The ‘Mars/Barsoom’ series by Edgar Rice Burroughs is the definition of a pulp adventure– a fast-paced tale about a human man who finds himself transported to another world, where he punches and hews his way through hordes of monsters to rescue a beautiful princess. The structure resembles a faerietale, yet is laced with science fiction technology such as environmental manipulation. Thought to be inspired by ‘Gulliver of Mars’ by Edwin Lester Linden Arnold (about a soldier who goes to Mars and marries a princess named Heru), it paved the way for future planetary romances like ‘Dune’ and ‘Star Wars’, and even had a profound effect on early comic book protagonists like ‘Superman’ (who, like John Carter, adopts a foreign planet as his home, and discovers that his physiology in this new environment gives him extraordinary agility and strength).
However, there are mature themes in the ‘Mars’ books that are easy to overlook – sex, religion, race, prejudice - which I believe make it unique to all stories that came before or after, and elevates it from the category of juvenile fantasy to which it has been assigned.
The first book, ‘A Princess of Mars’, has a frame-story: Edgar Rice Burroughs describes his ‘mad’ uncle, John Carter, a man who claims to have traveled to Mars. This leads into the words of John Carter himself, from his memoirs, which relates his adventures on the red planet.
It was imperative that I establish a mechanism by which the audience would accept the scenario of a soldier astral-projecting himself to another planet. I needed them to forget what they think they know about Mars (i.e. the lack of humanoid aliens, vegetation, and the long-debunked theory of the Martian canals), and be willing to suspend their disbelief.
To me, the ‘Mars/Barsoom’ books always had a slightly tongue-in-cheek, ‘tall-tale of the American West’ style to them. I did not want John Carter’s adventure to be a grandiose lie told for the entertainment of his nephew (one of the reasons I liked Carter was his unswerving truthfulness), and I did not want it to be revealed at the end as ‘all a dream’, a figment of his imagination, because that device is a betrayal of our emotional investment. Of any fiction genre, Fantasy is the one that needs the most grounded psychological framework to create conflict which mirrors our own. With this is mind, I decided to develop the frame-story of Burroughs relating the tale, and I portrayed John Carter’s adventure on Mars not as fact, but as delusion caused by emotional trauma. This was not too far of a stretch from what was already there – after all, the description of Arizona in the opening chapters foreshadows the description of Mars, and the Apaches he encounters clearly foreshadow the Red Martians.
In the book, John Carter states that he does not remember any childhood, has always looked to be a man of about 30, and never ages. All we truly know of him is that he is a soldier, a Confederate captain in the Civil War. This lack of backstory was no doubt a purposeful attempt on the part of Burroughs to avoid lengthy exposition that would delay the introduction of Martian society, and at the same time forge messianic parallels (John Carter’s initials are ‘J.C.’, and ‘about 30’ parallels with the age of Jesus when he began his ministry, only to be crucified and resurrected at the age of 33). But this is where any adaptation of ‘Mars’ would immediately encounter their first challenge: how do you depict such an enigma as a relatable main character? John Carter is our perspective and our guide as we enter Mars, a strange and complicated world –wondering who it is we are following could alienate us emotionally from his struggle to win the hand of the princess.
As a Confederate soldier and proud antebellum gentleman, we might initially assume that Carter is an elitist fellow, and suspect him to have the faults that generally follow: racism, misogyny, and religious intolerance. However, this is repeatedly shown to not be the case: Carter, if anything, takes every opportunity to praise the beauty, strength and honor of people who differ from him physically and culturally. He even makes favorable comparisons to Native Americans, Africans, and the brave women that he knew back on Earth.
Distilled down to its core, the ‘Mars’ series is about superiority complexes. The various factions of Mars each venerate a certain virtue to the exclusion of all others, and believe this makes their own culture to be morally superior. Because Mars is a dying planet where resources are limited, they use this as justification to kill and make war upon other factions. These factions are portrayed as differing ‘races’, but in fact seem to represent differing classes.
