From DennisMansfield.com : There’s a quick and savage scene in Disney’s “John Carter” film where the main character from 19th Century Earth is in an arena surrounded by Martian beings.
The Earthling, Confederate Civil War Captain John Carter (think Cowboys and Aliens) challenges an evil Martian warlord. They fly through the air towards each other to engage in battle. But just as they meet, John Carter cuts off the head of the beast in an instant, for one of the most surprising (and certainly the quickest) film confrontations in recent memory.
Having spent $250 million on the film’s production and over $100 million additional on the PR for the film, I can’t help but think that a similar fate should happen to the firm that promoted this film.
To see the trailers, to see the online videos, to read (if you could find them) the previews of the film, a typical film goer would have no idea what the film is about… or the rich heritage of the story itself.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, of Tarzan fame, was the originator of the entire storyline. (There are many books.)
But the PR of the film would have you believe “John Carter” was an orphan, without a century+ of fans – for goodness sakes, it was a film project that was lusted over by George Lucas BEFORE Star Wars.
None of this was known… or even presented.
Here’s the kicker.
The film is really enjoyable. Really enjoyable. As I left the theater, I FB’d that I found the film more engaging than I did Star Wars. C’mon… and the PR “experts” could not do better than they did?
Willam Dafoe is the only higly visible major star in it (and he does a VO-only of a Martian leader). The rest of the cast members are strangley unknown… and yet, believable.
Michael Cavna of The Washington Post did an admirable review of the film, touching on many concerns I share about how terrible the PR was on this thing.
Someone needs to pay the price for this Hollywood PR disaster.
But the film’s director, producers, cast and crew should not be the ones to meet the fate of the evil Martian warlord.
The PR firm should be forced to go to the ER, knowing all too well that severed heads cannot be reattached.
Den
Washington Post
THE RANT: ‘JOHN CARTER’s’ MASSIVE FALLOUT: Who’s to blame for Disney’s ‘$200-million’ bomb
SOMETIMES BAD FLOPS happen to good people. Even those hideous, avert-your-eyes flops that cause you to question how so much talent can go to so much disgraceful waste. Amid the commercial carnage that follows the CGI blood-splatter, even Hollywood’s best coroners are sometimes stumped by the precise cause of staggering box-office death. They walk away, shaking their heads, chalking it up to fickle audiences or muddled plots or who-knows-what-exactly? Commercial death comes, as it must, to all serial big-spenders backing gargantuan movies.
But in the case of “John Carter,” it didn’t have to be this way.
From Box Office Magazine, by Matthew Piscitelli, Anthropologist
John Carter was written 100 years ago in 1912 and you see the scientific thinking of that day in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ depictions of these creatures and their society. At the time, anthropologists thought along the lines of what’s called “unilineal evolution,” the idea that people and groups evolve from simple societies to what was considered the pinnacle of social evolution: European civilization. It’s essentially a racist view, that the people who the colonialists encountered were less-evolved, barbaric, and it was their job to save them. One early anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, even categorized groups based on a scale of savagery to barbarism to civilization. Savages, for example, had fire and bows and arrows, but once metal-working and agriculture developed, you were considered a barbarian. Finally, once you developed writing, you were civilized.
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In this, the season of John Carter, I have found my thoughts occasionally returning to the year 1976 when I was a graduate student in a seminar on the Modern American Novel, one of the highlights of which (besides reading Pynchon, Barth, Bellow, and Vonnegut and getting graduate credit for it) was a series of dinners with some of the same writers we were reading. Most notably — John Barth paid us a visit, right about the time that Giles Goat Boy was making waves and Barth was emerging as one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
Barth was jovial, engaging — and of course the students were out to impress — and so the dinner conversation turned to structuralism and semiotics, the arcane method of literary criticism that was then in favor. Thinking I would throw a bit of a hand grenade into the conversation, I made a cynical observation — something to the effect that if I were to apply structuralism criteria, it would be hard to distinguish beween the value of, say, Giles Goat Boy and the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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This is a historical fable to be watched for its imagery and not analyzed for its plot. John Carter deserves and merits respect.
by Carole Mallory for Huffington Post: Frank Frazetta rotoscoped me for director Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice. Remember Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat which in the ’80s made him a star? Well, Bakshi cast me in Fire and Ice. We filmed the movie and then I was rotoscoped by Frank Frazetta. Rotoscoping is a process of creating a cartoon by drawing directly on the film.
Frank Frazetta also drew early images of John Carter. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a fan of Frazetta and they collaborated with Frazetta doing the book jackets for many of Burroughs’ novels. Joseph Stalin’s favorite writer, Burroughs flunked his entrance exam for West Point. He had more important things to do. In 1912, he created Tarzan shortly after he created John Carter. At the age of 74, he died alone reading the Sunday comics in bed. He wrote over 91 novels, 26 of which were about Tarzan. ” I write to escape… to escape poverty,” he said. In 1950, he died a wealthy man.
