This is one of those summertime columns on less-weighty topics, so …

• Harry Potter and the Pot of Gold: The world’s longest run of sequels since Charles Dickens used to write tearjerkers about Little Dorrit a chapter at a time for newspapers is reaching the end of its rope today, as Part II of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows opens to the sobs of millions of adoring fans.

I’m a huge science fiction and fantasy buff, and yet I never could get engaged with this series, which started out in a mostly lighthearted fashion (at a school whose motto was “Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon,” no less) and ended up in widespread death and destruction, with Harry’s fate being — well, see the movie if you haven’t read the book, OK?

Yes, the Lord of the Rings follows the same arc, opening with cute little Hobbits enjoying their ale while watching a magical fireworks display and ending three books later in widespread death and destruction, followed by the chief protagonist literally sailing off into the sunset with the last of the Elves, never to return.

These are not the only mega-examples of the genre. From Star Trek to Star Wars to Indiana Jones, similar tales have spanned generations, and have many worthy successors.

To name just one, George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” is another fantasy epic with four volumes in print, a new book on the verge of release and an HBO series set for a second season.

People who can’t see past the fantasy in these works think of them as unrealistic to the max, but their fans do not.

While the settings are fantastic, the stories are hardly “escapist,” featuring instead all the archetypes of literature.

They include conflict, betrayal, sacrifice, nobility, courage, loyalty, redemption, despair and desperate struggles against overwhelming odds.

Such themes spring from our deepest natures in pitting good against evil, and are found in classics from Sophocles to Shakespeare and beyond.

So it’s good news that “The Hobbit,” a sort of LOTR prequel (although J.R.R. Tolkein never intended it as such) is coming out as a two-parter, the first half in December 2012 and the second a year later. And you thought only Los Angeles had a problem with Smaug?

Oh, and for Lewisians, the last film in the Narnia series, “Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” didn’t break even in the States but ended up earning more than $400 million when foreign sales came in, making another sequel, reportedly “The Magician’s Nephew,” more likely. (Sorry, “Silver Chair” fans, I wanted that one, too.)

If this sort of thing delights you as much as it does me, there’s much to anticipate. Or, as Tolkein’s Elves would put it, we are in for vanya sulie ar’ quel fara — “Fair winds and good hunting.”

• Cable critter capers: I am astounded by the number of cable programs devoted to tracking down everything from flying saucers to ghosts to legendary wild creatures.

These aren’t single episodes, either, but ongoing, regular series featuring hunts for UFOs, fabled beasties like the chupacabra of the Southwest, the Jersey Devil of the Garden State’s pine barrens, or lake monsters like Scotland’s Nessie and Champ, a reputed denizen of Lake Champlain (I can’t wait for someone to see “Moosie” in Moosehead or “Sebagonzo” in Sebago).

• Top of the charts: Still, the No. 1 worldwide questworthy critter remains the ever-elusive Bigfoot. (The proper plural, I have learned, is “Bigfoots,” unless you call them by their Indian name, “Sasquatch,” abbreviated “quatch” or “quatches” — and don’t forget it’s “Yeti” in the Himalayas).

Bigfoots, like UFOs, have a series of their own, with investigators seemingly collected less from the ranks of academia and expert hunters and trackers and more from the corner bar. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

The evidence they present is the usual stuff — grainy movies taken from a distance, testimony from excited but usually unidentified eyewitnesses, plaster casts of big footprints and recordings of haunting hoots far away in the night.

But no Bigfoots. Never any real Bigfoots. Or even just one of them. Even though this continent has been inhabited by humans for upwards of 30,000 years. While it has had many species go extinct, we have fossils for the ones no longer around, and — especially since Europeans with boomsticks showed up half a millennium ago — lots of dead animals of all current species, too.

But no Bigfoots. Not one, despite people with guns prowling the continent from north to south and east to west for hundreds of years.

You’d think, if they really existed, somebody would have shot at least one by now.

You’d think.

• Boo! Then there are the ghost shows. I may doubt Bigfoot, but I was less of a skeptic about ghosts, and something that happened a decade ago settled the issue for me — but these shows are something else, like “Haunted Antiques.”

I’ll bet it’s big in Hallowell.

My favorite is “Ghost Hunters,” in which two guys with a Roto-Rooter business (!) somehow got the SyFy Channel to finance a storefront office, a couple of SUVs and some electronic gear and set themselves and a couple of their friends (think corner bar again) up as spook specialists — and they’re making a ton of dough doing it.

The whole thing is couched in the highest scientific terms, except that when they actually run across something that appears to be supernatural, their typical response is, “Holy s***! A ghost!” Which sort of takes away from the disinterested, cool, dispassionate, analytical nature of their inquiries.

But, hey. Who you gonna call?

M.D. Harmon is an editorial writer. He can be contacted at 791-6482 or at mharmon@mainetoday.com