Yup! If I’d had left out “starring Kevin Costner”, you could throw in Slapshot as well.
Come into my parlor, Spider-Man and The Fly.
Exactly.
The main character who is stranded with companions including the ridiculously cowardly and the apparently foolish, learns, after a lengthy trip through a strange landscape (which includes some dangerous plants), that the key to returning home is very near where the character arrived.
Wizard of Oz and…Labrynth?
Not quite (I haven’t seen Labrynth, so that might apply too). What I was thinking of as the other one was Ringworld
Lord of the Rings and The Sword of Shannara?
Ayup. And I probably could have made my description twice as long, so profoundly did Terry Brooks copy the details of LotR.
A woman manages to transport an important artifact away from herself just before being captured by agents of evil. The artifact finds its way to a teenage farmer, who lives with his uncle. Sent out in search of the artifact, the bad guys kill the uncle and burn down the farm.
Accompanied by an old man who becomes a father figure to him, the boy learns that he is heir to a great legacy of ancient warriors who were extinguished many years ago. The or man teaches the boy about the sword fighting techniques, rites and rituals of this long-lost group. The old man is ultimately killed by the bad guys. The boy and his new companion escape from the bad guys with a beautiful woman in tow.
There’s a giant battle. Some time later, the boy is reached in a vision by someone who beckons him somewhere for more training.
(I could go on and on. Let’s just say that even at the time the second work was released, it was criticized for being derivative).
Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress.
Yes to Anne of Green Gables. The other book is **Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm **by Kate Douglas Wiggin, which I read after Anne of Green Gables and assumed that Wiggin had copied her plot. (Another similarity is that both heroines acted out a scene from a famous work of literature and got into trouble for it. Anne pretended to be Elaine, from a poem by Tennyson about an Arthurian story, and Rebecca pretended to be Eliza after seeing a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.) However, Wiggin’s book was published decades before L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.
No takers on either? Here’s a hint: both feature a Young Frankenstein castmember.
A disadvantaged youth heads off to the school of wizards to learn the secret behind a dark, all-powerful evil and finds he has himself quite a reputation in the meantime.
Er, this might have more than two.
A strait-laced, blue collar high school male falls in love with an exciting, pretty young rich girl who has serious mental problems. Her parents warn him to stay away from her, and eventually decide to send her to a faraway boarding school. The young men takes her on an exciting, romantic road trip… but eventually realizes his love is genuinely unbalanced and a danger to herself and others. He takes her back home, and they break up tearfully, but he never forgets her.
Hmm. Don’t know The Hidden Fortress. But Star Wars is the elder work I have in mind.
I’d guess the other one you’re thinking of was Eragon, then.
I’m pretty sure one is Clue. Can’t think of the other.