Harry Meets World, part 2:

I read this very promising blog topic about Harry Potter's similarities to seminal TGIF/Disney Channel staple, Boy Meets World.  He got me all excited about the premise, and then, like a boy, he left me disappointed on the verge.  The only point he actually developed, is the Topanga/Hermione connection, (and very slightly on the Feeny/Dumbledore).

But then he went off course with Cory & Shawn/Harry & Ron:
    "Unlike the T.G.I.F. classic however, the geek turned hot-geek character (Topanga/Hermione) is not snogging the main character (Cory/Harry) but his white-trash (wizard-trash?) sidekick, (Sean/Ron). Can you imagine if it was Topanga and Sean instead of Topanga and Cory?? Whoa. I just blew your mind, right?"

The big problem?  He got too caught up on Cory & Harry being the main characters.

Take another look if Cory is Ron & Shawn is Harry:  We have the cool guy (Shawn/Harry) and his best friend/sidekick, the goofy kid with unusual hair (Cory/Ron).  The goofy kid's confrontational relationship with the geek becomes a romantic relationship with the now-hot-geek.

Once you get the main characters right, you open up a whole avalanche of connections:

• The cool guy has MAJOR issues with absent parents (only Shawn's aren't dead, they're just crazy).
• The goofy kid is part of a large, loving family:  housewife mother, working dad, cute little sister (Morgan/Ginny), cooler older brother(s)--I'm leaving Percy out, he's a douche, but basically all the other older Weasley boys are cooler than Ron.
• Loving family provides haven & family enviroment for family-issue ridden cool guy.
• Cool guy finds a middle-aged man with shaggy, dark hair (Jonathan Turner/Sirius Black) to be a father figure in place of absent parents--who leaves the story with very little notice.
• Cool guy's first relevant romance is an inter-racial relationship (Angela/Cho), and goofy kid and hot geek flirt with the idea of other relationships (random 1 episode guest stars/Viktor Krum & Lavender Brown), but everyone knows they're going to end up together.

So I guess it would have been just a matter of time before Shawn would have started making out with Morgan--and maybe Harry's got a long lost half brother out there.

And Dumbledore used to help David Hasslehoff fight crime.