Friday, July 27, 2007

concisio!

J.K. Rowling has said she might later write an encyclopedia, as apparently there are all kinds of interesting details and asides about the Harry Potter universe that have never made it into any books (HT: TS). Great, but if she thinks I'm going to stand in line and stay up all night just so I can read The Dean Thomas Backstory, she's got another thing coming. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia entry on Dean Thomas makes this revealing point:
In the UK edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Dean Thomas is not mentioned during the Sorting ceremony. He is, however, correctly sorted in the American edition as a Gryffindor, just after Harry and before Lisa Turpin. According to Rowling, her UK editor felt the chapter was too long and had to trim it down with any extraneous detail he could find.
I would love to see a special "Editor's Cut" of the last four books released. Didn't people do special cuts of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that improved the pacing and cut out most of the Jar Jar Binks character? I bet Brady will have a nice taut rendition of Deathly Hallows when he translates the German edition into English.

4 comments:

jennifer said...

Yet more distractions! I want to see the real epilogue, rather than the cut down version that was in the book...

Ken Houghton said...

Translating the fifth book into concisio would be relatively easy: the first 450 pages get cut to about 30 (Basically, "Harry whined a lot as the press was mean to him after Hermione turned the MoM's best shill into praying mantis fodder.").

Brady said...

I've never seen the German editions, but I wonder if they turn all the quirkily-named magical items into those beautiful, thirty letter words our Teutonic friends are so fond of. So, The Sorting Hat would be, hmmm...
Der Sortierenhut?

Brock#20 said...

The epilogue was supposed to be longer? Has JKR said that somewhere?

7 was top heavy in that too much time was taken getting to the finale. Then then finale felt rushed. It was like a long line of "and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened."

It will make one awesome movie though. The first one that I'm actually looking forward to see!