WW2 movies, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, *Lensmen *and other classic space operas, westerns, samurai movies…
I always laughed when people accused James Cameron’s *Avatar *of being derivative - as if you couldn’t say the exact same thing about SW Ep. 4 (note: I love both movies).
I finished reading A Princess Of Mars recently (nothing to do with the upcoming film, it was simply in my “To-Read” pile) and I don’t recall many Epic Swordfights in it- but I do recall a lot of improbable guns; rifles that can shoot halfway around the planet and so forth.
I’m surprised by the outrage (outrage, apparently!) that the characters will be wearing clothes in the film- again, from my reading the Martians/Barsoomians don’t wear much in the clothing department but it was an incidental background detail (in fact, as Alan Smithee says, there’s barely three paragraphs of it in the entire book) and FWIW I imagined John Carter wearing something like a Confederate Cavalry uniform (I know he wasn’t, but that was the mental image that worked best IMHO) as he strode about Mars dispatching opponents and being heroic.
Not really a fan of Sword & Sorcery movies at the best of times, but I am surprised at the complete lack of buzz about the film- I’ve heard almost nothing about it.
That’s because it won’t be released for another 8 months. As far as I know, shooting hasn’t even wrapped yet.
All right-thinking people hate Bowdlerisation. I’ve never read the books myself, but I can see why people would be annoyed if censorship makes the film - a visual medium - worse at conveying the look of the setting than plain text in a novel.
I had always taken the garb (or lack thereof) description to be basically Edwardian. The caharcters are wearing less than what a decent member of polite society would wear on holiday at the beach, therefore they are “naked.” If I thought about it any more, I would have said that jewelry, leather harnesses and armor do not constitute clothes no matter how muxh skin they cover.
But really, nekkid red chicks was not the main impression I have retained from the books, and I was one who found the dirty parts of “Gulliver’s Travels” before I was 10.
Put it this way: There’s nobody (well, almost nobody) who would say that the best thing about The Lord of the Rings was that the protagonists were short. Or even, for that matter, “I really liked that the protagonists were short”. It’s really not even all that relevant to the plot: The most important feature of the hobbits, plot-wise, is their rusticness, not their height. But if they made the movie and depicted the hobbits as all being 6’ tall, you can bet that there’d be legions of outraged fans crying that that’s not what they’re supposed to look like.
There are still fanboys who are pissed that Hugh Jackman is Wolverine because he is too tall. You’ll never please everybody. I’m just miffed (slightly) because the movie is being made by Disney, which doesn’t bode well in any sense.
True, but if the movies had been filmed before the technology existed to make them believably appear short, so that filming them as being of normal height was the only way to realistically make the movie, AND if they drew inspiration from classic illustrations dating back to the first edition that inexplicably depicted the hobbits as being 6’ tall, AND if someone did in fact come in and claim that the shortness was the best thing the books had to offer, how would you respond to them?
Here’s how contemporary comics books show JCOM. Which is about as far as you can go and still be a kid safe comic. The only JCOM scenes I ever saw that actually showed nipples etc. was in (I think) Heavy Metal by the same artist that did the “Den” series.
Oh, a simple Google image search for “Dejah Thoris” will show that plenty of artists totally got the memo on Martian nudity, including Adam Hughes and Frank Cho.
On a related note, cosplaying as Dejah (with my husband as JC) at Dragon*Con is one of the top motivators I have for a regular exercise schedule. Leia was too overdone, and I like an excuse to wear body-paint.
Moral of the story - at least one girl noted and remembered (and liked) that the Barsoomians were all running around in their Birthday Best.
Yeah, but sword fights?
DragonCon is the one con where it would be totally in keeping for participants to wear COMPLETELY authentic by the book Martian native costumery, such as it is. I remember last year around 3 pm. leaving a hotel for the parking garage and seeing some girl dressed in pretty much nothing but green body paint headed into the con from the street.
That would be Richard Corben, one of my all-time favorite artists.
What’s wrong with sword fights?
Or, what do sword fights have to do with not wearing clothes?
That happens later, when the lights are low.
You must not be a guy, in which case I am too embarrassed to explain.
That’s almost as embarrassing as the ladies at my Jewish wedding asking me if I, a convert had been…never mind.
Ahh.
Nevermind.
Although, you really don’t need to be embarrassed about explaining. My best friend and I have seriously contemplated “unicorn fights” with strap-ons before. We’re pretty sure we could get money for that.
Like I said, I can accept jock straps or the like.
Quoth Alan Smithee:
Except that they’re not limited by the technology here. Granted they can’t have them running around completely naked and still be able to release it, but folks wearing the equivalent of bikinis or loincloths make it into the movies all the time. If they went with similar costuming as this PG movie, say, nobody would be complaining that it’s not naked enough.