The Green Martians are a Spartan-like race, who value physical strength above anything else. They cannot create, only destroy: they inhabit deserted, crumbling cities, and make war upon other races in order to seize their resources and enslave others. This parallels the settlers who came to America and claimed it as their own, using their military might to force the natives out of their ancient communities, and capturing men and women in Africa to work their seized lands as slaves. The fur of the white ape was described as being a symbol of leadership among the Green Martians, and their food was also described as being pale, which to me symbolized this parallel - I made a slight alteration to strengthen it, which is that I depicted the abandoned cities as having once belonged to Red Martian natives, not a lost race of White Martians as the book described. I felt justified in this change because the Green Martians were at conflict with the Red rather than White Martians (I also felt the Therns should be the only White Martians, to avoid confusion).
The Tharks pride themselves on their bureaucratic discipline and sense of justice, while their enemies, the Warhoons, are anarchic savages who dismember their victims and keep their limbs as ghoulish trophies. Both are sadistic in nature, and seek to defeat ‘softer sentiments’ such as kindness. These represent the two conflicting sides of warfare: order and chaos. Carter, fittingly, joins the Tharks (the soldier profession) and rapidly climbs the ranks with his natural strength, which is a parallel to his career path on Earth.
The Red Martians, by contrast, are creators and builders - they value invention, technological progress, empirical expansion, and beauty. But they also have two warring factions: one which builds for glory and to reward conquest (Zodanga) and one which builds for the shared benefit of all in peaceful pursuits (Helium). Helium is the one placed in the most favorable light, because they fight to defend equality, while the Zodangans fight to maintain their wealth-divided hierarchy and racial hatred of the Green Martians. This clearly parallels the idealistic opposition between the North and the South in the Civil War – the South had begun to develop a land-owning, slave-owning aristocratic class, while the North determined that this was a threat to the principals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness upon which the country was founded.
Carter himself is torn between the two: he comes from the aristocratic Southern class, and shares their love of courage, honor and sophistication. His awe of Martian ingenuity is tempered by a slight contempt of intellectuals (Carter’s most prevalent description of himself is as a man who does not ever stop to think before taking action, and his mistrust of intellectuals is clearly dramatized later on in the portrayal of the Kaldanes and the Mastermind of Mars).
Yet at the same time he does not seek to dominate others, showing compassion to all forms of life. He ends the book caring nothing for the massive wealth that he has attained via the gold mine – Carter fights for one thing, and that is love. So while the Heliumites may struggle to defend themselves from more ruthless opponents, Carter recognizes that they too fight for love, and therefore aligns himself with Helium rather than Zodanga.
The Therns are the religious order of Mars. They manipulate the faith of the Martians in the goddess Issus, luring the faithful to their false ‘heaven’ and enslaving them. Once enslaved, they use their captives for sex, labor, sacrifice, and food. Their desire to cloak their sinful natures is symbolized by the fact that, unlike any other Martians, they wear wigs and robes to hide the nakedness of their heads and bodies. They are the major enemy faction of the second and third books of the trilogy (represented by Holy Father of the Therns, Matai Shang, and his daughter Phaidor), which indicates that Carter has a particular problem with religious self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Carter repeatedly tells the reader that he is not a religious man, despite his parallels to Jesus – or rather because of them, as Jesus was a reformer whose adversaries were members of the religious establishment.
By conflating Holy Father of the Therns Matai Shang with the old man at the atmosphere factory, I not only introduced the main nemesis of the series earlier, but was also able to foreshadow Matai Shang’s duplicity and gluttonous nature by having him offer a table full of food to Carter and his companions.
On Mars, John Carter can use his one main talent, fighting, to save the world from death, win the respect of warring factions and unite them, and claim a smart, compassionate, beautiful woman as his own. He gets to live happily ever after.
On Earth, John Carter is helpless against these forces. He loses the war, he loses his fortune, he loses his friend Powell. And in my version, he also loses his Native American wife and child. He has nothing.
