I don’t know what the number is, but isn’t there a book/theory from a while back about their being only 32, or 24, or whatever basic story lines? I’m sure this is really impossible to get down to a number, but I’m just wondering who it was that said this, where and what the number was. Afterall, there seem to be only 5 or 6 basic story lines in star trek. 
I wonder if you’re thinking about Joseph Campbell? His work was in the areas of archetypes and comparative mythology. Probably his most influential work was a book called “Hero with a thousand faces” published in the late 1940s.
“Hero with a thousand faces” is Campbell’s theory that all myths across cultures are essentially the same stories. He sets out a range of archetypal situations and characters, which he argues are common to all myth “sets”.
The book itself is still widely available. While it has been roundly criticised by later writers, it has been a very influential text not only in medieval studies where I encountered it, but in a range of other studies including psychotherapy.
If you’d like more information about Joseph Campbell you can find it here:
George Lucas is said to have used Campbell’s work as a basis for the “Star Wars” movies, I have no idea how true that is.
blackhobyah,
I don’t understand why you think that Joseph Campbell’s work would particularly be the theory that drhess is thinking about. Campbell’s point is that there is exactly one plot outline for all stories, not 64 of them. If you’ll read the link to the column by Cecil Adams, you’ll see that people have made claims that there anywhere from 1 to 69 different stories in the world.
Well, I didn’t say that the Campbell book was the one the OP was necessarily referring to, I just wondered. And I wondered because the Campbell book is very well known and has a very wide currency in all kinds of fields for some 50 years, so that if someone has vaguely heard about a theory of this type, it’s not unlikely that they’ve heard about or read Campbell’s work at some stage.
It’s possible that the mention of Star Wars may also have made the connection in my mind, since I had heard the story about George Lucas before.
And since the column by Cecil Adams didn’t mention Campbell, it seemed like extra information that might be worth having.
I don’t think I claimed to be providing “the answer”, just one which might have been useful or interesting. <SHRUG>