Polite Dissent

3 Responses to “ Harry Potter and the G-Force Syndrome ”

1. Jon Schnaars
   November 29th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
   

   I would like to voice my own polite dissent over your criticism of the Harry Potter series. I’m going to guess that while you have seen the movies, you haven’t read the Rowling books. That’s fine, but you have to understand that the films lose a great deal of the subtlety of their literary counterparts.
   With that being said, the trouble with your analysis is that you’re comparing apples and oranges. I’ve not seen Battle of the Planets, but my guess is that it is similar, in structure anyway to Power Rangers, a show that I loved growing up. (Team of super-hero-esque humans battle an ever present enemy, each episode having some wierd sub-enemy that is always tied back to the main baddie. This obviously isn’t a perfect match, but bear with me.)
   Battle of the Planets, like MMPR is a serialized television program that relies heavily on generic convention and through those generic conventions provides its greatest payoffs. Harry Potter might more closely be linked to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Potter, like LOTR, is one complete story told from beginning to end. While Potter unravels over the span of 7 books (although I highly doubt that Rowling can wrap everything up in only one more book), it still very much follows the epic structure that we see in LOTR and maybe in a more conventional sense, Star Wars. Each of these older trilogies contains separate stories or episodes (from here on out I’ll refer only to the films in each case) that can be taken on their own. The plot of each of these films has a beginning, middle and end. But in both LOTR and Star Wars, the main characters square off constantly against a seemingly dominant evil force (Luke v. Dark Side, Frodo, et al. v. Sauron). The same can be said of Potter, where the protagonist, Harry, is always at some level battling with a wizard whom others in the wizarding world are afraid to even call by name.
   Having read the novels I obviously have the foresight of two more entries into the series. The fifth and sixth film will more clearly develop the epic structure of the series (think of Order of the Pheonix and Half Blood Prince as Empire or Two Towers).
   All of these films/shows do share the commonality of having a central antagonist (Zoltar, Rita Repulsa, Sauron, Vader, Voldemort). But it is the syntactic genre elements that separate the bad (albeit entertaining) Battle and Rangers, from the good Rings, Star Wars and Potter.
   Sorry, I realize that this was very long and you probably didn’t intend for this entry to generate this fervent a response, but I just stumbled on your blog and I was really pumped to find someone who’s writing about this kind of stuff (comics and medicine, excellent!). Keep up the great work.

2. Vyd
   May 17th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
   

   First, the original poster said he DID read the books… and second, you can’t judge something unless you’ve at least seen it! You can’t really compare Power Rangers to Battle of the Planets (similar tho they are >.> ). If you haven’t seen Battle of the Planets, you should not guess what to compare it to, just as I have not seen much Power Rangers and will not compare it to anything here.
   The problem I have is that I don’t agree that Potter is like LOTR. When Tolkien wrote LOTR, he first created not only one entire language, but several others, at least in part. He also created the entire world from it’s beginning to end, at least as far as Middle-Earth with elves is concerned. He created a world full of customs, art, songs, diversity, and details so fine that you could easily get lost in his world as if it were real. His world of Middle-Earth had a full history before he ever started writing LOTR.
   Harry Potter to me, comes off more like Star Wars. When Gorge Lucas made the first Star Wars, he made it with a grand story in mind, an over-arching plot and he wrote out but in no great detail. The first film was made in such a way, that if the film was not successful (as it was a big gamble, nothing was ever made like it before), he could let it end there and not have the rest of the story hanging from a cliff. Yes he left strings open, so he could continue the story if, as he hoped, it was successful. Star Wars episode 4 has a history never fully explained, has a beginning, middle, and end, and leaves room for more. This was part of his genius as he left it with just enough to let people want there to be more, but also to leave it as it started, unfinished. His true intent was to mimic, and ultimately perfect, the idea of the saturday cinema sci-fi shows he saw when growing up, the kind that would just run in the theater so you never saw the beginning and would leave before the end. You get enough to understand what is happening, but don’t need to see every event.
   With the success of the first, the 2 following films were guaranteed so he made them more linked and involved. His recent creations of the precluding trilogy (episodes 1-3) was an attempt to fill in even more gaps, but even here he had to deviate from his original story due to legal issues with his co-writer.
   Harry Potter began with that kind of feeling, you know there is a past and history, and there is an overarching plot, but you only get enough for the first story to be fulfilled while leaving enough open to continue the story. Had the first book failed, she could have ended the series there and not continued with the rest, you know he “defeated” the bad guy yet the evil was still lurking in the shadows, very much like Star War’s “Darth Vader”. With each book she releases, she tells the audience more about the world she has been developing as she goes on. In the first book there is no reference to any wizard being able to teleport as they can in the 5h and 6th books, for example. There are many more examples as such, but I won’t go into all of them now.
   Still I get the impression that as the series became more successful, she felt the need to elaborate on things mentioned before that were never fully created even in her own notes until later. By the 4th book, she has developed a complicated world and yet continues to reveal more important plot devices for the first time in the following books.
   In contrast, LOTR was written together, all 6 (yes 6) books were written at the same time with the intent of being sold as a single volume. However, one book many thousands of pages long is a hard sell, and so he ultimately split the 6 books into 3 novels, Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, and Return of the King. Unfortunately he passed away before he could finish writing in detail the events and history of The Simarillion, which was later finished and compiled and released by his son Christopher, who has since released many corrections and elaborations based on his father’s extensive notes. He only this year (2007) released the latest of these elaborations as an actual novel he believed his father would has written himself one day if he had the time, titled “The Children of Húrin” (if this site can’t read vowel accents correctly, that’s “Hurin”).
   The point is, they are all good in their own way. I like Gatchman/G-Force (yet i hate the changes made to Battle of the Planets, there is a huge difference between G-Force and Battle of the Planets btw), I like Harry Potter, I like Star Wars, I love LOTR, yet to compare them is hard to do. They each have similarities in structure and the like, but are all unique. I feel that the most extensively written (by the original author) of these is LOTR, yet I enjoy Harry Potter greatly as well as Star Wars. G-Force was intended to be something they could continue to make cheaply for as long as it was popular so they could milk it for as much money as they could. Hence the story was intended to never really finish, but to just continue until it no longer made a profit. It is far different from these other titles, and yet it is something I too enjoyed as a kid and will continue to enjoy throughout my life.

   btw.. imo, Snape is a good guy.

3. Aaron
   July 29th, 2008 at 10:26 am
   

   I never saw an episode of battle of the planets until today. I was a Gforce fan when I was little. Of course, I’m grateful to Sandy Frank and the existing fanbase that made the re-release of Gforce in late 80s-90s possible, but I can’t get over how different it is. I’m really disturbed by how they treated Keyop, I mean, Jason got his violence toned down but he’s still got a personality. Anyway…

   Check out the new ADV dub of Gatchaman if you haven’t already! I was able to order a box set courtesy of a small anime specific shop in my town. The DVDs come bilingual, but I think it is a very strong dub. If by chance you have seen it, do you think that occasionally inter-character tension often goes unresolved? Example, Joe bitch slaps Jun….

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