Carter’s Mars delusion is a purposeful attempt to deny the tragic reality, in return for reality denying him the triumphs and Happily Ever After he desires. Everyone still living in the Earth reality who desires for him to snap out of his psychological retreat is therefore – intentionally or not - an antagonist: they are luring him back to the game of superiority, which Carter refuses to play.
Having decided that this was the frame-story that would need to be developed, I needed to create the ‘real’ versions for each of the characters:
-Dejah Thoris = Dyani, “Thorn”. In the book, John Carter has his out-of-body experience in a cave, and when he returns to consciousness on Earth 10 years later, he finds corpses hanging from the ceiling of the cave, and the mummified body of a Native American woman with a pile of greenish powder. It is implied that his out-of-body experience was, perhaps, the result of the woman drugging him with the powder, but who she was and her reasons for doing so are never explained. So instead I introduced Dyani, a beautiful Native American woman (‘red princess’), who Carter rescues from soldiers in the same way that he rescues Dejah Thoris from the Tharks. Dyani visits him in the cave to heal him of an injury, does still drug him (a parallel to the radium powder she is forced to make in the dark pits of Mars) but it is only to dull his pain as she uses a thorn to stitch him up (he nicknames her ‘Thorn’, which is later garbled into ‘Thoris’). The yellow moss that she uses as a cushion for him turns into the yellow moss of Mars.
Because of Dyani’s use of medicine, Carter imagines her as a scientist on Mars. Note that I did not just come up with this characterization myself - in the books she was not only captured while onboard a scientific mission to chart the atmosphere, but she was also very knowledgeable about the details of Martian technology, chemistry, geography, and Earth. All of the dialogue along these lines is taken directly out of the book, except for the little backstory details I added about her father being the astronomer to have discovered Earth, and that she had dreamt of traveling there someday – this was done to establish a connection with Carter, who stated early on that he always felt an irresistible attraction toward the planet Mars. Dejah's scientific expertise becomes crucial at the end of my script, where I have Dejah fixing the malfunctioning atmosphere factory, not a group of random engineers as in the novel.
I felt no need to diminish Dejah’s role as a princess, nor did I wish to diminish her sexuality in any way – I see nothing wrong with Carter imagining his wife as a sexy princess. But since the narration repeatedly stated that women on Mars were armed and capable of defending themselves when necessary, I also did not see anything wrong with describing Dejah participating in the action a bit more. In the book, the description of Dejah’s trappings are sparse: it says that she wears sandals (made from zitidar hide), jeweled ornaments that do nothing to hide her nakedness (I determined that the jewels would be turquoise, due to their use among the southwest Native Americans, and to symbolize water), and her long mass of dark hair is worn in an elegant coiffure. But later, she pulls a great diamond pin from her hair, and uses it to carve a map of Mars into the solid marble floor. If she had at least one huge diamond sheathed in her hair, I could not see any reason why she couldn’t use it as a weapon. I also didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t have two.
I did not like the introduction of Kantos Kan as the Heliumite soldier Carter meets in the dungeons of Warhoon, as he did not seem to serve any real purpose other than to help him become an air scout in Zodanga, a sequence which was equally unnecessary and would have slowed down the finale. I already intended to have Tars Tarkas and Sola follow Carter into the Warhoon arena, since theirs was the friendship relationship that needed to be strengthened (and because I couldn’t have main relationship characters disappear for too long). I almost got rid of the Kantos Kan role altogether, but then I realized that his dialogue about Dejah Thoris sounded strangely paternal. Since I had already added the backstory detail of Mors Kajak, Dejah’s father, being a scientist, I figured that he could be the mentor who teaches Carter to operate the fliers instead - and because I replaced the guardian of the atmosphere factory with Matai Shang, I needed someone who could be left in charge of the post (and someone who could become the target of villain Sab Than’s wrath in the finale).
The Red Martians are depicted as hatching from eggs, and it was stated that there was only one mammal, very rare, upon Mars – meaning that the Red Martians were not mammals. Since the Malagors were described as being red birds, and there was already precedence for the white apes evolving into the Therns, I decided that the Red Martians were an avian race evolved from the almost-extinct Malagors.
