Until I stumbled across today's Geeks of Doom, I had no idea another animation director had aspirations to make a feature-length John Carter of Mars. ...
In 1931, ... author [Edgar Rice] Burroughs approached Bob Clampett about possibly making a full-length animated John Carter feature. Working with Burroughs’ son John Coleman, Clampett spent a year beginning in 1935 producing a reel of test footage ...
The test was impressive enough for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to acquire the rights to Burroughs’ John Carter novels but when the reel was screened for theatrical exhibitors across the country it was greeted with cold indifference, particularly from those who felt the elaborate sci-fi fantasies wouldn’t play well with audiences in the Midwest. MGM canceled development on the film and the next year Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became the first full-length animated feature ...
And three-quarters of a century later, Andrew Stanton makes Carter. Sometimes in Hollywood, ideas have to percolate a little while before coming to full boil.
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11 comments:
Clampett couldn't have pulled it off at all. He made a handful of good cartoons, but that's about it.
What he's got there sure anticipates Filmation's later adventure-cartoon look. We'll never know if he could have built on that to make a successful product.
I can more imagine the Fleischers tackling something like this and getting it right like they did Superman.
Geez... what was Bob Clampett doing in 1931 that got him in the same circles as ERB?
Edgar rice Burroughs was primarily a marketer . Not a very good writer. After the surprise success of John Carter, he wrote (or supervised the writing of) Tarzan books--meant to be nothing more than a moneymaking franchise ( he freely admitted this). He and clampett and Disney would have bumped into each other a lot--as they were in the same social strata at the time.
In 1931, Bob Clampett was a 17-year old novice 3rd-tier animator at Harmon-Ising and his contact with Disney was from selling him stuffed Mickey Mouse dolls.
And that was the guy ERB zeroed-in one to bring his franchise to life?
That was ERB's social strata? 17-year old doll stuffers? I've heard Hollywood was a small town but...
I've read three of the John Carter novels. Those are WAY better than "not very good" and if their success was unexpected it was certainly not undeserved. Those are solid adventure stories.
Haven't read John Carter, but I have read some of the Tarzan books, repeatedly. They are much better than "not very good" as well.
No one said theyvweren't very good. They're not particularly well written, which is true. But plenty of good movies have been made of pulpy pap.
Gore Vidal (a very good writer) reviewed Burrough's body of work several years ago. Vidal wrote that while ERB's dialogue is weak, he writes action very well, which Vidal considers a difficult trick.
Gore Vidal - the great writer of such classics as Myra Breckinridge....Action wasn't the only thing Vidal had trouble writing
"...I had no idea another animation director had aspirations to make a feature-length John Carter of Mars. ..."
Wrong. If you had read the text in the embedded video - rather than the misinformed Geeks of Doom article that seems to be spreading false rumors everywhere - you'd know that Clampett never tried to make a full-length animated feature of John Carter of Mars, but rather a series of theatrical shorts. Also, it was Clampett that approached Burroughs (in 1936) about adapting JCoM to animation, not the other way around.(The info in the video is most definitely accurate, as it's from the bonus material of the official Beany and Cecil Volume 1 DVD, put out by the family of Bob Clampett himself.)
Clampett was competent as a cartoon maker, but doing something like John Carter was WAAAY over his head.
Andrew Stanton is a competent cartoon maker, but doing something like John Carter is WAAAY over his head.
It doesn't help that John Carter is total crap pulp from a bygone era.
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