Ron Weasley and a very convincing flying car
  • Darth Maul getting sliced in half by his own twin-ended light saber (which points to one of those big “now that I think about it” things in Star Wars where we can’t figure out why he hadn’t actually done this to himself in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace)
  • A TIE fighter coming up close in Harry Potter’s rear view mirror
  • A Baselisk being taken out by a Star Wars chicken walker
  • A love scene between Dumbledore and Voldemort
  • Chewbacca humping Han Solo’s leg
  • Pikachu costume electrocuting somebody
  • Voldemort’s immortal line: “Harry Potter, come for pie”
  • A completely gratuitous shot of Chewbacca chasing after a girl in a very skimpy “sexy Sorting Hat” costume
  • An amazingly well done TIE fighter crash scene
  • An equally amazing scene where Harry’s car falls out of the sky to land on another car, almost killing Harry – but what’s even more amazing is that the two cars, one smooshed on top of the other, remain as elements in the next shot where he’s running away from it even as the camera follows Harry, which means the models of the two crashed cars are being camera tracked and composited into place.

This video is really little more than an excuse to string together as many cool effects as possible. It’s really telling that these two guys, with no formal training in visual effects or animation, were able to pull off all these very convincing visuals, even to the point of rivalling or even exceeding the effects in some of the professional films we’ve seen.

By the way, this isn’t the first Harry Potter vs Star Wars video the Philippou brothers has made. Here’s first one:

What the Philippou brothers accomplish is nothing short of amazing. They have bright futures ahead of them in film making and visual effects if they choose to go pro and pursue this as a profession. Their YouTube channel, founded in 2013, already has nearly six million subscribers and has racked up an amazing 875 million views, and they’re probably doing quite well just on the advertising revenue from that.

What will they make next? We can hardly wait to find out.

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SCIFI Radio Staff
SCIFI Radio Staff

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