Today is the one year anniversary of Dateline Jasoom, the podcast for fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs – creator of Tarzan, John Carter, and other fantastic worlds of pulp adventure. After a few clips of highlights from the past year, I have an interview with ERB’s daughter from a 1960s radio show called Monitor. And that interview includes a rare sound clip of ERB dictating a Tarzan novel. Plus, there’s the usual amount of lunacy.
Years ago I started a website called the Barsoomian Blade, which was a tabloid newspaper on ERB’s Mars. The “Dateline Jasoom” podcast originates from the Chicago bureau of that newspaper. (Jasoom is what Burroughs’ Martians call Earth.) The show is distributed across “The Gridley Wave Network.” In many of Burroughs’ stories, the Gridley Wave was a sort of radio over which Burroughs could receive the various tales of wild adventure from different planets and write them down in his books.
Anyway, my podcast is sort of an intertangled mix of real interviews with fans and people involved with Burroughs projects (comic book artists, SF authors, etc.) and also goofy news from the imaginary worlds of Burroughs. We’ve had “live” reports from Mars, commercials for useful products on those worlds, and in one show I traveled up the Wazoo River searching for Tarzan’s mate, Jane, to get an exclusive interview.
I thought this show, No. 27, would be a good introduction for fans who might be interested in the 'cast. I’m always looking for contributors. See the contributor faq.
Besides the Disney/Pixar John Carter project, Guillermo “Hell Boy” del Toro is planning a Tarzan movie. Grim and gritty is the word, which could be good. Or, it could be as bad as almost every other Tarzan movie.
Robert Rodriguez was attached to JCoM, but he left / got kicked out of the DGA because he wanted Frank Miller listed as co-director of Sin City (the DGA only wants one director pre movie with a few exceptions). Paramount would not allow (or could not have) a non DGA director for JCoM.
Other directors attached include Kerry Conran (Sky Captain) and Jon Faveau (Iron Man). JF let go of JCoM to concentrate on IM.
That was Robert Rodriguez. Then Kerry Conran came and went. Then Jon Favreau. Then Paramount gave up trying to get John Carter made, which is when Disney came along. Conran (whose Sky Captain looked fantastic, if the story was kinda weak) apparently shot some test footage at one point to show Paramount execs. I’d like to see that some day. It’s supposed to be pretty cool.