-Tars Tarkas = Powell. In the book, Carter finds a gold vein with a fellow soldier and miner named James K. Powell. Because slavery was the preeminent issue of the Civil War, and because I wanted prejudice to be the major point of contention between Carter and his family, I decided that Powell should be a freed slave – specifically, the former slave of a ‘family friend’, Hal Powell (equivalent of Tal Hajus), who raped and killed his wife Gracie (Gozava). On Earth, (Toby) Powell dies at the hands of racist soldiers, leaving his daughter Sally (Sola) in the clutches of Hal and his bitter wife, Sandra (Sarkoja).
On Mars, he lives to rescue Sola and defeat Tal Hajus, replacing him as a person of power and authority, and will be saved from the Martian ‘afterlife’ by Carter. He will also appear in another form: the Black Martian prince, Xodar.
I wanted to base The Green Martians on an actual creature Carter could encounter in Arizona – preferably a green, red-eyed creature who laid eggs, and had horns or facial protrusions of some kind. In the book the Thark hatchlings are described as having eyes that moved independently of each other to see forward and back, so my first thought was that some sort of chameleon-like reptile made an impression on Carter in Arizona. But when I began my search, a monstrous grasshopper appeared: the Red-Eyed Devil, Neobarettia Spinosa. It had six limbs, which fit perfectly with the six-limbed Green Martians, and its habitat included only three states: Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. The only part that I chose to add to increase the parallel is to give wings to the female Green Martians.
-Sab Than = Sebastian Carter, Than Kosis = Kevin Carter. I had decided that Carter’s romantic rival, Sab Than, should be Carter’s brother Sebastian, the father of his nephew. I realized that Mors Kajak and Tardos Mors had inherited names of inverted order from Than Kosis and Sab Than, and decided to use it as an example of the difference between Zodangan and Heliumite’s attitudes toward their heirs. This provided a good motivation for Sebastian as a second son who wanted to use Carter’s mental state as an excuse to steal away his inheritance.
-Phaidor = Faye Doren, Matai Shang = Matthew Shane. In ‘Gods of Mars’, Phaidor is a female Thern, spoiled daughter of Matai Shang, who becomes obsessed with marrying John Carter. It made perfect sense to make her the woman that Carter is expected to marry, who he spurns in favor of marrying the very not-proper Native American woman. This provides further reason for Carter not to return to reality – for now that the wife he loved is dead, Faye is waiting to ensnare him, and will use ‘Father’ Matthew Shane to convince him that this is what he must do.
-Thoris Llanna = Tala.I determined that his son Carthoris from the books was a problematic character. His name resembles awkward celebrity mash-up names that ‘Bennifer’ or ‘Brangelina’, and also sounds uncomfortably like a part of the female anatomy. Also, as tempting as it would be to parallel Burroughs with Carter’s Martian son, we really don’t need a ‘Carter Jr.’ jumping around and distracting attention from our lead. But introducing his daughter Tara earlier than the books, endowed perhaps with some of her father’s abilities, was a very interesting prospect. Tara is the only female protagonist of the series, and the strongest female character other than Sola and Thuvia. ‘Thuvia, Maid of Mars’ was a great disappointment to me, but I would love to adapt ‘Chessmen of Mars’ – so Tara will be taking over both the role of Carthoris and Thuvia).
Lastly, there are some moments where I increased the level of violence – mostly to do with the actions of Zad (who kills the thoat rather than strikes it, to provoke the fight with Carter) Tal Hajus/Hal Powell’s sexual violence (and the subsequent loss of his arms), and Sab Than’s suicidal attack on the atmosphere factory (which I intercut with a sex scene not found in the book between Dejah and Carter, since that was the culmination of their relationship arc - and because I had moved up the atmosphere crisis, Dejah needed to have lain Thoris Llana’s egg in Carter’s absence, so that his daughter would be grown in the sequel).
