Did the “Wednesday” script start as a Harry Potter copy cat?

Submitted by robbed_blind t3_z5a5di in television

I’m only two episodes in, but I can’t shake the feeling that this show started as a ripoff of Harry Potter, but then they plugged in Wednesday as an easily identifiable protagonist to generate hype and take advantage of an established IP.

The two really obvious parallels that jump out are the four established cliques/houses and that her mother is a notable legacy alumna that excelled at their weird canoe competition. The whole Edgar Allan Poe plot that comes to the front in episode 2 is just too similar Chamber of Secrets. Especially with the low effort puzzle she had to solve, followed by a magical moving statue that gave Dumbledore’s office entrance vibes. But the bigger issue to me is how unimportant the Addams Family has been to the overall plot.

You can plug in any other moody Mary Sue as the protagonist and the show would only need minor rewrites to make it work. Which is a shame because Ortega has done a fantastic job from what I’ve seen, and has been the only reason I’ve made it this far.

So anyways, how likely is it that the script for “Nevermore Academy” bounced around in development hell until someone had the clever idea to plug in the Addams family?

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[deleted] t1_ixuv4hw wrote

Your mind is going to be blown when you find out that “magical academy with hidden secrets” has been a fantasy sub-genre for decades before Harry Potter came out.

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Rauschpfeife t1_ixuvzng wrote

That's wild, man.

(I do find it a bit ironic that the OP is implying that the Wednesday show is derivative, but references something that I always thought was cribbing off other works a lot, as the original.

I mean, depending on who you ask, Harry Potter is the plot of Star Wars, with a bit of Books of Magic for looks, or ripping off any other combination of some of someone's favorite works.

At this point all art is derivative, it seems like, the question is how obvious it is. In Harry Potter's case, I'd say it's fairly obvious.)

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GarlVinland4Astrea t1_ixvizrq wrote

Thank you for bringing up Books of Magic. Because a simple google search will show you how similar the overall aesthetic of the main characters are.

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Roook36 t1_ixvkzqq wrote

lol. I read the Harry Potter series when they came out. But I was so over the "chosen one orphan being brought up by assholes who finds they're talented in magic and are trained by an old wizard". From Star Wars, Wheel of Time, David Eddings, Sword of Truth, blah blah blah

By the time Harry Potter came out I was so over it. Hero of a Thousand Faces and all that.

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StoneGoldX t1_iy0tbkg wrote

Congratulations, you're over one of the basic elements of human storytelling since storytelling existed?

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robbed_blind OP t1_ixuxigb wrote

I guess I could’ve done a better job of titling the post. It’s more that I find it weird that the marketing surround the show was “Addams Family returns with a show centered around Wednesday”, but from what I’ve seen they’ve just plugged Wednesday Addams into a generic school for magical gifted children. You could swap her out with a moody version of Hermione or any other female fantasy protagonist, and show would be virtually identical.

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meatball77 t1_ixxonor wrote

Agreed, how different is this show from say Winx. . . . except for the styling.

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NGNSteveTheSamurai t1_ixv91hb wrote

Some boarding and prep schools have houses. That’s not something Rowling invented. She took things from real life and just applied them to a school for magic.

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slicshuter t1_ixvi4c8 wrote

>really obvious parallels that jump out are the four established cliques/houses

This has been a thing in some schools for decades, my high school had 4 houses named after different birds of prey with corresponding red, blue, yellow and green colours.

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CrazyRaiderfan t1_ixv9nua wrote

I don’t think Wednesday is a Mary Sue either. She screws up a lot. At one point I was thinking she was a terrible detective.

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GarlVinland4Astrea t1_ixvjbbs wrote

Also her personality causes a lot of her own problems throughout the series. She's by no means treated as perfect Mary Sue. Ironically, the Christina Ricci version from the films was a lot closer to a Mary Sue because she was almost always in the right on every subplot, got one over on absolutely everyone, always had the upperhand and was portrayed as far too intelligent for anyone else to compete with.

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QuintoBlanco t1_iy5lpux wrote

>She was almost always in the right on every subplot, got one over on absolutely everyone, always had the upperhand and was portrayed as far too intelligent for anyone else to compete with

That is not what a Mary Sue means.

A key element of a Mary Sue character is that she excels at everything and that she is liked by (almost) everyone.

Wednesday is an outsider and there are very clear limits to the control she has over her surroundings.

The original Mary Sue was a parody for a reason.

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GarlVinland4Astrea t1_iy5q6ij wrote

No a Mary Sue is an writer stand in. She doesn't need to be liked by everyone, she can be disliked by all the wrong people. Wednesday is literally only disliked by obnoxious shitty privilege people in the film that are made out to be people that deserved to be taken down a peg. Even the original parody Mary Sue had the silly green androids capturing her. It's okay for antagonists not to like her. Wednesday pretty much won in every situation of the two films and flipped every situation on it's head and could easily manipulate people into thinking she was doing the right thing. Wednesday in the movies is smarter than everyone she comes against and pretty easily outmaneuvers them all the characters that you would want to like Wednesday generally like her. The only difference between her and a conventional Mary Sue is the typical Addams Family twist that she's very macabre.

The show Wednesday isn't that. She constantly faces obstacles she can't overcome because some of her qualities are presented as flaws that hurt her. Not the case in the films.

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QuintoBlanco t1_iy7o2mm wrote

The key is that a Mary Sue is liked by the establishment.

