The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs

There's a difference between surface resemblance and A CONSISTENT SPIRIT.

Somebody made a John Carter movie which altered the CIRCUMSTANCES for the hero, but which was TRUE TO BURROUGHS where the nature of the characters was concerned. I really enjoyed it. The hero here IS NOT a crybaby.



To clarify a bit: in this movie, what is _called_ "Mars" is in a different solar system, but is referred to as something like "Alternate Mars" because its environment is _like_ Barsoom in the novels. Lead actress Traci Lords may have done adult stuff in her career, but she projects dignity here. Another point of preserving what matters in the story is that the "Green Martians" in this movie have only _four_ limbs. Burroughs wrote that they had _six_ limbs each; but he explicitly said that the middle pair of limbs could operate as arms >or< as legs. Nobody, including Disney, _ever_ got this right; instead, they _always_ were shown simply having four arm-type arms placed high on the body. Again, therefore, the low-budget version saved money by just going with two arms and two legs. The _society_ of the Green Martians remained much as Burroughs envisioned it.
 
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If you've read Burroughs extensively, you know he's in the space opera wish fulfillment fantasy business, a sort of Harlequin Novels Meets the Martians thing. If you haven't read him extensively, read the following paragraph and save yourself a lot of time and money:

"His masculine arms trapped her helplessly, as a rare butterfly, yet so gently that as she dropped her resistance, she saw in his eyes a light of common souls, a very special sort of water from a special sort of well for she has always anonymously thirsted. 'Jenser!' she cried, 'You make me tremble like the aspens of Phobos!'" ;-)
 
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