 What decade is known as the golden era of Bollywood? 90s. 1950s. Close. Josh! Hey, welcome back to our stupid reactions to Gorman and Rick. Let us know if you agree with that. And you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, for more juicy content! So juicy. It's 4,000 characters, juicy. You can write a novel now. Yeah, more room for all of you white supremacist racists to start ranting even more. You know what? Have AI do it for you. They'll be more articulate. Today, we got a video. And this is an interesting. This is why Bollywood's Harry Potter was a box office bomb. Hold on. Are you going to actually? One second. Bollywood had a Harry Potter. Yes. What the hell? Seriously? And they're going to go over it a little bit so it looks like. Wow! We've heard something new every day, kids. I've heard about it and how. You have? Bad it was. Wow. I have not. So let's go in a little into it. It's like, let's see. I cannot wait. Just think of it. Who was involved? Just think about early 2000s Bollywood remaking Harry Potter. Wow. And it's probably worse than you think. I want to see the musical numbers. Is that why, actually? And I want to know who was cat bring this on. Let us know if you've ever seen this. Wow. Here we go. But they didn't make all the films. Weirdly. What would happen if Bollywood, the loud and lavish center of Indian cinema, decided to make their own version of one of the world's most magical franchises? This is the story of the Hindi Harry Potter. While the books might have been best sellers, it was only after the Wizarding World hit the silver screen that Harry Potter skyrocketed into a multimedia mainstay that would eventually rake in billions of dollars. During its original theatrical run, Potter Mania ripped through the world. The movies became instant classics, broke all kinds of box office records, and ruled popular culture. So that by 2003, Harry Potter was at five books and three movies with hype at an all time high. Meanwhile, in India, the movie biz was booming too. Productions were starting to adopt more Hollywood sensibilities, and TV studio Creative Eye Limited wanted to be at the forefront of the industry's next chapter by going digital. Just a few years earlier, George Lucas had pioneered shooting high definition video in lieu of film, and the tech had just arrived overseas. At a time when most Bollywood movies had budgets of well under $1 million, this was a game changer and gave Creative Eye the opportunity to produce a visual extravaganza that could become the country's next big cultural phenomenon. So working with audio visual company JVC, they plan to produce India's first ever 3D movie. No picture James Cameron's avatar. This was the early odds. We're talking old school red and blue movies. Nice. For the first time, India could actually make movies designed for this. Creative Eye figured combining the gimmick with a suitable family friendly story ripped from the west with spell box office gold. They did it in 3D. So they quickly hired a couple of writers, including the auspiciously named J.K. Nirmal. They called it a Hindi version of the Harry Potter story entitled Abracadabra, The School of Magic. The script lifted a ton of elements from the original Potter pictures. A young boy is sent to a spellbinding castle to learn magic. There he befriends two quirky classmates, a shaggy groundskeeper. Is that Anupamkar? That was Anupamkar. The movie featured kooky characters, magic wands, a forbidden forest with creaky spiders. I could go on. Don't even get me started about the invisibility pills. But the movie would also smartly adapt much of this source material for its own culture. Gone were the Britishisms, replaced with a heart unashamedly Hindi. Broomsticks were traded out for magic carpets. Squidditch became basically flying soccer with a flag instead of a ball. The story's spells and enchantments would borrow heavily from Hinduism. The fashion and story themes would maintain the country's cinematic staples. The story also took some unique liberties, like, for instance, instead of a wise and kind-hearted Dumbledore, this school's headmistress would be a straight-up villain out to kill the main character's father. There's a Casper the Friendly Ghost channel companion to replace Hedwig, a random, creepy, Zubat-looking thing. And of course, it wouldn't be Bollywood without the singing and dancing. It is on a punker. Abracadabra was written as a huge production, requiring a massive cast, tons of elaborate costumes, original music with its own choreography, and hundreds of visual effects shots to bring the movie's 3D magic to life. To pull it all off, director Dheeraj Kumar knew the picture would need solid financing, so he turned to a method that Hollywood had spent the past decade on. Product placement. Brand integration in Indian cinema wasn't uncommon, since the mid-60s production studios would occasionally use it to cut costs. Ed Glazier is how the world remade Hollywood, notes that a single brand deal could pay anywhere from five to six figures, and that Coca-Cola paid a whopping $670,000 for placement in the 2001 Bollywood movie memory. But director Kumar didn't want well-known international brands, instead preferring to partner with Tamlin, an Indian stationery company, and Tarle G, which produced Glucose Biscous. Nice. It could be kind of like having an American produced movie featuring Crayola and Nabisco. The pattern with brand integrations is, of course, how to integrate them. The writers needed a way to put the two companies' products into the story without breaking the law. So, how'd they do it? They broke the law. The two companies would feature two sub-plots, each involving Willy Wonka-esque golden ticket hunts, in which both companies would exist in-world and offer scholarships to the School of Magic as prizes. This idea could have come from the fact that Hollywood was in the middle of producing the infamous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reboot at the time. Abracadabra's main character would inexplicably find out both of these golden tickets. It's literally the same side story. Twice. Just different logos. But hey, our hero can pull it off because magic. There are other not-so-subtle ad spots in the movie when fake Harry is getting picked on by school bullies. There's a Popeye's spinach moment where he gains super strength thanks to eating a Parle G biscuit. And while the students are learning to cast spells in class in one particular scene, they're instructed to levitate Camlin-colored pencils. Not to mention that throughout the movie, the brands are constantly featured on screen. Our hero sometimes literally just