“I’ll Put a Spell on You”.
A couple of years ago, at Christmastime, my nephew played with a Harry Potter toy — or something to that effect — waving it around and incessantly declaring “I’ll put a spell on you.”
It was either a catch-phrase from the Harry Potter movie, or it was not a catch-phrase. My sister, his mother, expressed that “I’ll put a spell on you” was certainly not used in the movie (or book) as often as he was using it. It didn’t matter: the kid had glommed onto that expression, and for all intents and purposes, the entire Harry Potter experience for him boiled down to “I’ll put a spell on you”.
But the movies are truncated adaptations of the books, the books being too long to clip into 2 and a half hour of film, so I almost figure that perhaps some parts of the books could be shortened in that matter with a glib “I’ll put a spell on you!” Blamo! 30 pages shortened to that phrase, and we can move to the more important scene.
I have not read Harry Potter — or rather, I read the first 30 or 50 pages of the first book before moving on. Obviously I approve of Harry Potter — blah de blah: kids. read. long books. Enjoy it. Striking a blow for Literacy. Hard to disapprove of that, and short of a series of puppy mutilations, any discussion of literary value is moot to that positive.
I can haphazardly measure out basic Fantasy themes from Harry Potter information that has seeped into my consciousness through osmosis. I see the bumper sticker reading “Republicans for Voldemart”. Okay, this is the villian — authoritarian, I presume. I hear negative references to “muggle”, which I think refers to those without magical power, and more generally in our popular culture refers to a lack of creativity — for example, that woman who challenged Harry Potter in some school library or other — muggle. (Or is muggle-wump, a further denigration downward). Harry Potter is an ordinary child who was, in typical fantasy manner, discovered to have great powers and fit into another realm. And thus is born the intrinsic pleasure of identifying with Harry Potter.
Who may or may not have said “I’ll put a spell on you”, but I assume that was a bad guy. And may or may not die in the final book. Page 634. Dagnabit if that didn’t spill out onto the web like that!