Remembering Harry: Or Maybe We Won’t Have To…

because he just won’t go away.

Some think the poor boy will be dust.

Some think he will live forever in our hearts.

And some figure that they can force Ms. Rowling to keep poor old ‘arry going forever.

Now they aren’t being quite as crazy as the fan in Stephen King’s Misery, but they are being really annoying.

I mean that irritating petition to “Save Harry Potter.” It reminds me of the ones my students occasionally start, demanding ice cream every day or skateboarding during recess. Somehow they think that all you need to do if you really want something is get a bunch of people to sign a petition asking for it, and —voila— you get it! Forget about whether there is money for ice cream (or if it is healthy), forget about some other kids who don’t want skateboarders taking up all the space (not to mention the safety factor), forget about whether Ms. Rowling wishes to write about Harry anymore — enough signatures and we should reasonably give in.

Here’s Jean Hannah Edelstein at the Guardian blog on “Do We Want Harry Back For Good?”

(And by the way — this is NOT like Sherlock Holmes. Rowling plotted the seven books out before she began whereas Conan Doyle wrote a series of stories with some linking aspects, but nothing plotted out this way at all.)

Cinderella Graduate Student and Other Wacky Tales

The BBC and Hat Trick Productions are currently filming a series of modernized fairy tales, similar to Shakespeare Re-Told and their updated versions of several of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I found the earlier series to be mixed so will be curious if they are more uniformly successful with the fairy tales.

So far they have completed filming on Billy Goat, a retelling of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Evidently in this new version Billy Goat is a boy band and their manager is — surprise, surprise — a troll. “He might eat mice as snacks, but this troll knows the music business and he’s got them locked in a watertight contract.” O-kay, we shall see, we shall see.

They are currently filming Cinderella which looks more promising to me. According to the BBC press release:

Adapted by Richard Pinto and Anil Gupta (Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No 42), Cinderella is set inside a bustling University and asks the question; who was really responsible for the evolution of the human race – man or woman?

Now I’m quite a fan of The Kumars at No 42 and very much like stories that poke fun at university life (having grown-up as a faculty brat) so I’m hopeful. While I’m not quite sure how true it is to the familiar Cinderella most of us know (Aarne-Thompson folktale type 510A), if it is successful — I’ll be happy. (Right now it sounds a bit like one of those old thirties films with the two leads wittily battling things out — not particularly Cinderellish, but we’ll see.) Here’s a very recent interview with James Nesbitt (the prof prince).

The last two to be filmed will be Rapunzel and The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Thanks to Fuse#8 for the heads-up.