I’ve been a huge fan of Potter Puppet Pals since the first Flash animated shorts came out, so originally I was totally stoked to be writing about Neil Cicierega’s video homage to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. But then I re-watched The Mysterious Ticking Noise, and I started cursing this assignment — because the song was instantly stuck in my head.
The PPP series started out as Flash animations, but these were too time-consuming, leading creator Neil Cicierega to film actual puppets of the Harry Potter characters performing on a stage similar to that in the Flash shorts. The Mysterious Ticking Noise stars hand puppets that look vaguely like Harry, Ron, Hermione, Dumbledore, Snape and Voldemort, and has a thin plot: Snape investigates a strange ticking noise, and starts to sing along with the ticking — until the other characters join in.
The silliness of the video and catchiness of the song make this short irresistible — no wonder it’s been viewed over 42 million views on YouTube, is the #2 Most Discussed Comedy of All Time on YouTube, and is #3 Most Viewed Comedy of All Time. It also won the 2007 YouTube Award for Comedy — not bad for a song with lyrics made up entirely of names repeated over and over again.
The Star Wars and Star Trek franchises have both had fan films that climbed to viral popularity; the time for the Harry Potter franchise to reach similar heights was long overdue. The Mysterious Ticking Noise takes a familiar franchise and adds super-catchy music and super-simple lyrics, guaranteed to get a song stuck in your mind and make a hit. Actually now that I think about it, maybe I should have put a warning at the beginning of this article…
“Snape. Snape. Severus Snape…”
“Dumbledore!”
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