Oh, and Lasciel, between posts 171 and 179, you’re just begging guys to ask for pictures. You know that, right?
Then the movie shouldn’t be made in the first place. Either do it right or don’t do it at all.
Hell, you could sell tickets. 
Wait a minute, you sit around talking about this stuff? You got a lot of time on your hands, or what?
From what I’ve seen in this thread, there would be all sorts of complaining that it’s not naked enough. Besides, as your link shows, it’s been done. Once you’ve admitted that it has to be bowdlerized (not for technological reasons but practical ones), the choices are between a bowdlerized version that looks like an iconic image from another movie (and anything even remotely along those lines will recall that exact image) or something different that draws inspiration not from Star Wars (which of course stole it from Burroughs to begin with) but from the original artwork accompanying the novel, I think the latter is both more artistically satisfying and better attuned to the spirit of the original as it was published.
Oh, and about that complaining I said would occur even if they went with the Leia look? Here’s an example:
If “doing it right” means doing in exact fidelity to the novels, then I suppose they shouldn’t do most movie adaptations. Frankly, I think this fetish with exact fidelity to source material is artistically bankrupt anyway, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. By your standard, I suppose the original novel should never have been published unless Burroughs could talk the publisher out of illustrating it, since the illustrations that accompanied it showed the female characters with clothing (though still, as DrFidelius pointes out, “naked” by Edwardian standards).
And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m still amazed that people seem more worked up about the amount of clothing than, for example, the shape of the flyers or Tars Tarkas’s eyes. Sure some things can completely undermine an adaptation. If they made Barsoom a highly technological alien world in another solar system populated by Whitley Strieber-style “greys” I probably wouldn’t go see it. But as I’ve said, neither Burroughs, who mentioned the nudity only occasionally and sometimes contradicted it with mentions of robes, furs and capes, nor the publisher who commissioned the original artwork, seem to have felt that the nudity was a key factor in defining the world of the novels.
Let me contrast what I said above with two other examples, one of which I’ve mentioned before. The Conan stories make a much bigger point of describing the women as sexy and voluptuous than Burroughs ever does. Howard’s prose drips with exotic eroticism. It would be a much bigger change in tone for a Conan move to have fully clothed woman than this one.
The other example is James Bond. I haven’t read the original stories yet, but the early movies showed about as much skin as they could get away with, and Bond’s aggressive, brutal sexuality was a key element to them. A movie in which Bond was not a womanizer would be very different from the movies that were made from the sixties through the 2000s. The “Bond Girls” were practically a franchise of their own.
But the new Bond series did away with that. I don’t think Vesper was ever shown in a bikini or as merely an object for James’s brutal affections. But few people objected. The new Bond (at least in the first film) stood on his own as a valid and enjoyable updating of the franchise, even though it had a different feel from it’s sources. (And I’d argue that the previous movies as much as the Fleming stories constitute source material.)
Well in point of fact leaked photos of the production show that the Conan movie coming out in August features topless slavegirls in chains. Follow the link in the spoiler box to see, it’s NSFW of course:
So the people that made the Conan movie clearly “get” the costuming issue. However, the Aug. 19 release for the movie indicates to me they might not have “got” the whole plotting/characterization thing.
The covers shown here =
Are by Jusko - Frazetta’s nephew.
My introduction to John Carter Warlord of Mars was the Marvel Comics run -
Normally, I’d agree with you. But honestly, if people want to see hot, naked women- well, there’s The Internet or Adult DVDs/Periodicals. I just can’t get worked up (or see the outrage) about a “General Audience”-intended movie not being full of Naked Space Babes, regardless of what the original source material said.
Exactly - I’d rather watch an imperfect movie that actually got made than a perfect one that never will.
This movie was first greenlighted in 1931.
If accepting non-nude protagonists means that it won’t take another 80 years for this movie to get made, then i’ll accept it.
Somehow I don’t think the nudity in the books has been the stumbling block. Call me cynical. But now you’ve got me dreaming of a raunchy pre-Hayes Code version of John Carter of Mars with leggy Ziegfield Girls doing synchronized leaping about on Mars.
More along the lines of Tarzan And His Mate I think.
Good times
It will be interesting to see what kind of toys and burger joint nick-nacks will be accompanying this film.
a wind-up crawling Kaldane would be cool.
Rykor sold separately.
Does Ras Thavas (the brain-switching surgeon of Mars/Barsoom) make an appearence?
I always liked the idea of paying Ras for a nice young, toned body.
How did he secure bodies for his clients?
I think his clients brought their own slaves (or captured prisoners) for that purpose.
They showed the trailer before Captain America, and Deejah Thoris looks better on the big screen. Most of her outfits at least bare midriff; it’s just hard to tell because they seem to have favored dresses in the same color as her body paint. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s body paint, and not meant to be her actual skin color. I’m guessing that they originally intended actual red skin, but found that it didn’t look right, so decided to call it makeup instead.