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Whoops! Wrong planet!
Published: 5/14/2012 9:13 AM
Last Modified: 5/14/2012 9:13 AM


A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Even the Library of Congress makes a mistake now and then.

Last week, while driving home from a show, I happened to hear a radio spot for the Library of Congress extolling the joys of reading.

“Open a book, and you enter a whole new world,” the plumy-voiced announcer said.

And to prove that, the advert included a few snippets of dialogue from a recently released film version of a best-selling book, a film on which its creators had lavished funds equal to the gross national product of a couple of Third World nations, that it had released to great fanfare.

Yes, gentle readers – all nine of you out there – the film upon which the Library of Congress had based its efforts to encourage people to read more books was…. “John Carter.”

We will pause for a moment to allow the murmurs of “John WHO?” to subside.

Yes, “John Carter.” The $350 million Disney production about a American soldier from the 1860s magically transported to Mars, where he becomes embroiled in war and romance on a red planet filled with the sort of globular monsters and architecturally impressive females that might appear in a Frank Frazetta wet dream.

Frazetta. Frank Frazetta. Illustrator who created thousands of covers – oh, never mind.

“John Carter” died a swift and not so merciful death at the box office, and people who keep close track of these things believe that Disney could lose as much as $200 million on this project.

For Disney, that’s close to walking-around money. The company’s stock has gone up in the wake of “John Carter,” so the House of Mouse is likely to be content once the fiscal year ends.

As for the Library of Congress, it might seem that hitching its advertising wagon to this particular star was horribly misguided. But there is some logic to it.

“John Carter” the movie is an adaptation of “Under the Moons of Mars,” a serial that first appeared in print in 1912, and was published in book form five years later as “A Princess of Mars.”

It was the first published work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who that same year would create what is his most famous character, Tarzan. “Tarzan of the Apes” would make it into hardcover first, published in 1914, but the character of John Carter was Burroughs’ first – and his own personal favorite – creation.

So, this year is the centennial of Burroughs’ two best-known characters, which is why the Library of America has come out with new facsimile editions of “Tarzan of the Apes” and “A Princess of Mars.”

Burroughs was a pulp writer who aspired to greatness – or at least the respectability of being published in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, which was one of the premier showcases for American popular and literary fiction.

Yet the lure of relatively easy money by feeding the public’s demand for more Tarzan adventures was too much.

Still, as Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz writes in his introduction to the Library of America re-issue of “A Princess of Mars,” Burroughs “is important…to the readers and writers he inspired, the genres he helped shape. At a fundamental level Burroughs is vital to our understanding of what is called the American Century. Situated at a key juncture in the U.S.’s development – the precise instant that the America we know was first a-birthing – his work both protoypically embodies and prototypically unravels primal American fantasies about race, masculinity, history, human-ness, coloniality and civilization.”

And besides, “A Princess of Mars” contains such sentences as, “I turned to meet the charge of the infuriated bull ape.”

How can you NOT want to know what happened next?




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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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