Wizard People, Dear Reader

Wizard People, Dear Reader, released in 2004, is an unauthorized, alternative soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, written by Brad Neely, a comic book artist from Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Wizard People, Dear Reader is a narrative retelling of the lives of the characters of The Sorcerer's Stone and the world in which they live. Presented in the form of a thirty-five chapter audiobook, this soundtrack is intended to replace the film's audio track.

Brad Neely, in an interview with Chief magazine, described the beginning of the idea as follows:

Anyway, we were at a bar and were getting a good laugh at a guy who was playing pool all by himself while wearing a hoody over his hat, sunglasses under that and headphones on the outside of all of it. So we started riffing on "What could he possibly be listening to?". Someone who I don't think was me said that he was listening to a book on tape of Harry Potter. And out came the Wizard People narrator. I joked that night that I was going to rush home and record an entire misinformed book on tape of The Sorcerer's Stone, because I had not and have not ever read any Harry Potter books. Once I started making notes for it I realized that an audio track alone could get boring, so I decided to sync it with the movie. Then I took a week or two and made the damn thing. I love it.

In 2004, the New York Underground Film Festival rented a print of the film from Warner Bros., screened it with the sound off, and played Neely's soundtrack instead. Shortly thereafter, website Illegal Art made Neely's work available for free download. In the following year, Neely also performed Wizard People live in several cities, until Warner Bros. took action against theatres that had rented prints, and forced them to cancel the shows. Rather than taking legal action, however, Warner Bros. reportedly told theaters which had scheduled a performance of the show that further movies produced by the studio would be withheld unless the dates were cancelled, possibly due to the protection allowed for by parody laws.Carrie McLaren, whose website Illegal-art.net promoted the work, claimed that Neely's use of appropriated plot, characters and themes interlaced with humor constituted a separate work of art in its own right.

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