Darren Criss
About Ten Years Ago... (Live)
[DARREN, spoken]
So about 10 years ago, well a few of us put together a show just for fun in college like you do. Just havin' a laugh, and we put together a raunchy, silly Harry Potter parody musical, and it was meant for a very small group of people. It was wrought with inside jokes and things that were just funny and fun to us. We did it in a small black box theatre at the University of Michigan. And that was kind of it. We were just doing it for us and having a great time. And by the end of it, it was just sort of a fun last thing that we did before a lot of us graduated, and if no one had seen it, which was sort of the intent after it was done, we would have been kind of fine with that. It was kind of a magical thing that we loved and talked about, and that was great. When we put it on YouTube 10 years ago before that was really like a thing to do, we did it mainly to share it with each other, because we missed each other and it's meant to be sort of this love note to something that we had built together. Little did we know that millions of people around the world would see it. I should have read the disclaimer that YouTube asks before you press 'upload', because apparently it was available to so many other people that weren't those 200 some odd people in that room that night. And in turn, you guys have created something that is much bigger than us, then yourselves, something that we could have never possibly dreamed of. So thank you for sharing this with your friends, for creating fan communities, for singing along. Thank you for immortalising this very weird, fun stuff that we made for ourselves, into GIFS and memes and enthusiastic, but sometimes questionable, fan art. We're so appreciative. I think we felt it in this room tonight, I hope you felt it. This is so, so special to us. You have made us, in all your enthusiasm, into a fully-fledged production company.