I believe Fantasy and Horror to be an inseparable pair: the light is always in danger of being snuffed out by overpowering darkness. Fantasy lures us in with visions of beauty, so that we know what is at stake when Horrific ugliness inevitably marches to destroy it. A sense of horror is what I wanted most to emphasize in my adaption of ‘Mars’, and thankfully the foundation already existed - I only needed to make slight tweaks in order to make it work.
However, there are mature themes in the ‘Mars’ books that are easy to overlook – sex, religion, race, prejudice - which I believe make it unique to all stories that came before or after, and elevates it from the category of juvenile fantasy to which it has been assigned.
The first book, ‘A Princess of Mars’, has a frame-story: Edgar Rice Burroughs describes his ‘mad’ uncle, John Carter, a man who claims to have traveled to Mars. This leads into the words of John Carter himself, from his memoirs, which relates his adventures on the red planet.
It was imperative that I establish a mechanism by which the audience would accept the scenario of a soldier astral-projecting himself to another planet. I needed them to forget what they think they know about Mars (i.e. the lack of humanoid aliens, vegetation, and the long-debunked theory of the Martian canals), and be willing to suspend their disbelief.
To me, the ‘Mars/Barsoom’ books always had a slightly tongue-in-cheek, ‘tall-tale of the American West’ style to them. I did not want John Carter’s adventure to be a grandiose lie told for the entertainment of his nephew (one of the reasons I liked Carter was his unswerving truthfulness), and I did not want it to be revealed at the end as ‘all a dream’, a figment of his imagination, because that device is a betrayal of our emotional investment. Of any fiction genre, Fantasy is the one that needs the most grounded psychological framework to create conflict which mirrors our own. With this is mind, I decided to develop the frame-story of Burroughs relating the tale, and I portrayed John Carter’s adventure on Mars not as fact, but as delusion caused by emotional trauma. This was not too far of a stretch from what was already there – after all, the description of Arizona in the opening chapters foreshadows the description of Mars, and the Apaches he encounters clearly foreshadow the Red Martians.
In the book, John Carter states that he does not remember any childhood, has always looked to be a man of about 30, and never ages. All we truly know of him is that he is a soldier, a Confederate captain in the Civil War. This lack of backstory was no doubt a purposeful attempt on the part of Burroughs to avoid lengthy exposition that would delay the introduction of Martian society, and at the same time forge messianic parallels (John Carter’s initials are ‘J.C.’, and ‘about 30’ parallels with the age of Jesus when he began his ministry, only to be crucified and resurrected at the age of 33). But this is where any adaptation of ‘Mars’ would immediately encounter their first challenge: how do you depict such an enigma as a relatable main character? John Carter is our perspective and our guide as we enter Mars, a strange and complicated world –wondering who it is we are following could alienate us emotionally from his struggle to win the hand of the princess.
As a Confederate soldier and proud antebellum gentleman, we might initially assume that Carter is an elitist fellow, and suspect him to have the faults that generally follow: racism, misogyny, and religious intolerance. However, this is repeatedly shown to not be the case: Carter, if anything, takes every opportunity to praise the beauty, strength and honor of people who differ from him physically and culturally. He even makes favorable comparisons to Native Americans, Africans, and the brave women that he knew back on Earth.
Distilled down to its core, the ‘Mars’ series is about superiority complexes. The various factions of Mars each venerate a certain virtue to the exclusion of all others, and believe this makes their own culture to be morally superior. Because Mars is a dying planet where resources are limited, they use this as justification to kill and make war upon other factions. These factions are portrayed as differing ‘races’, but in fact seem to represent differing classes.
The Green Martians are a Spartan-like race, who value physical strength above anything else. They cannot create, only destroy: they inhabit deserted, crumbling cities, and make war upon other races in order to seize their resources and enslave others. This parallels the settlers who came to America and claimed it as their own, using their military might to force the natives out of their ancient communities, and capturing men and women in Africa to work their seized lands as slaves. The fur of the white ape was described as being a symbol of leadership among the Green Martians, and their food was also described as being pale, which to me symbolized this parallel - I made a slight alteration to strengthen it, which is that I depicted the abandoned cities as having once belonged to Red Martian natives, not a lost race of White Martians as the book described. I felt justified in this change because the Green Martians were at conflict with the Red rather than White Martians (I also felt the Therns should be the only White Martians, to avoid confusion).
