15 Things You Probably Didn't Know About The Marauders

In 2008, J.K. Rowling penned a Harry Potter prequel short to raise money for two charities. She used it to (briefly) expound upon the adventures of best friends James Potter and Sirius Black, during the four brief years between their graduation from Hogwarts and James's death.

She describes an encounter where the disheveled pair run afoul of two patrolling officers. The duo reminds one officer of his daughter's slacker boyfriend, and they eventually escape by commandeering a motorcycle.

Per Harry Potter Page to Screen: The Complete Filmmaking Journey by Bob McCabe, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban helmer Alfonso Cuarón filmed an expository scene featuring the young Marauders during their time at Hogwarts, and clarifying their relationship with the Marauder's Map that divulges all the covert areas of the campus grounds to Harry, Ron and Hermione. 

Cuarón said he used the Beatles as a visual reference point while building out the younger iterations of the Marauders. "James was like Paul—good looking and sure of himself—and Sirius was like John, as he was a bit of an anarchic troublemaker," Cuarón said. "We gave them sideburns, little glasses, and longer shirts."

Sirius, who hailed from a family of Slytherins, was a proud member of Gryffindor house while at Hogwarts. His room in school was decorated with images of Muggle girls and motorcycles.

In short, Sirius was a rebel with a cause, a bad-*ss determined to zig where his entire family zagged and carve out his own path in life. This of course makes the ultimate tragedy of his 12-year imprisonment, life as a fugitive from justice, and eventual murder at the hands of his cousin all the more tragic.

There's a reason we said Peter Pettigrew felt more like a Slytherin than a Gryffindor. Yes, retroactively, of course he should have been a Slytherin. But even at the time of his studies, there was an open question as to his fit. The Sorting Hat struggled to decide where to place Pettigrew. J.K. Rowling wrote in a short story on Pottermore that Pettigrew was a "Hatstall," the designation for any student who gives a Sorting Hat pause for more than five minutes.

The Sorting Hat could not place Harry between Slytherin and Gryffindor for a hot minute, before ultimately sending him to the latter Hogwarts house, where he would tag along with the Marauders and ultimately betray them all. Maybe the Sorting Hat should have taken an extra minute in its deliberations.

Harry Potter's father, James, grew up loaded. Author J.K. Rowling noted in an epic interview that James's wealthy parents, Euphemia and Fleamont, made sure to pamper him, their only child, in his youth.

"James inherited plenty of money, so he didn't need a well-paid profession," Rowling mentioned in another conversation. Subsequently, after finishing his schooling, James and his wife Lily rejected Death Eater recruitment overtures from the wicked Lord Voldemort to enlist as fulltime lieutenants in the Order of the Phoenix."

While Peter Pettigrew was disguised (for several years) as Scabbers, the eventual pet rat of the Weasley clan, one mammal was on to him almost immediately: Hermione Granger's cat Crookshanks. Because Crookshanks was not purely a cat, but also partly a fantastic beast called a Kneazle, he had the ability to detect a ruse. Crookshanks the cat/Kneazle frequently terrorized Scabbers the human/rat, though no one else figured out his true identity until Sirius Black and Remus Lupin put all the pieces together during Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.