When I watched Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, I was mesmerized by the fantasy of what had once been Frazetta images.
The reception that John Carter has received in lieu of Burroughs’ and Frazetta’s involvement is unfair. This is a historical fable to be watched for its imagery and not analyzed for its plot. John Carter deserves and merits respect. It is a bridge to cinema history from Tarzan to today. Bravo to all those who collaborated on it to make it as splendid as it is. And booooooo to those who were laying in wait for its opening to lambast it with a litany of grievances and schadenfreude all of which ignore the visual splendor of this Frazetta-influenced film. Pixar executive Morris and director Stanton felt Frazetta’s art was dated and this film should have a different look. Perhaps this was their mistake. But if you allow your fantasies to take over you can see Frazetta’s influence and spirit.
Even in these rather dreary days in the aftermath of a disappointing opening weekend for John Carter, ProgressUSA.com has posted a wonderful story about the 1957 “Mars and Beyond”, a Disney production that included a very humorous look at Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom. Directed by Ward Kimball for “Disneyland” TV series, the segment on Barsoom includes some very funky sketches.
Here it is — the full hour.
From the LA Times: It was 100 years ago last month that author Edgar Rice Burroughs introduced the character of John Carter — an ornery Confederate soldier, mysteriously transported to Mars, who tangles with green men, and then red ones, from an ancient civilization. Over that century, Mars has been rivaled only by our moon when it comes to off-planet fantasies, and it’s maintained a mystique with no heavenly rivals.
On the page and on the screen, our cosmic neighbor has been spun every way imaginable: “The Martian Chronicles,” “My Favorite Martian” and “Total Recall.” The list is growing in another direction as video games such as Red Faction and Doom draw audiences into the Red Planet’s gravitational pull.
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by Terence Bowman for Den of Geek: Adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels haven’t fared well in the past, so can Andrew Stanton’s John Carter break the cycle? Terence finds out…
Published on Mar 7, 2012
This Friday, one of science fiction and fantasy writer Edgar Rice Burroughs’ most popular characters is finally making his big screen debut. And it’s not that yelling guy in the loin cloth who hangs out with apes. No, the movie is about Burroughs’ other most popular character, John Carter of Mars.
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From Superhero Hype: This Friday, Finding Nemo and WALL•E director Andrew Stanton will go where no other filmmaker has managed to go before, as he tackles the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs in Disney’s John Carter, and genre fans, whether in comics or movies, may be pleasantly surprised by the familiarity of some of the themes, being that Burroughs’ work had such a huge creative influence on fantasy and science fiction writers in the hundred years since the first book, “A Princess of Mars.”
By now, you’re likely to have seen the commercials and trailers, but maybe you haven’t read any of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books yet. Since it’s opening in a few days, you probably won’t have time, but don’t worry, we’re here to help.
The sad fact is that John Carter of Mars hasn’t remained as iconic as Superman or Sherlock Holmes or Spider-Man or other fictional characters whose stories everyone knows. That’s why we’ve put together this brief overview of some of the characters and races encountered by the protagonist of the title. Unfortunately, this may not be stuff you can get from the commercials, nor should you, since director Andrew Stanton probably would want moviegoers to discover the wonders of Barsoom and its inhabitants for themselves by seeing the movie. That said, while Stanton’s movie is a really fun action adventure, for some moviegoers, it’s going to be a lot of information to absorb all at once.
Ironically, a lot of the information here is courtesy of Disney’s production notes, which act as a scorecard that makes it easier to appreciate the movie and all the different characters and races on Barsoom. We also got a bit of help from Josh Kushins’ “The Art of John Carter: A Visual Journey,” a companion book being released by Disney Editions and Encyclopedia Barsoomia. You may be surprised to learn that most of the cast in John Carter also have appeared in other comic-related movies.
Best of all, we’re going to keep this brief guide relatively SPOILER-FREE, which means you can learn just enough to watch the movie without major plot points being spoiled. Cool?
by Michael D. Sellers: Star Wars, Avatar, and John Carter. That’s the cinema progression although by now everyone knows that the 100 year old John Carter books by Edgar Rice Burroughs came first and inspired both Lucas and Cameron. Let’s get a few confessions out of the way: First, I’m a devotee of the books. I read them all as a kid and John Carter of Mars is a precious thing to me, something I’ve waited to see on the screen for more decades than I care to count. This means I’m predisposed to want to like this film and I’m hoping for the best; but it also means I will be demanding of the film-makers because I know how extraordinary it ought to be.
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