The Tharks pride themselves on their bureaucratic discipline and sense of justice, while their enemies, the Warhoons, are anarchic savages who dismember their victims and keep their limbs as ghoulish trophies. Both are sadistic in nature, and seek to defeat ‘softer sentiments’ such as kindness. These represent the two conflicting sides of warfare: order and chaos. Carter, fittingly, joins the Tharks (the soldier profession) and rapidly climbs the ranks with his natural strength, which is a parallel to his career path on Earth.
The Red Martians, by contrast, are creators and builders - they value invention, technological progress, empirical expansion, and beauty. But they also have two warring factions: one which builds for glory and to reward conquest (Zodanga) and one which builds for the shared benefit of all in peaceful pursuits (Helium). Helium is the one placed in the most favorable light, because they fight to defend equality, while the Zodangans fight to maintain their wealth-divided hierarchy and racial hatred of the Green Martians. This clearly parallels the idealistic opposition between the North and the South in the Civil War – the South had begun to develop a land-owning, slave-owning aristocratic class, while the North determined that this was a threat to the principals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness upon which the country was founded.
Carter himself is torn between the two: he comes from the aristocratic Southern class, and shares their love of courage, honor and sophistication. His awe of Martian ingenuity is tempered by a slight contempt of intellectuals (Carter’s most prevalent description of himself is as a man who does not ever stop to think before taking action, and his mistrust of intellectuals is clearly dramatized later on in the portrayal of the Kaldanes and the Mastermind of Mars).
Yet at the same time he does not seek to dominate others, showing compassion to all forms of life. He ends the book caring nothing for the massive wealth that he has attained via the gold mine – Carter fights for one thing, and that is love. So while the Heliumites may struggle to defend themselves from more ruthless opponents, Carter recognizes that they too fight for love, and therefore aligns himself with Helium rather than Zodanga.
The Therns are the religious order of Mars. They manipulate the faith of the Martians in the goddess Issus, luring the faithful to their false ‘heaven’ and enslaving them. Once enslaved, they use their captives for sex, labor, sacrifice, and food. Their desire to cloak their sinful natures is symbolized by the fact that, unlike any other Martians, they wear wigs and robes to hide the nakedness of their heads and bodies. They are the major enemy faction of the second and third books of the trilogy (represented by Holy Father of the Therns, Matai Shang, and his daughter Phaidor), which indicates that Carter has a particular problem with religious self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Carter repeatedly tells the reader that he is not a religious man, despite his parallels to Jesus – or rather because of them, as Jesus was a reformer whose adversaries were members of the religious establishment.
By conflating Holy Father of the Therns Matai Shang with the old man at the atmosphere factory, I not only introduced the main nemesis of the series earlier, but was also able to foreshadow Matai Shang’s duplicity and gluttonous nature by having him offer a table full of food to Carter and his companions.
On Mars, John Carter can use his one main talent, fighting, to save the world from death, win the respect of warring factions and unite them, and claim a smart, compassionate, beautiful woman as his own. He gets to live happily ever after.
On Earth, John Carter is helpless against these forces. He loses the war, he loses his fortune, he loses his friend Powell. And in my version, he also loses his Native American wife and child. He has nothing.
Carter’s Mars delusion is a purposeful attempt to deny the tragic reality, in return for reality denying him the triumphs and Happily Ever After he desires. Everyone still living in the Earth reality who desires for him to snap out of his psychological retreat is therefore – intentionally or not - an antagonist: they are luring him back to the game of superiority, which Carter refuses to play.