Technically James Bond is a Mary Sue, he's a part of the establishment, extremely competent in almost every aspect, respected by men, and desired by women.

If we take away the trust MI-6 has in him, he would not be a Mary Sue, but the misunderstood outsider who is always right. Dirty Harry perhaps?

The Bond villains are his green aliens.

As for being a writer stand-in, allegedly Bond was a type of wish-fulfillment for Fleming who was not accepted into MI-6.

A Mary Sue is a special type of writer stand in.

It's a character that exists in a world where the establishment fully embraces the alter ego of the writer because they acknowledge the character's competence.

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Old-Big3570 t1_iyd45vy wrote

I am totally convinced this is a rip-off of the HP franchise. Here are some examples:

  • Wednesday is ‘the key’ just as Harry is the ‘Chosen one’
  • The secret gathering room gives me HP 5 vibes with a rip-off ‘room of requirement’ including a Dumbledores office-like entrance.
  • ⁠‘normies’ are ‘muggles’
  • ⁠the wolf-fighting is so similar as the fight in the forrest in HP 3 (Sirius Black vs. Professor Lupin).
  • ⁠the (biology) professor that turns out to be the bad guy and was planning to kill Wednesday from the beginning just like how professor Quirrel tries to kill Harry ( HP 1 ending).
  • ⁠the rip-off of the ‘Tri wizard Cup’ in HP 4 looks very similar.
  • the mermaids attacking the contestants under water similar to HP4.
  • ⁠the way Wednesday asks the guy out is exactly the same as when Harry asks Cho Chang to ball.
  • ⁠the way and the theme of the dance is also exactly the same as in HP4.
  • the way Wednesday comes walking down is also the same as how Hermione walks down the stairs.
  • ⁠the death of the Headmaster (HP 6).
  • at the final scene when Crackstone and Wednesday are fighting Crackstone gets stabbed from behind by Bianca looks similar to when Neville fights Naghini with the sword of Gryffindor.
  • Crackstone dissolves just like Lord Voldemort style in a burst of ash and flames.
  • Wednesday and her friends have saved their outcast community from eradication, just like Harry Potter and the Battle of Hogwarts.

There are a lot more similarities but I just remembered these few.

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Kelbotay t1_ixuvne0 wrote

Maybe but that's not exactly an original concept either, harry potter just happens to be the most popular one amongst certain audiences.

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nizzzzy t1_iy1huuv wrote

Did you see the finale yet? It feels and watches exactly like the finale of Harry Potter

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preppytarg t1_ixv34sj wrote

The boarding school setting is just derivative in general.

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ViskerRatio t1_ixx6p7x wrote

My suspicion is that the script-in-development-hell idea might be true. While the whole notion of a "magical academy" is fairly common (there have been multiple such series in recent memory), the series tends to break with the Addams Family mythos with an explicitly magical world rather than an implicitly magical world.

That is, in previous incarnations of the Addams Family, they're weird and they're like these various horror/magic archetypes, but they tend to exist in a (mostly) grounded reality rather than one where everyone just blithely accepts that vampires, werewolves and merfolk simply exist as an entire cultures - or that you've got mystical powers such as precognition and telekinesis as every day occurrences.

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reddit455 t1_ixvagpm wrote

"Hogwarts" is just the name JK Rowing came up with for her version of a reasonably popular trope. magic school

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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WizardingSchool

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Happy Days Era "witch school"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabrina_the_Teenage_Witch

Sabrina the Teenage Witch is a comic book series published by Archie Comics about the adventures of a fictional American teenager named Sabrina Spellman. Sabrina was created by writer George Gladir and artist Dan DeCarlo, and first appeared in Archie's Madhouse #22 (cover-dated Oct. 1962). Storylines of the character at elementary-school-age also appear under the title "Sabrina -- That Cute Little Witch" in almost all of the Little Archie comics.

this is the pre-internet Harry Potter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Witch

The Worst Witch
The Worst Witch was first published in 1974 by Allison & Busby, and proved to be an immediate success, selling out within two months.[9][10]
Plot
The novel begins with Mildred Hubble and the upcoming traditional assembly where all of the first-years are given their own black cats that they will teach to ride on their broomsticks with them. Unlike the other girls, who receive black kittens, Mildred receives a tabby cat, which she simply calls Tabby. The kitten is unable to sit on a broomstick, so Mildred carries Tabby in her bag. Miss Hardbroom disapproves and Mildred has to stop. Afterwards, another witch called Ethel Hallow teases Mildred about it, and dares her to turn her into a frog. Mildred loses her temper and turns Ethel into a pig instead.

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Zaddo98 t1_iyazz31 wrote

There was moving statues, staircase paintings, a werewolf turning, bringing back people from the dead, them inside the food lift in the house (similar to when the basilisk was in harry's parents house), sirens, the water themed sports with a merman involved... if you ask me its more than just a coincidence...

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pahamack t1_iy1pj94 wrote

did "Naruto" script start as a Harry Potter copy cat?

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Substitute wizards for ninjas!

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CaiAbaixo t1_ixzmlaf wrote

I agree, this show is a total copy of Harry Potter. The ‘normies’? Oh and she is also “special”? Werewolves and magical creatures? Dang. Writers literally made a cheap version of Harry Potter.

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FamiGami t1_ixuv9jg wrote

Ask Tim burton. Until then, don’t make things up.

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ozgun1414 t1_ixuy6m5 wrote

dont say things like that. as a pottercholic i can eat that shit right now. and if i puke, thats on you. literally.

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