Potter Puppet Pals

Origin¶

Potter Puppet Pals is a Harry Potter parody series created by Neil Cicierega, made with Emmy Cicierega and Alora Lanzillotta. It started as Flash animation on Newgrounds — the first short, “Bothering Snape,” went up on September 27, 2003 — and switched to live puppetry on YouTube from September 26, 2006.

Cicierega was already a fixture of early internet comedy: he is also behind the animated “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny” and the Lemon Demon music project, and later the Mouth Sounds mashup albums. Potter Puppet Pals is his most-watched work by an enormous margin.

The Mysterious Ticking Noise¶

The breakout short was released on March 23, 2007. In it, the puppet cast hunts for the source of a rhythmic ticking, and one by one each character begins chanting their own name in time with it — “Snape… Snape… Severus Snape…” — until Ron, Hermione, Harry and Dumbledore are stacked into a full round. Voldemort appears, joins in, and the song ends abruptly.

The numbers were extraordinary for the period:

• Over 72 million views in its first two years on YouTube.
• The 22nd most-viewed video on YouTube as of January 1, 2013, with more than 137.5 million views.
• Over 150 million views by April 2014.
• Winner of the Comedy category at the 2008 YouTube Awards, taking a reported 61.6% of votes in the category.

Why it worked¶

The short is built like a piece of music rather than a sketch. Each name enters on the beat, layers over the last, and the escalating round makes the whole thing function as a canon — genuinely catchy rather than merely quotable. The abrupt ending then denies the resolution the build-up has promised, which is what makes people replay it.

It also captured the specific comedy of early YouTube: homemade, cheap, unpolished, and confident enough not to explain itself. The puppets are visibly hand-made. Neville Longbottom is a butternut squash on a stick, and Cedric Diggory is a foot with Robert Pattinson’s face drawn on it. That crudeness is the aesthetic, not a limitation.

Reach¶

The chant became a shorthand among Harry Potter fans and general internet users, quoted in comment threads, forum signatures and eventually as a nostalgic touchstone for anyone online in 2007. Recognition reached the source material itself: at the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, actor Alan Rickman — Severus Snape himself — praised the series, and Daniel Radcliffe suggested the film cast should make a live-action version for charity.

Cicierega marked the tenth anniversary with a 4K remake released March 23, 2017, re-shooting the short with the original audio.

Legacy¶

Potter Puppet Pals is one of the defining artefacts of the first wave of YouTube comedy, sitting alongside Charlie the Unicorn, Numa Numa, Badger Badger Badger and Homestar Runner as proof that a single person with cheap tools could out-reach broadcast television. Its lasting contribution is the earworm: nearly two decades on, “Snape, Snape, Severus Snape” remains instantly recognisable to a generation that mostly cannot remember where they first heard it.