I saw the trailer finally at Conan. Which was appropriate enough for me since I alternated reading Conan and John Carter novels in my Physics class in high school. The Tharks and flying ships looked cool, but who knows. Burroughs and planetary romances in general didn’t age well even when I read it, much less now. And Burroughs was no where near as good a writer as Robert E. Howard. Still, in memory of my youth, I’ll give it a shot if it is even half-way decent.
Are you me? LOL.
ERB’s John Carter books were the first sci-fi books I read. Cardboard characters in pulp fiction where the hero gets the princess in the end. Damn I loved those books.
I suspect the source material is not deep enough without a lot of rewriting/re-imaging. No matter, I will have to see it. Wasn’t the original story published in 1912? Only 100 years to go from book to move.
They should call it John Carter of Barsoom. Get that name brand recognition going.
A Princess of Mars, starring Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris, is available for Netflix streaming. I’ll bet that has what you’re looking for.
You missed Traci Lords as Dejas Thoris, middle-aged Bitch-Princess of Mars from 2009. And be thankful that you missed it!
As far as source material, there’s several books in the Barsoom sequence.
I’m currently working through Chessman of Mars, with live action chess-like gaming, where the pieces fight like battlechess 2000…except it’s more like rounds of street fighter when they enter the square to fight to the death, and their “piece” on the board determines their starting equipment. And that’s just the awesome bits spoiled in the title, which doesn’t even happen until the second half of the book.
How can you possibly say this isn’t aging well?! Especially in drips and drabs read for free on my Droid X (since you don’t always have book on you, but you usually have your phone!)
Odd that I was one of the two animators for the original Battle Chess, had read The Chessmen of Mars, and it had virtually no affect on the game.
How can you possibly say this isn’t aging well?! Especially in drips and drabs read for free on my Droid X (since you don’t always have book on you, but you usually have your phone!)
Because I worked at JPL while images of Mars came in live and there was no Helium, no abysmally slow flyers (love that Robert Abbett cover on A Fighting Man of Mars), no Tharks, not much atmosphere and even less water (alas). You have to kind of put your mind into another era to invoke willing suspension of disbelief (which I can do, but Burroughs is notoriously sloppy about anything that is even vaguely scientific, making it that much harder).
I was trying to choose an image appropriate to The Chessmen of Mars, and to my taste, Frank Frazetta in black and white is not any less than his color work. As for John Carter himself, this one ranks higher for me on the Frazetta scale:
And if you have to have a Frazetta female (“I do, I do!”):
Though, of course, I appreciate the ones you posted also (I’m from the buy the book because Frazetta did the cover artwork era).
I think you can solve a lot of the aging problems by just not calling Barsoom Mars at all and just assuming it’s some kind of alternate dimension/far flung fantasy world. There’s really no reason it has to be the actual planet Mars.
Except that Carter sees the planet of War in the sky and makes an appeal to it. And then you can toss the whole Percival Lowell inspired canals/dying planet thing, not to mention the whole God of War/idealized warrior world angle. The basic underpinnings don’t make sense then.
This is my personal fave. I also love FF women. There is definitely some meat on DT’s bones in this painting. :-)
[nostalgia]
I remember going through the book racks in used book stores in my youth looking for SF/Fantasy books with Frank Frazetta covers.
[/nostalgia]
Was I judging books by their covers? Shame on me.
I don’t think you need any of that for the story to work. Those themes can still be in there without the “Get it? He’s on Mars!” wink/nudge. The notion that Mars is an inhabitable world with multiple sentient civilizations makes a lot less sense than any complications introduced by not calling it Mars.
I’m better off with a steampunk mentality than I am with tossing the entire underpinnings of the Mars series. I mean, otherwise just be honest and file off all the names, including Burroughs.
Granted I’ve only read the first book, and that was a long time ago, but I really think you’re giving the Mars thing way too much weight. Also, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the trailer doesn’t mention Mars at all outside of the “JCM” logo at the end. Modern audiences aren’t too bright, but they know you can’t run around and play Tarzan on Mars. At the very least, I’m interested to see how they gloss over the Mars aspect to make it palatable to a modern audience that doesn’t even know what “steampunk mentality” means.
The easy way to do the Mars thing is to make the astral projection thru time also, back to before the Martian civilizations were wiped out.
IIRC, some of the Burroughs pastiches(Resnick?) did this.
Or you can just call it Barsoon and the unwashed masses with just go with ‘another planet’.
Hell, it can all be a hallucination for all I care. I just want to see pulp adventure done with a big budget.
The original proposed animated movie by Fleischer was scuttled by the suspicion that “modern” audiences of the thirties wouldn’t buy into it. They lost the chance to be the first feature length animated film and Flash Gordon came out that year.
Whether they want a simple title to able to hang sequel titles on or whether they wish to hide the Mars link to give people to a chance to buy into the general concept first, I don’t know. But when all is said and done, the Disney film is still set on Mars.
Wtf. Just keep it Mars, he goes back (or forward) in time too. Problem solved. Next up: Never-Never Land and Heaven debunked by Pixar astronomers.
Never-Never Land and Heaven are excused on account of magic, much the same as John Carter’s teleporting to another planet trick. I’m going to guess that humanoid life on Mars, which is a whole different element as far as suspension of disbelief goes, crosses into “this is stupid” territory for most viewers today even before you get into the sword-and-sandal He-Man conceit.
Not saying it’s impossible to make it work, I’m saying it’s going to be a really tough sell. I think Disney agrees, considering the move of the release date from summer (“We have confidence this movie will resonate and do well”) to March (“Oh God what have we done just put it out and let it die quickly at the end of the fiscal year so we can forget about it”). But you never know. Could be the surprise hit of the year. Certainly it wouldn’t be the first time sci-fantasy captured the public imagination.
Post-Transformers, the “this-is-stupid” plausibility bar’s already lower than…Pellucidar.
My advice to Disney would be if you’re so embarrassed by the premise of John Carter Warlord of Mars to reference Mars because the last one had Mars and Moms in it, then don’t make John Carter.
Bradbury wrote “Martian Chronicles” decades after canals and Martians were scientifically debunked. He just didn’t give a shit. Space had sound in Star Wars. Space elves love serving aboard human-run starships. If Martian girls are red, red-hot oviparous nudists, I require no further backstory. It’ll get kids (well, boys) back into astronomy and polishing their telescopes every night.