Potter Puppet Pals
Snape, Snape, Severus Snape. If your brain just added the next line, you were on YouTube in 2007. Neil Cicierega's felt-puppet Hogwarts reduced the wizarding world to bickering hand puppets — and produced one of early YouTube's most-watched videos ever.
Potter Puppet Pals began on September 27, 2003, as Flash animation posted to Newgrounds by Neil Cicierega — the internet polymath also responsible for animutation, the band Lemon Demon, and "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny." Made with his sister Emmy Cicierega and Alora Lanzillotta, the series reimagined Harry Potter as a squabbling daycare: a hyperactive, self-adoring Harry, a meek Ron, an exasperated Hermione, a melodramatic Voldemort, and a thoroughly batty Dumbledore.
In September 2006 the series jumped to YouTube as live-action felt puppetry, and on March 23, 2007, it uploaded its masterpiece. "The Mysterious Ticking Noise" is one joke executed perfectly: the cast builds a percussive chant out of their own names — "Snape, Snape, Severus Snape" — over a metronomic tick whose source is the punchline. The video won the comedy category at the 2008 YouTube Awards with over sixty percent of the vote, and by the start of 2013 it had racked up more than 137 million views, at that point the 22nd most-viewed video in YouTube history. For the Harry Potter generation the chant became a shibboleth, recited in school hallways with the reliability of a knock-knock joke.
New episodes kept arriving for years afterward, but the ticking noise is the monument: a homemade puppet show, made by siblings, that out-traveled almost everything the era's studios put online.
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