Parallels in other's fiction to that of JKR.

[John]

No: HPFGUIDX 192427





--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Bart Lidofsky <bart at ...> wrote:
>
> Snipped.
> 
> Bart:
> I said "Escape to Witch Mountain"; "Race To Witch Mountain" was a 3rd 
> hand copy, and diverged greatly from the original novel. Alexander Key 
> was accused by many of copying Henderson in his 1968 original novel.
> 

John: I'm sorry about that title mix up Bart, it didn't register and even if it had I must admit that I might not have noticed the difference. I have not read the book but certainly have seen the film, which whilst far from a cinematic 'masterpiece' is none the less an entertaining juvenile movie that I myself, even though in my dotage, enjoyed. :o)

> John:
> >   Even the concept of the 'boarding school story' as used by JKR is one that has been around a while.
> 
> Bart:
> I read several of those in the late 1960's. The Id/Ego/Superego trio was 
> also rather common in popular literature as well.
>

John:
Regarding 'boarding school stories' they date back quite a way, of course long before the time you read some in the 1960's. Charles Dicken's Nicholas Nickleby of course has a lot about a fairly awful establishment of that type called Dotheboys Hall, and at a guess I'd say the genre of the British 'boarding school story' probably reached it's peak in the 1920-1930's, but carried on as a quite common genre into the 1950's at least. Hogwarts is just another, but supremely brilliant recent 'variation on a theme'. :o)

Many such tales feature school bullies as characters. Crabbe and Goyle the hulking greedy sidekicks of Draco Malfoy are fairly typical of the bullies these stories tend to portray even though they are wizards. However they also include elements of the more comic, fat and greedy boarding school boy Billy Bunter. But some boarding school bullies like Flashman in the story Tom Brown's School Days, which was set in the real life Rugby School are an even worse and a more extreme threat than the two famous Harry Potter bullies and their leader Draco ever were to younger pupils.

Regarding your second point Bart, whilst having no great knowledge of such psychological concepts I do believe you are right and do recall Forbidden Planet, the film loosely based on Shakespeare's play The Tempest. It featured a 'monster from the Id', summoned up by alien technology and embodying all the primitive subconcious urges of Morbius, the father of the young woman whom a starship captain falls in love with after landing his ship and discovering the pair as survivors from a previous expedition.

This film is remarkable in many ways, it is very advanced in it's effects for it's time, is actually adult, not juvenile in it's acting and script, deals with the concepts of innocence and evil and also last but by no means least is where a beloved character first makes an appearance. One who went on to feature in a TV series and another later film. I am talking of course about Robbie the Robot, also something of a first as he was not a rampaging monster like almost all previous cinematic robots, but a useful, helpful and benign servant. A precursor of Asimov's positronic robots unable by design and built-in 'laws' to harm or kill a human. 

Many Blessings.
John, (Oriondruid).