I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
As I was making my way home through Gastown on Friday night, I passed a poster promoting the new Walt Disney film
John Carter, which will apparently descend upon an unwitting public on March 9th. Early previews have not given me huge confidence in this swashbuckling adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, but they do make me wonder if the general populace has the least idea of what it's all about.
In other words, who is John Carter?
Old school fans like myself recognize the name immediately, although I suspect that we all append "Of Mars" at the end. John Carter - Virginian gentleman, Civil War veteran, Indian fighter, apparently immortal warrior, and eventual Warlord of Mars* - was the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who is far better known for his ape-man hero Tarzan of the Apes. John Carter's core story is laid out in the three-book series
A Princess of Mars,
The Gods of Mars, and
The Warlord of Mars, but his Martian adventures ended up spanning 11 books (the last of which was finished by Burroughs' son and published posthumously) dealing with every possible form of derring-do on the surface of Mars, or Barsoom as its inhabitants call it.
Although John Carter is initially introduced as an immortal who has no knowledge of his long-forgotten origins, the first book places him in post-Civil War Virginia, from whence a penniless ex-Captain Carter of the Confederate Army heads West to make his fortune. After his mining partner has a fatal encounter with Apaches, Carter takes a wrong turn while trying to escape the same fate, and ends up in a mysterious cave at the top of a mountain. From there, he is transported to Mars by a means which is never fully explained, and which, frankly, is completely irrelevant once Burroughs has gotten his character to where he really wants him to be: the arid sands of Barsoom, a dying planet where every man - or Martian - is in a perpetual state of warfare for the dwindling resources that remain.
Burroughs' Barsoom is an astonishingly rich creation, if not necessarily a plausible one. Starting with the six-limbed tusked green Martians who initially discover Carter upon his arrival, Burroughs fills Barsoom with multi-legged riding thoats, the lion-like banthas, savage fanged calots that serve as watchdogs, giant white apes, flying warships, ruined cities, vast wastelands, deadly swamps, and a veritable rainbow of Martian races: green, red, white, black and yellow. However, all of this is merely background for the romance between John Carter and the incomparable Dejah Thoris, the titular princess of the first book, daughter of the Jed (or king) of the city-state of Helium.**
There's no claim of novelistic brilliance to be made for the Mars books in terms of plot and depth. The stories are unambiguous to the point of cliché: the heroes are uniformly brave, noble, and honourable, and the villains are unreservedly evil and cowardly. That being said, Burroughs wasn't trying to write
War and Peace, he wanted to write tales of thrilling adventure, and his success is complete.
That complete success in defining a Mars of excitement, adventure and romance influenced an entire generation of writers, including Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury, and gave birth to a genre of interplanetary adventure fiction that was best represented by the pulp magazine
Planet Stories, published from 1939 to 1955. Burroughs' work has continued to be an inspiration to innumerable authors and filmmakers over the years. George Lucas acknowledges his debt to Burroughs for
Star Wars, as does James Cameron in the creation of
Avatar, and the list of science fiction authors who pay tribute to Barsoom in one form or another is endless.
However, the task of visual adaptation has always evaded complete success in spite of frequent attempts. The six-limbed green Martians are described as ranging from ten to fifteen feet in height, and as such there are practical issues involved in having a six foot tall human interact with characters almost three times his height, and interpretations of the characters, architecture, weaponry and clothing have met with mixed responses.
A Princess of Mars first saw publication in 1912 as a six-part series in
All Story Magazine, starting in the February issue, so in a way you could consider the current Disney attempt to be a celebration of the character's centennial - a point which has gone completely unremarked upon in promo for the movie. In fact, I'm a bit worried about the manner in which this historic landmark in the genre of science fiction is being marketed. Why has the Walt Disney company removed the movie so far from its iconic origins? Logic would suggest that if you've got the rights to a series with a
massive historical geek following, you'd want to chase that leverage as much as possible.
Instead, it's as if Walt Disney has made a deliberate effort to divorce the movie from its origins by choosing to just use
John Carter as the title, and I have to wonder if it indicates lack of confidence in their treatment of the source material. Would you rush out to see
Heathcliff Earnshaw? Perhaps not - but if I told you that
Wuthering Heights was coming to the big screen, I'd probably have a better chance of getting your attention, purely and simply due to the reputation attached to that title. It has to be a bad sign if Disney isn't willing to use the same approach with
John Carter and
A Princess of Mars.
- Sid
* Well, not
all of Mars, to be really honest about it, mostly the city-state of Helium and its allies, plus the Thark tribe of the green Martians - for example, I'm pretty sure that the guys in Dusar never get on board - but let's not pick nits. After all, a hero is a bit lost without some villains to fight.
** One feels a bit for Dejah Thoris after a while - she seems to spend the entire series being kidnapped, held captive, menaced, threatened, imprisoned, chained, and otherwise abused. It's surprising that she and John Carter find the time to raise a family.
