EDICOLA NEWS: THE REVIEWS nr. 297
album: Hogwarts houses (Panini)
stickers: 100 (1-100)
starter pack: album + 2 packets + 4 cards limited 3,90€
box: 24 packets (4 stickers per packet) 0,90€ each
ecoblister: 5 packets + 1 card limited 4,50€
treasure box: album + 23 packets + 4 cards limited
The dawn of a new era? Or simply the necessary research to propose something different? Maybe it’s the second one, but we like to think it’s linked to the first hypothesis. Certainly the HP phenomenon does not know the word end and indeed it is enriched with new followers, as the generations go by. Impressive if we think about how much the actors who play the various characters have become adults and those adults, unfortunately, some of them are no longer with us.
Panini’s editorial proposal is intriguing, in our opinion on the one hand it meets the now clear need to have albums that are not too abundant in stickers, on the other it also winks at collectors. For families the possibility of collecting an album with a limited number of stickers and therefore relatively easy to complete, for the large public of enthusiasts and fans having a collection of over 800 stickers but not in a single issue. This album is the first of four that thematically retraces the entire long saga, from the Harry Potter films to the Fantastic Beasts prequel.
The photos used are nothing particularly new for a Harry Potter sticker album, if the story is the same and the characters are always the same (even if, thanks to the Fantastic Beasts films, we are meeting new ones) then it is in the formula , in the format, in the proposal that you have to be original.
We don’t need to tell you the story, you know it by heart. The total number of stickers in the album could be misleading, from 1 to 100 but in reality they are 200, so the fun and pleasure that sticking stickers always gives us is guaranteed.
Even the choice to limit the texts and images printed on the album in other cases would have made us grumble, in this case it’s to give all the space possible to the stickers; once again, our little card friends are the absolute protagonists. We hope that in the continuation the charts will be able to amaze us, so as to make each album different from the other.
After all, the very title of the album leaves no doubts, this is a guide in stickers. Not sure what your house could be? The album opens with a nice test to find out, here too attaching the stickers is essential. Don’t you remember the other houses? Well, go to the last pages and maybe your curiosities will find the answers.
The general reasoning remains that brings us back to the sentence with which we opened this review. There was a need for novelty and to create new formulas to always keep the variegated world of stickers alive. Guessed the mix between two parallel but different worlds, that of occasional buyers and the most hardened collectors.
The interesting idea of offering a box set to contain the four albums (hopefully calculated with enough space for the complete albums..), a sin exclusively on the Panini site and also a limited set of 14 cards, irrelevant for the completeness of the album but an extra that will please those who “can’t get enough”.
The paper in the album is certainly of a much higher quality than the Panini average of recent years. The stickers are no different, large and shiny, as are the special metal ones and the many more or less small ones. A questionable choice was that of inserting only four stickers in a packet, the price of the packet is paradoxically cheaper when compared to other collections, precisely as a function of the quality.
On the other hand, a sticker could be added and the price left at 1 euro. Is it just an experimental project? Maybe yes, but if you read what is written on the last page “the first four collections”, it is a clear message that Panini are convinced they have got it right; this time, we too think the same.
(EN)