The Dudley Moment In Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire That Made No Sense
When Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone first came out as a novel in 1997, it made a generation of kids wait by their windows, hoping one day an owl would arrive to inform them of secret magical powers. No such luck transpired — that we know of — so for six more novels, people had to make do with taking a literary portkey into the magical realm of Harry Potter and his adventures at Hogwarts and beyond. The first book was simple enough, about a boy — mistreated by his adopted family — who goes off to learn how to become a wizard with the help of his friends, Ron and Hermione. In between classes, Harry discovers a sinister dark wizard by the name of Voldemort is out to kill him, and only he has the power to destroy him once and for all. No pressure.
With each passing novel, more details get added to the lore of this world, and occasionally, it leads to a plot hole. While it's only natural for time travel to cause some discrepancies, there are other aspects of these stories that easily could've been removed without leading to all sorts of problems fans continue to dwell on all these years later. One of the most egregious examples of this takes place in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire where a superfluous detail completely messes with the timeline.
Harry Potter says his cousin Dudley destroyed his PlayStation — a year before they actually came out
In the film version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the first time we see Harry, he's already at Ron's house, a departure from the novel in which he spends some time with the Dursleys at the beginning. One of the book's earlier passages recalls how Harry would write to his newfound godfather, Sirius Black, over the summer, delighted he finally has a living family member who cares for him. One of the letters contains an anecdote about how Dudley got so mad at his parents for trying to put him on a diet that he threw his PlayStation out of the window. There's just one tiny problem with that story.
Harry was born on July 31, 1980, which means Goblet of Fire would begin in the summer of 1994. The PlayStation first came out in December of 1994 in Japan, and it wasn't even available in Europe (where Harry Potter is set) until September the following year (via PlayStation). This one little detail raises a whole lot of questions, namely how the heck did Dudley get his hands on a PlayStation over a year before it would've been available to him?
Considering author J.K. Rowling offered insight into how wizards relieved themselves before toilets (via Mental Floss), you would assume she'd also explain what's going on with Sony's manufacturing process. The most likely explanation is that she just made a mistake, given that the book was released in 2000 and the PlayStation had been around for a while at that point — with the PlayStation 2 arriving a few months after the fourth Harry Potter novel. Still, it's fun to imagine Harry saying, "Accio PlayStation" for Dudley's birthday just to get him to shut up.