John Carter: the Movie, the Reality, and the Fan

How a story written in 1912 could seem so fresh today.

The other night I went to see John Carter, a movie treatment of several of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars novels.  Originally, I was trepidatious at best, with yet another Hollywood treatment of a beloved classic.  Face it, Hollywood has seldom done other than to mangle, misinterpret, and maul favorite science fiction stories.  The trailer did nothing to change my mind, with its endless hard cuts to CGI explosions and three second action sequences piled on each other.

However, a strange thing happened.  All my friends, those whom I trusted for their judgment, urged me to see the film and lauded it as a better than passable product.  Sure that this was some early April Fool’s Day joke, I went to see John Carter and was pretty pleased with the result that I was pleasantly surprised.

First, let’s take into account first of all that Princess of Mars was published in 1912 (that's a century ago) and therefore was pre-cliché because Burroughs created the alien world genre.  Burroughs not only had a story about planetary travel and encounter, but the aliens were believable and fully filled out as characters.   Although the film grazed information for a couple of different books and added an unnecessary backstory, it still managed to work fairly well.  The Tharks, specifically, Tars Tarkas and family, really had a lot of nuance and character for CGI figures.  Uh, lets don’t forget Woola either, he had lots of heart and many legs.

I’d like to retract my earlier skepticisms, and give an endorsement to this Mars movie.  Despite a few flaws and Hollywoodizations, the film comes off as a good reflection of this 80 plus year old classic.  By the way, I made a blog entry about John Carter back last summer, on 26 September 2011, that might prove to be good reading to Burroughs fans.  Interestingly enough, the entry made well before the movie release still holds up in the light of the movie.

John Cater was pretty heavily panned by film critics because of its obsolete heroic style and clichés.  Princess of Mars and the other subsequent books of the series pretty much predated most of what we consider golden age Science Fiction, it was from these books and others of this vintage that the clichés were created.  For those of you who want to read Edgar Rice Burroughs' works which are now copyright-free and available for download, here are the URLs from Project Gutenberg.        
                                                                                   CoastConFan
Just click and enjoy.                       

A Princess of Mars

Gods of Mars

Warlord of Mars

Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Chessmen of Mars
if you don't like Mars, try the center of the earth: 

Pellucidar

CASE STUDY: JOHN CARTER, CAPTAIN, CSA

Insanity, delusion, amnesia, guilt, and wealth

Found recently is an early image of Captain John Cater, CSA who after the Late War, prospected in the Arizona Territory, finding a vein of gold and perhaps something else.  He later retired to a small house in New York State along the Hudson River, dying on 4 March 1886.  He left a peculiar will behind and a quantity of documents, which were discovered over the course of years.  Among many peculiarities of his life was his tomb, which was specially constructed while he was alive to be unopenable, except by a mechanism located within the tomb itself. suggesting he also had a fear of catalepsy along with the delusion of time and space travel.

John Carter, Circa 1862

He claimed to have been chased into a cave in Arizona while prospecting by marauding Apaches where he astrally projected himself to another planet he called Barsoom.  There is some conjecture that Barsoom was actually Mars a half million years ago, which meant that he believed he not only projected himself over millions of miles but over hundreds of thousands of years in the past.  Carter also had selective amnesia, claiming to have no memory of a time before the Civil War.   

Being wealthy, he avoided being sent to a sanitarium and hid away in his cottage in a remote area until his premature death in 1886.  His death certificate has disappeared as well as nearly all records of his life outside of this photograph and some military records with the Virginia cavalry.  Carter obviously had an accomplice who destroyed documents, dropped off packages of documents over the years and sometimes masqueraded as Carter “Uncle Jack” after his death.

Outside of his well written delusional dreams, which were subsequently published as fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a few records, and this photo, there is no proof that John Carter had even lived.  His birth, baptismal, and most military records and, most curiously, his death certificate disappeared.  There have been rumors that John Carter became an immortal, not just on this world, but also on several worlds over a huge span of time.  That conjecture dwelled upon too deeply might just land you a billet in the Arkham Sanitarium.  This image is part of an exhibit at the Rhode Island Museum of History about the history of mental treatment of delusional persons.

                         
                                                                                                CoastConFan

Project Gutenberg has free downloads of several text modes as well as some audio books of the following books:  Princess of Mars, Gods of Mars, Warlord of Mars, Thuvia Maid ofMars, Chessmen of Mars, Pellucidar