Harry Potter is a lot more like Willow than you may have realized

Every generation has a handful of stories that inspire its most creative minds to grow up and construct their own unique worlds. Children of the 1970s and ’80s were changed by Star Wars, Willow, and other classics the same way those of the late 1990s and 2000s read and watched Harry Potter with wide, fascinated eyes.

Jonathan Kasdan is one of the few that was not only inspired by a movie as a kid but went on to create a TV show set in the same world as that movie decades later.

Though Willow is one of many stories that inspired the Hollywood creative, he can’t help but notice its similarities to a popular franchise that emerged less than a decade later. Kasdan told EW that the two heroes of Willow and Harry Potter have a lot in common — and that there’s no way this is pure coincidence.

“You’ve got to wonder if J.K. Rowling wasn’t thinking about this a little bit,” he said while pointing out the parallels between the 1988 film and the first book in the Harry Potter series, which was released in 1997. “It’s hard not to look at the opening of Harry Potter, which is a baby being left on a doorstep, and equate it to this in a way that’s pretty clear.”

Willow‘s Elora Danan, like The Boy Who Lived, is an abandoned infant prophesied to defeat the world’s most evil entity. Rescued and protected until she’s able to confront the evil she is destined to destroy, it’s hard to downplay the similarities between Elora and Harry.

However, many stories at the heart of fantasy — including Star Wars, one movie of which Kasdan’s father Lawrence directed (1980’s The Empire Strikes Back) — revolve around the popular Chosen One trope. When all hope is lost, all it takes is one unlikely hero to defeat the darkness and return the world (or the universe) to its rightful state.

So perhaps Harry Potter‘s creator had stories like Willow in mind while crafting their tale of a young hero who escapes death to later triumph over evil. The beautiful thing about stories is that they build off of one another, with one inspiring another which goes on to inspire more.

Story lovers become storytellers, who just might encourage new storytellers to leave their mark on the world.

The first two episodes of the Willow series premiere on November 30 exclusively on Disney+.