Having decided that this was the frame-story that would need to be developed, I needed to create the ‘real’ versions for each of the characters:
-Dejah Thoris = Dyani, “Thorn”. In the book, John Carter has his out-of-body experience in a cave, and when he returns to consciousness on Earth 10 years later, he finds corpses hanging from the ceiling of the cave, and the mummified body of a Native American woman with a pile of greenish powder. It is implied that his out-of-body experience was, perhaps, the result of the woman drugging him with the powder, but who she was and her reasons for doing so are never explained. So instead I introduced Dyani, a beautiful Native American woman (‘red princess’), who Carter rescues from soldiers in the same way that he rescues Dejah Thoris from the Tharks. Dyani visits him in the cave to heal him of an injury, does still drug him (a parallel to the radium powder she is forced to make in the dark pits of Mars) but it is only to dull his pain as she uses a thorn to stitch him up (he nicknames her ‘Thorn’, which is later garbled into ‘Thoris’). The yellow moss that she uses as a cushion for him turns into the yellow moss of Mars.
Because of Dyani’s use of medicine, Carter imagines her as a scientist on Mars. Note that I did not just come up with this characterization myself - in the books she was not only captured while onboard a scientific mission to chart the atmosphere, but she was also very knowledgeable about the details of Martian technology, chemistry, geography, and Earth. All of the dialogue along these lines is taken directly out of the book, except for the little backstory details I added about her father being the astronomer to have discovered Earth, and that she had dreamt of traveling there someday – this was done to establish a connection with Carter, who stated early on that he always felt an irresistible attraction toward the planet Mars. Dejah's scientific expertise becomes crucial at the end of my script, where I have Dejah fixing the malfunctioning atmosphere factory, not a group of random engineers as in the novel.
I felt no need to diminish Dejah’s role as a princess, nor did I wish to diminish her sexuality in any way – I see nothing wrong with Carter imagining his wife as a sexy princess. But since the narration repeatedly stated that women on Mars were armed and capable of defending themselves when necessary, I also did not see anything wrong with describing Dejah participating in the action a bit more. In the book, the description of Dejah’s trappings are sparse: it says that she wears sandals (made from zitidar hide), jeweled ornaments that do nothing to hide her nakedness (I determined that the jewels would be turquoise, due to their use among the southwest Native Americans, and to symbolize water), and her long mass of dark hair is worn in an elegant coiffure. But later, she pulls a great diamond pin from her hair, and uses it to carve a map of Mars into the solid marble floor. If she had at least one huge diamond sheathed in her hair, I could not see any reason why she couldn’t use it as a weapon. I also didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t have two.
I did not like the introduction of Kantos Kan as the Heliumite soldier Carter meets in the dungeons of Warhoon, as he did not seem to serve any real purpose other than to help him become an air scout in Zodanga, a sequence which was equally unnecessary and would have slowed down the finale. I already intended to have Tars Tarkas and Sola follow Carter into the Warhoon arena, since theirs was the friendship relationship that needed to be strengthened (and because I couldn’t have main relationship characters disappear for too long). I almost got rid of the Kantos Kan role altogether, but then I realized that his dialogue about Dejah Thoris sounded strangely paternal. Since I had already added the backstory detail of Mors Kajak, Dejah’s father, being a scientist, I figured that he could be the mentor who teaches Carter to operate the fliers instead - and because I replaced the guardian of the atmosphere factory with Matai Shang, I needed someone who could be left in charge of the post (and someone who could become the target of villain Sab Than’s wrath in the finale).
The Red Martians are depicted as hatching from eggs, and it was stated that there was only one mammal, very rare, upon Mars – meaning that the Red Martians were not mammals. Since the Malagors were described as being red birds, and there was already precedence for the white apes evolving into the Therns, I decided that the Red Martians were an avian race evolved from the almost-extinct Malagors.
-Tars Tarkas = Powell. In the book, Carter finds a gold vein with a fellow soldier and miner named James K. Powell. Because slavery was the preeminent issue of the Civil War, and because I wanted prejudice to be the major point of contention between Carter and his family, I decided that Powell should be a freed slave – specifically, the former slave of a ‘family friend’, Hal Powell (equivalent of Tal Hajus), who raped and killed his wife Gracie (Gozava). On Earth, (Toby) Powell dies at the hands of racist soldiers, leaving his daughter Sally (Sola) in the clutches of Hal and his bitter wife, Sandra (Sarkoja).
