"I can remember as a child reading with breathless fascination the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I journeyed with John Carter, gentleman adventurer from Virginia, to "Barsoom," as Mars was known to its inhabitants. I followed herds of eight legged beasts of burden, the thoats. I won the hand of the lovely Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium. I befriended a four-metre-high green fighting man named Tars Tarkas. I wandered within the spired cities and domed pumping stations of Barsoom, and along the verdant banks of the Nilosyrtis and Nepenthes canals. Might it really be possible - in fact and not in fancy - to venture with John Carter to the Kingdom of Helium on the planet Mars? Could we venture out on a summer evening, our way illuminated by the two hurtling moons of Barsoom, for a journey of high scientific adventure? ... I can remember spending many an hour in my boyhood, arms resolutely outstretched in an empty field, imploring what I believed to be Mars to transport me there."
--Carl Sagan, Cosmos
I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. I preferred the John Carter books to the Tarzan books, mainly because of the fantasy elements (though Tarzan was certainly no stranger to fantasy). It always irked me that there were Tarzan films without number, but no movies set on Barsoom. If I squint, I can see Barsoom in Star Wars, thinly disguised as Tatooine. It's got some of the fauna and it has the two great lights in its sky, though Tatooine's lights are suns rather than moons. But Princess Leia was not Dejah Thoris. Not even once they put her in the slave girl get-up in Return of the Jedi. The first Barsoom book, A Princess of Mars, was published in 1912. The first movie set on Barsoom arrives a hundred years later. This must surely be the longest case of development hell ever. I wish the resulting film, John Carter (2012, directed by Andrew Stanton) was worth that wait, but it's not. Not really. Though parts of it are magnificent.