Comments on: Harry Potter: Books cf Movies

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:59:44 +0000

Well, did you ever wonder why there were seven to begin with?

By: dean

dean — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:26:07 +0000

“…there are seven, not any other number but seven…”

This hints at

“Seven shall be the number thou shalt count. and the number of the counting shall be seven. Eight shalt thou not count neither count thou six, excepting that thou then proceed to seven. Nine is right out.”

Apologies to all for the, er, adjustment.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:40:04 +0000

Ole, that would be an entirely different issue. I was not asking the question “how long is a Harry Potter book really?” which might involve sampling different editions or printings. Or, “given different langauges, how long would a book be and what kind of variation would there be” in which case I might have looked at different language translations. And so on.

Seriously: I was looking at the relationship between seven books, given length of book, and eight movies, given length of movies. I stipulated that any one movie or book would adequately represent the needed value since the variations were small or non existent. I used the same “version” of each, not switching back and forth between extended vs. non extended movie, for example.

Given that, there are seven, not any other number but seven, points of reference for the book length. There is no sampling. And, there are eight, and no other number other than eight, movies.

I could have remeasured the book length by looking repeatedly at the number of pages, I suppose ….

By: Ole Phat Stu

Ole Phat Stu — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:05:45 +0000

@Greg,
I assumed it was a sample because you included neither the foreign translations nor the paperback re-issues nor the large print versions for the poor of sight…

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:28:28 +0000

I’ve noticed a great deal of variation between what people say about the contents of the books vis-a-vis the contents of the movie. I’ve read the books and seen the movies, and they are the same stories and there are a LOT of details that are reproduced, in most of the movies, right out of the books. There was not a single character added in the book, and I can’t think of any important characters left out of the movie. Almost everything in the movies happened in the same place as it happened in the book (the notable exceptions are in the very last movie during the extended attack on hogwarts act) and almost every event occurred in the same order in the book and movie except for one thing that Julia knows but that I will not say in the fifth movie, and the plots were identical.

It is also true that many book details were left out, more from the latter part of the series where the books were twice as big but the movies not. All movies do that. Most movies do that more than these.

The thing is, different people respond to different things being different.

By: Lynn Wilhelm

Lynn Wilhelm — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:26:08 +0000

I happen to have my daughter (8) with me now and I showed her your post Greg. First, she has read the books and seen the movies. (I didn’t let her see the movies until she’d read the book.) She liked the movies but liked the books better.

She says: “The books had more details and were right. The movies didn’t have some of the detail from the books and the details they had didn’t match the books.”

I thought there was a lot that differed between the books and the movies. It wasn’t only the detail, but the obvious changes that were made in the movies that bugged me. As my duaghter said, “They were wrong.”

On Zeno’s comment on the shorter books in the series’ beginning. The editing and proofing could have something to do with it. Rowling did have to work hard to sell that first book and maybe she made them more simple. The books did get more complicated and harder to read after the first three. In fact the first three books are classified as Children’s books at my library, while the last four are in the Young Adult section.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:35:51 +0000

There are multiple versions of the Harry Potter books that probably have different page lengths, and also, most of the movies have an extended version. But these numbers would not change the overall pattern.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:31:32 +0000

Are all the books formatted similarly? Or do text and margin sizes and so forth change from book to book?

By: Umlud

Umlud — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:02:20 +0000

Just ran the numbers on Twilight. Can’t really do the cross comparison, though, since the second part of the last book comes out in 2012. Still, these books DO get longer over time:

Hardcover pages
498
563
629
756

That said, the softcover version of the first book was longer than the hardcover book. This was the only book that had different lengths listed, implying that there was a decision about replacing some edited-out material. It also implies that there has been an some similar amount of minimizing the editorial hand as the series took off.

By: Umlud

Umlud — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:51:24 +0000

Now that the Twilight (bleaugh) series is wrapping up at the box office, does anyone know of similar relationships? I’m assuming that it’s similar: longer novels longer than earlier novels, movie lengths roughly the same (with the last novel also being split into two films).

What about LotR? (Or should we wait for the Hobbit to come out first?)