Actually I really appreciate that you stick to your guns on this, it makes the thread much more interesting!
>>>As you might expect, I am still convinced that the similarities are more than could be expected from simple reliance upon the same archetypes.
There is one thing that undercuts this a little for me - and that's the fact that, certainly in Britain anyway, Young Sherlock Holmes is not terribly well-known. This in itself means nothing (after all, I saw it on video and TV as a kid, no doubt Ms. Rowling probably has seen it), but I just mean that it's a comparatively obscure source.
>>>My primary reason for this is the number of coincidental elements. As a 'case', my argument is easy to dismiss because it is based upon circumstantial evidence
Yeah, but who cares! I have a pet theory that season 2 of 24 is a deliberate allegory of Iraq... life would be less fun if we were too mindful of circumstantial elements.
That said, many stories and elements can be found to repeat, sometimes very deliberately, sometimes very coincidentally. On the one hand, it would seem extraordinary if Du Maurier hadn't written Rebecca as a deliberate re-invention of Jane Eyre, but on the other, Douglas Adams always claimed to have based Marvin The Paranoid Android on an old colleague, until his own mother pointed out that the character was exactly the same as Eeyore in Winnie The Pooh.
>>>whereby the lots of little facts taken all together suggest something different to the prevailing orthodoxy.
Well, you know, I am a believer in Occam's Razor and stuff like that... I am distrustful of arguments that have lots of little working parts and details. Not that I dismiss them out of hand, or don't enjoy them, you understand.
My position is that this film closely resembles the Harry Potter films. I'm not sure that I would have been reminded of the Potter books so much if they hadn't already appeared on film. Then again, Potter does very knowingly inhabit the Boarding School story genre, that Young Sherlock Holmes draws on.
>>>I have to say that the argument that she is unlikely to have based her work upon any one source because of her propensity to borrow from many is amusing!
Yes..! And I think it's pretty evident, because so many elements can be found all over the place in children's literature. Aside from the very obvious comparison to be made with Jilly Murphy's Worst Witch books, there was also a trilogy of books by a Welsh author called Jenny Nimmo, about a young boy who discovers on his tenth birthday that he is Gwydion Gwyn, the last of the Welsh Wizards. There are no other particular resemblances to Potter, but my point is that there are other stories where young children discover their magical significance in the way Harry does. Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence has a similar revelation. But then, so does Star Wars actually. And indeed, a whole lot of other stories where a young hero or heroine discovers their true, superior origins (Oliver Twist, as another example). Then again, we don't want to get too broad in our comparisons here, as easy as that would be.
>>>If she likes to be inspired by existing stories, that might suggest that if you look hard enough you can identify which of those stories provided the largest pieces of the template.
Indeed. And certainly, the other great borrower of our time, George Lucas, has entire fragments of other films intact in his own epic - even the dialogue between the pilots attacking the Death Star bears a startling similarity to pilot's dialogue in The Dam Busters. On the other hand, an author like Philip Pullman has a variety of detectable influences in his own work - his book Northern Lights/The Golden Compass bears comparison with Anderson's The Snow Queen in a lot of respects; he admits to basing his villainess Mrs Coulter on Nicole Kidman's character in To Die For. And the book opens with the young heroine hiding in a wardrobe (this similarity to C.S. Lewis was a matter of chance, apparently). None of these influences leave an overwhelming imprint on the work, however, and as much as I am... hesitant... to call Rowling anything more than a very artful borrower, and as much as I would cite various points of unoriginality in her work, nor have I felt that very large chunks of the concept were lifted wholesale.
>>>You are quite right to identify the boarding school tradition as a source of origin for some of YSH and this may have directly, or indirectly (via YSH) influenced Rowling. For example, HP-Draco/ YSH-Dudley could be a Flashman-derivation.
I think that's undoubtedly the case - though bear in mind that Tom Brown's Schooldays is such a major precedent that Flashman is likely the influence on both Dudley and Malfoy, rather than there being a direct connection between those two. You may have seen Michael Palin's 'Tompkinson's Schooldays', another Tom Brown parody, featuring Ian Ogilvy as another variation of the Flashman character. In any case - what school story is complete without a School Bully? The School Bully is usually the son of a wealthy, influential parent and is beyond real punishment... and while Tom Brown gets there first, I think this would have sprung up without him.
>>>However, as regards two-guys-and-a-girl, apart from Star Wars, where the heroes are more or less adult, I have racked my brains unsuccessfully to find this replicated in a British schoolkids' adventure.
I think you're quite right, this is a shaky point. I can cite examples - it's a very common comination in the novels of John Gordon - but there's not much point, since boy-girl pairings, and groups of four (Nesbit and Lewis) are easier to find.
>>>One thing that really flags up the influence for me is the supernatural element. YSH suggests black magic and illusion in the context of a boarding school archetype and this IS unique
This is an excellent point, now you mention it. Well... I can think of one or two precedents, Jill Murphy for example... but as a full-blown Victorian Boarding-School story, YSH is a bit of an innovator for including those Gothic elements (mind you, it also includes a big chunk of the plot of The Sign Of Four).
(Indiana Jones meets Conan-Doyle spiritualism meets Tom Brown) - then along comes HP and does the same thing.
>>>You won't find a hooded and cloaked Dementor-alike in Tom Brown's Schooldays, yet one appears in YSH.
This is certainly true... but YSH was borrowing the idea of the exotic assassin from The Sign Of Four here... and some would say Rowling was borrowing Tolkien's Ringwraiths (though the Dementors are in fact an extremely generic depiction of a death-figure). Actually, Phillip Pullman's work includes creatures that are extremely similar to Dementors in terms of their effect, though roughly contemporaneous and I wouldn't suggest there was any interbreeding going on.
My own view - at this point - is that a lot of similarities can be explained by chance and common influence, and when this is brought to the screen by the same people, similarities are inevitable.
On the other hand, given that I readily note that Rowling borrows from all over the place, I can hardly then suggest YSH was NOT an influence!
All of which said, I always like an interesting discussion on this stuff, so I'll have a look at your blog shortly, and give the matter some thought.
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