A Princess of Mars

Currently I am reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' (yes, the same man who created and wrote Tarzan) A Princess of Mars. This is a project Hollywood has long tried to get made, most recently it was in the hands of Jan Favreau who says he is going to do the project, but he put it on the backburner while he went to do Iron Man, an adaptation of a Marvel comic.

I remembered this old AintItCoolNews piece on Princess of Mars from a few years ago when Robert Rodriguez signed on to direct it. The thing that always gets me is for how long people have been trying to adapt A Princess of Mars into a film:

"Bob Clampett and John Coleman Burroughs attempted to make it 5 years before Disney produced SNOW WHITE. Had they succeeded, it would have been the first feature-length animated film, and it would have been radically different than the type of films Disney ended up producing. Who knows what the animation industry would look like now if they had succeeded. They actually made it to animation tests that Clampett animated, while John and his wife painted the cels, and these can be seen on the BEANY AND CECIL DVD. If you want to read more about this potential version of the film, you can do so right here."

The AICN article has plenty of artwork concerning A Princess of Mars and other books from the Jack Carter series by Burroughs. There are also plenty of links to other sites concerning the series.

Ray Harryhausen also took a crack at it, but he was frustrated by the scale of the story. He never managed to find a way to break it down to a feasible size, and had to give up on it eventually.