After months of speculation, anticipation and maybe a little worry from the fandom, Team StarKid have posted a video confirming the YouTube release of A Very Potter 3D: A Very Potter Senior Year. 

A Very Potter Senior Year is the third and final of the Harry Potter parody shows which first brought the group attention when they were students at the University of Michigan. The formation of their company, Team StarKid, came after the huge and unexpected response to their work when their YouTube videos went viral. The name “StarKid” is a joke from that first Very Potter show, which hit the web in June 2009.

Less than six months after the release of A Very Potter Sequel, the group’s composer – and their Harry – was one of a million struggling actor/musicians in Los Angeles. He got a haircut, landed a TV guest spot, sang a Katy Perry song to another boy, and his star rose astronomically overnight. But in between movies and Broadway and world tours, Team StarKid and their fans wanted Darren Criss back for a few minutes – just long enough to put together “the Threequel” – the final Potter show that was long known to be finished, ready and waiting to be staged as soon as the circumstances would allow it.

Earlier this year, Team StarKid announced that they would finally be able to perform a version of A Very Potter Senior Year – that because they weren’t sure if they could ever run it as a full show in the way they’ve run more recent releases, they would bring the cast (including Darren) to the LeakyCon convention this past August, and give the audience a staged reading of the script. The final product was five hours long after only 36 hours rehearsal with the full cast. It was completely uncut, full of goofs, and had never been run in order before. It contained songs, staging, choreography, and over 70 costumes worn by the 30+ members involved – Team StarKid brought in nearly every single person who had ever been in a StarKid show to take part in Senior Year.

The audience of 4,000 – who had possibly been expecting a bunch of people sitting in a row of chairs, reading lines back and forth – ate the whole thing up. The rest of the fandom wept and pulled at their hair, especially when rumors circulated that Team StarKid’s creative team, who do seem to pride themselves on delivering technical perfection even if the content is silly, may not want to release the show online due to the one-off LeakyCon taping being unmanageable from an editing perspective. Too many mistakes. It won’t make sense. It’s too long.

Fear no longer, StarKids:

Unlike most purposefully cheesy StarKid announcement videos, the above seems to really reflect the gravity of the situation, that the StarKids know just how much this moment means to a lot of their fans. That, after radio silence, right now was not the moment for teasing or tongue in cheek. We see footage documented from a StarKid creative meeting, discussing the issue of the quality and the context, the fears that if this show will be released it will represent a lowering in standards, and the counter-argument that everyone at LeakyCon and awaiting the show online knew that it wasn’t a full-blown production, that they were expecting a reading and would be forgiving of that. The final conclusion? That for Senior Year to make sense, for the goofs to be funny, for the footage of the reading to be worth watching, the fandom should be familiar with what the show should have been.

So they’re releasing everything. Later this month, Team StarKid will release the script and the music for A Very Potter Senior Year, and then allow fans some time to get to know it, and then, in early 2013, they will put up the entire live video of the staged reading. The script and soundtrack – featuring nine new songs written by AJ Holmes, Clark Baxtresser and Pierce Siebers – will be made available on December 15 through The Ann Arbor T-shirt Company.

In case fans weren’t thrilled enough, the announcement video then features over a minute of footage from the reading. With StarKid’s usual “no cameras, no spoilers” policy in place, this is the first Senior Year content of any substance to have been posted – snippets of songs, previewing new characters (Lockhart! McGonagall! Hagrid! Young Tom Riddle!) and the return of all the old gang, including our Harry, of course.

We were at the live reading, and if you want to know more about what happened, you can go back and read our review of the production.

Is the release of AVPSY in this format – script, soundtrack, then YouTube – everything you’d hoped and dreamed? Did you like the footage from the StarKid meeting and the footage from the show? What are you most excited for?