stopping at a TV to watch a complete commercial. Well, it's all of it too much for most moviegoers. It's hard to fault the director. They've got to pay for those three glasses somehow. With brand deals locked in, the script finished, and a budget of just over a million dollars secured, Abracadabra rolled into production with high expectations. It would feature some of the biggest names in Bollywood, most several big musical numbers, a plot that seemed to have everything that was popular at the time, and a novel viewing format to pique public interest. In short, this was going to be India's big thing. As the movie approached release day, director Kumar launched a new film, as the movie approached release day, director Kumar launched a massive marketing campaign throughout the country. Toys, coloring books, all kinds of merchandise featuring the movie's characters. Creative Eye pulled out all the stops, renting out malls and theaters, setting up publicity booths for cast members. They hung up advertisements in schools, arcades, libraries, all in an effort to keep kids everywhere. For all intents and purposes, Abracadabra was too big to fail. It would almost certainly launch Bollywood's new era of big box office blockbusters, and so certain were the producers of the movie's immediate success that the flicks and credits even promised a sequel. And on December 24th, 2004, Abracadabra, the school of magic, hit theaters. But stunningly, bombed. With a budget of over a million dollars, the movie would need to take the number one spot in India's box office and hold it for several months. But opening weekend, it found the film barely pulling in 75%. Oh, wow. Your mouth was not good. While kids might have enjoyed the movie, parents found most of the characters off-putting. The 3D experience, gimmicky, and annoying to sit through for over two hours. And the shoehorned product placement certainly didn't do the movie any favors, taking the audience completely out of the experience. While having fully rendered and realized animated characters like the friendly ghost were certainly impressive at the time for a Bollywood production, many found the actual performances of said characters annoying. And at times unbearable. Moviegoers also found that the pacing of the first half dragged far too much. No doubt hindered by plotlines designed purely for poorly integrated advertising. And while the choreography and music was enjoyable, the occasionally slapstick and surface-level humor and comedy failed to fully win audiences over. While certainly loud and flashy, the movie lacked soul. By the next weekend, word was out that abracadabra was a dud. Even the 3D gimmick did little to inspire repeat viewers. Fewer and fewer people bought tickets, and by the end of the movie's theatrical run, only a fraction of the budget came back. Somehow, someway, this surefire hit was a total non-starter, and Bollywood's Harry Potter became an infamous flop. Creative Eye Limited went back to TV. This video was sponsored by Squarespace. If you've got a story, talent, skill, or business... Ooh! Wow. It looked bad. Well, I will say... That's how they changed. It doesn't even look like Harry Potter. But I will say one of the foundational tenets of artistry in writing above everything, above story, above arc, above character development is product placement. Everybody knows that. There's nothing more important to your artistic integrity than ensuring you have product placement in your script and story. The best product placement ever was in Wayne's World. It was amazing. No. It's been so long since I've seen Wayne's World. It's so good. They showed it in there. It's just really sad. People keep selling out. He's decked out in Pepsi. It's all tongue-in-cheek. Then they went into Advil. Here, you have a headache? Take one of these. I have nothing against product placement. It's a really wonderful thing. That's a comedy thing. But when you've made it a part of the story, absolutely, unconscionably, unforgivable. Watch Seinfeld. No human being in their right mind has 15 boxes of cereal in their kitchen. But Jerry does. The product placement in Friends. I found one that I paused and showed to Indrani where we were watching Friends. I said, they're getting lazy. This is Season 6. I paused it and said, producers and writers are getting lazy. On top of Phoebe's refrigerator was a bottle of A1 steak sauce. Phoebe's a vegetarian. Passionately against the killing of animals and eating them. But she's got A1 steak sauce on top of her fridge. Maybe she puts it on her tofu. Maybe. So anyway, product placement's fine as long as you're not perverting the art form to just put it into the story so that you can get more product placement. That's awful. Among many other things that are awful about that. Oh, jeez, the CEI was bad. I know what I'm asking. I've never briefly talked to him. I bet he didn't do promotion for that unless they paid him a lot of money. Oh, man. Oh, that's something that I just dread. Hmm. Being contractually obligated to promote something that you know is an absolute piece of crap. Yep. And they have to. It's part of why they paid you. Yeah. And you can't talk bad about it because if you do, they can really legally get on you for saying that you purposefully are trying to undermine their success as a business. So that's just rough. It's absolutely rough. In fact, that's something that, and a recent, I think it was a the actor on actor thing, Jennifer Lawrence was talking to why is her name escaping me? Viola Davis. And Viola asked her what's one of the most interfering things, troubling, hardest things for you that interferes with your work as an actor. And without hesitation she said, oh, press. Having to do interviews. That's because you want to keep your instrument clean and you want to be focused on the work. Having to do the press releases and having to talk about things and have the interviews, she said it's one of the most head screwing things. And Viola was. Absolutely. Wow, I had the foggiest idea that they tried to do that. Let us know if you ever had to say this. Did you see this thing? Yeah, let us know. I'm not gonna ask. Were you in this thing? Yeah, let us know. You were in it. Poor kids. Oh, poor kids, man. Oh, my heart for those kids. But that's what happens when you do old remake. Those kids were probably so excited. We're making the Indian version of Harry Potter. How far Hindi cinema has come? Oh, my goodness. That to Brahmastra. It really had the visual effects on that as opposed to the visual effects on what we just saw. Anyway, if you saw it, let us know if you did and how it was and if you survived down below.