It’s DVDuesday, as they say on G4-TV’s Attack of the Show! Today is the release date for Disney’s John Carter, the movie adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fantasy novel, A Princess of Mars. But don’t just run out and buy the movie—do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The ’Warp’s special edition of Burroughs’s action-packed tale.
A Princess of Mars features six incredible black-and-white illustrations by artist Eliseu Gouveia (Carmilla, Lorelei: Sects and the City, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0) and an introduction by science fiction expert John Gosling.
As for the movie…
It was a $250-million epic that had the power of Disney behind it, a New York Times bestselling author as one of its screenwriters, and the director of Pixar’s mega-successful Finding Nemo and Wall-E at the helm in his first live-action feature. So how could it turn out to be such a turkey at the box office that it got its ass kicked by the Dr. Seuss animated feature The Lorax—in that movie’s second week of release—and then by the Jonah Hill comedy 21 Jump Street the week after that?
Well, terrible marketing decisions were the biggest factor. Dropping the book’s title for the stunningly generic John Carter; director Andrew Stanton’s head-scratching logic was that no boy would go see a movie called A Princess of Mars, and no girl would see a movie called John Carter of Mars. (The title of this post came from a fan on an Internet forum who’d smartly suggested that Disney should have split the difference and called it John Carter and the Princess of Mars, thus giving it an Indiana Jones feel.) Trailers that told you nothing about the story or its setting—apparently after the failure of the animated feature Mars Needs Moms, Disney felt that Mars was a “bad” word to include in a title, so no mention was ever made of the planet that Carter is transported to. Failing to educate the general public that the movie was based on a novel published in 1912, or that the book was written by the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs’s most famous character.
It took the fans at the John Carter Files Web site, using all the footage that was available online, to accomplish what Disney’s marketing department seemed incapable of doing: create the kind of trailer that would make John Carter look interesting, and let people unfamiliar with the 100-year-old novel know that Carter’s adventures predated—and inspired—movies like Avatar and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (both of which the uninformed public loudly complained were being ripped off by Carter):
Looks interesting, doesn’t it? Well, if you’d like to read the source material on which the movie was based, A Princess of Mars is still available for order from brick-and-mortar stores, as well as from retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Or you can buy it directly from the StarWarp Concepts store.
And librarians: As with our YA dark fantasy Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1 and our other illustrated classic, Carmilla, A Princess of Mars is distributed by Ingram Book Group, available at a standard discount. If you have an account with Ingram, contact your representative and tell them you want to add StarWarp Concepts titles to your library!
