Star Wars has big influence on Harry Potter

So my wife is a huge Harry Potter fan and I took her to see the Half Blood Prince the other night. Don't get me wrong, I like Potter and all, but each time I watch one of these movies, the influence of Star Wars is more and more noticable. A couple of examples:

1. Consider Potter and Luke. Both sons of powerful fathers with little to no knowledge of their own abilities until a master comes along to help them. Both become powerful in their own time, but often with help from their friends.

2. Consider Anakin and Valdemort (Tom Riddle). Both very powerful and evil in their universes, both taken in by a master and trained in their respective arts only to turn on their masters.

3. The trio of main characters is similar: Han/Luke/Leia = Ron/Harry/Hermione

4. Consider Obi and Dumbledore. Both older masters when we first meet them, both a little odd, but very powerfu and both eager to train the next generation.

5. I'm sorry, but the HP robes are total Jedi rip offs. And the wands might as well be a saber.

With Star Wars a good 30 years before HP started, I can't help but to notice some influence here. Am I seeing things?

 

You are not the only one. Harry Potter is a great big ideas hoover that just sucks in random bits and bobs like shelob from Lord of the Rings or comedy characters from the Discworld books. It's one of the reasons why I don't buy into the fad too much. I only really like the first book because the first few chapters were spectacularly original and well written. Then Harry gets on the train and it all spirals from there...

 

Yeah, but Voldemort isn't Harry's father.

A much better example of something stolen from Star Wars would be Eragon.

 

Indeed it does

 

It isn't Star Wars per se, it's that they both have taken their inspiration from Joseph Campbell. it's the hero's journey. Take a look at "The Hero With a Thousand Faces."

 

The Chosen One thing perturbed me. It was fine when sleazy Snapes said it.

 

No its not, its just that it follows the same general plot and story most sci-fi/fantasy movies have so it allows you to pick out similarities. You can say most films are influenced by other films and pick out plot points that make it so because thats just the way that films work.

 

That's not much.

I still say a better example would be Eragon. Not so much characterization-wise, since we've never seen Luke enjoying torture and killing while deciding to become a vegan because he respects life. (Values dissonance much?) Quite the opposite, Luke recognizes the importance of death by the end of ROTJ and in fact chooses to die rather than join the Sith. Nor does Star Wars have any scene between Luke and Yoda comparable to Chapter 16 of Eldest. (Now there's some nightmare fuel for everyone here.) Nor does Luke drop his pants and compare bruises with, let's say Wedge. Except that Eragon and Roran are cousins. I don't even need to put on my McEwok-colored glasses for this.

But despite being a sadistic vegan who has a tendency for Just Plain Wrong ho yay, Eragon still lives on his uncle's farm until his uncle finds a maguffin and the Empire destroys the farm and kills Eragon's family in order to find the maguffin. Eragon meets the last of an ancient order of mystic warriors who dies soon afterward and Eragon swears revenge. Then Eragon joins la Resistance and is key in a battle against overwhelming odds. Then Eragon goes off and trains with another of these mystic warriors. Oh, and you know "I am your father"? Not only is Eragon's father a bad guy, but his brother is too.

 

I guess it makes a certain sense to see it this way, with Star Wars being first. But it's more that they have the same sources that inspired them and where they take things from.

A New Hope is a very basic fairy tale: innocent, naive farmboy goes on quest, meets good wizard who gives him a magic sword, finds some companions to help him on the way (Han as the classical scoundrel) and saves the princes who is kept prinsoner by the evil wizard. The End.

Archetypes and fairy tale motives - that just has to lead to similarities, but doesn't make one a rip-off of the other, just because it came later.

IMO Star Wars gives these themes a much more original spin than Harry Potter. Harry Potter stays a lot closer to the fairy tales it so richly takes from. Just take a look at The Force versus good, old-fashioned magic-with-wand. But then, you could call the Force a rip-off of certain believe systems. The things Harry Potter takes from LOTR makes me shake my head much more.

But does it really matter? Using the old legends and folk tales as inspiration has been done for a very, very long time now and gave us books we now call classics. As long it leads up to a good story, with or without elves, I personally am happy. And Harry Potter got a lot of kids to read books again, so that's good too.

Still think LOTR is the best though

 

About 1 in 10 children who claim to have read the Harry Potter books actually read any of the series. Many kids would actually scan through the books for anything that would seem like a major plot point so they could boast about their reading speed in the playground and picking on anyone else with an original opinion or slower reading speed. Also, kids would 'read' nothing outside of the series. Most kids books started to lose their imagination because of this, and now the childrens book 'industry' runs off of this template. Not really that good.

 

Eragon and the new Star Trek movie are much more obvious than Harry Potter. Anyway, Star Wars owns them all!

 

Yeah, I added an Eragon page to Darthipedia. Check it out, or I will destroy your planet.

 

JK Rowling and the others must have read the same books as GL,or watched Star Wars,hence same plot.but they don't have R2D2 and Chewbacca.

 

My favorite parody of this "It ripped off X" theory:

[image=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/olderthantheythink.jpg]

Though Eragon played it straight. Just for pun, the one place where it didn't play it straight seems to be Eragon's fascination with his enemies' "lean and hard muscles" and his Master's "hairless groin". But one of the guys he gets slashy with is his half-brother, so make your own Luke/Leia joke.

 

Star Wars has a big influence on Harry Potter as lord of the rings has a big influence on Star Wars. Ace

 

Some epic elements such as love triangle, old mentor figure, main villain being a long lost relative etc etc, don't necessarily come from Star Wars. Although in Harry Potter books per se, the Star Wars is a very likely source and some resemblances are just too obvious.

 

"Dumbledore never told you what happened to your father."

"He told me enough! He told me you killed him."

"No...I am your father."

"NOOOOOOO!!!"

Later, in Dumbledore's office...

"Professor, why didn't you tell me?"

"In order to protect you both, you were hidden with Muggle families when you were born. That is why your sister remains safely anonymous."

"Hermione...Hermione is my sister."


There were a lot of rumors about Voldemort really being Harry's father, and J.K. Rowling told the rumor-mongers to quit watching so much Star Wars.

Seriously though, I see some similarities but as someone mentioned already, they are more along the lines of the hero's journey and less about Star Wars itself. Harry's death at Voldemort's hands was actually supposed to have been influenced by Christianity, whereas Star Wars has more of a Buddhist influence.

 

So, The Legend of Zelda was a rip off of Star Wars?!?!

Ahh, man...so many hours of childhood enjoyment, crushed in one fell swoop. Somebody please take this knife out of my back.

 

People also forget that Star Wars was influenced by a lot of other things. And the archetypes of the hero's journey tend to be similar from stories around the world. You could say that both Potter and Star Wars were influenced by the story of King Arthur. I don't remember Rowling ever saying that she was influenced by Star Wars but based on her writing, she was definitely influenced but Greek and Roman mythology. This is evident in the names of some characters (Sirius Black, Remus Lupin).

I don't think kids who read Potter would limit themselves to just that. It's not just me who thinks that. I read a Matthew Stover interview where he said that readers of Potter will demand good fantasy novels. Fantasy is my favorite genre but it seems to be one of the most underrated in the book world. Look at the top 10 bestseller list. Most of the time, I see thrillers or romance. If Potter gets kids interested in fantasy, Rowling deserves a lot of credit for that.

 

LOL. But a couple of years ago, say before the Phoenix, I wouldn't have been surprised if things went that way.

 

It does have some Jewish influences too. Revenge of the sith was supposed to be alot like a shindlers list movie because of what happened in the holocaust do to what happened to the jedi Children. Stormtroppers being Nazis and all that.