On Mars, he lives to rescue Sola and defeat Tal Hajus, replacing him as a person of power and authority, and will be saved from the Martian ‘afterlife’ by Carter. He will also appear in another form: the Black Martian prince, Xodar.
I wanted to base The Green Martians on an actual creature Carter could encounter in Arizona – preferably a green, red-eyed creature who laid eggs, and had horns or facial protrusions of some kind. In the book the Thark hatchlings are described as having eyes that moved independently of each other to see forward and back, so my first thought was that some sort of chameleon-like reptile made an impression on Carter in Arizona. But when I began my search, a monstrous grasshopper appeared: the Red-Eyed Devil, Neobarettia Spinosa. It had six limbs, which fit perfectly with the six-limbed Green Martians, and its habitat included only three states: Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. The only part that I chose to add to increase the parallel is to give wings to the female Green Martians.
-Sab Than = Sebastian Carter, Than Kosis = Kevin Carter. I had decided that Carter’s romantic rival, Sab Than, should be Carter’s brother Sebastian, the father of his nephew. I realized that Mors Kajak and Tardos Mors had inherited names of inverted order from Than Kosis and Sab Than, and decided to use it as an example of the difference between Zodangan and Heliumite’s attitudes toward their heirs. This provided a good motivation for Sebastian as a second son who wanted to use Carter’s mental state as an excuse to steal away his inheritance.
-Phaidor = Faye Doren, Matai Shang = Matthew Shane. In ‘Gods of Mars’, Phaidor is a female Thern, spoiled daughter of Matai Shang, who becomes obsessed with marrying John Carter. It made perfect sense to make her the woman that Carter is expected to marry, who he spurns in favor of marrying the very not-proper Native American woman. This provides further reason for Carter not to return to reality – for now that the wife he loved is dead, Faye is waiting to ensnare him, and will use ‘Father’ Matthew Shane to convince him that this is what he must do.
-Thoris Llanna = Tala.I determined that his son Carthoris from the books was a problematic character. His name resembles awkward celebrity mash-up names that ‘Bennifer’ or ‘Brangelina’, and also sounds uncomfortably like a part of the female anatomy. Also, as tempting as it would be to parallel Burroughs with Carter’s Martian son, we really don’t need a ‘Carter Jr.’ jumping around and distracting attention from our lead. But introducing his daughter Tara earlier than the books, endowed perhaps with some of her father’s abilities, was a very interesting prospect. Tara is the only female protagonist of the series, and the strongest female character other than Sola and Thuvia. ‘Thuvia, Maid of Mars’ was a great disappointment to me, but I would love to adapt ‘Chessmen of Mars’ – so Tara will be taking over both the role of Carthoris and Thuvia).
Lastly, there are some moments where I increased the level of violence – mostly to do with the actions of Zad (who kills the thoat rather than strikes it, to provoke the fight with Carter) Tal Hajus/Hal Powell’s sexual violence (and the subsequent loss of his arms), and Sab Than’s suicidal attack on the atmosphere factory (which I intercut with a sex scene not found in the book between Dejah and Carter, since that was the culmination of their relationship arc - and because I had moved up the atmosphere crisis, Dejah needed to have lain Thoris Llana’s egg in Carter’s absence, so that his daughter would be grown in the sequel).
I believe Fantasy and Horror to be an inseparable pair: the light is always in danger of being snuffed out by overpowering darkness. Fantasy lures us in with visions of beauty, so that we know what is at stake when Horrific ugliness inevitably marches to destroy it. A sense of horror is what I wanted most to emphasize in my adaption of ‘Mars’, and thankfully the foundation already existed - I only needed to make slight tweaks in order to make it work.
| A Princess of Mars - feature adaption by Carly Bryann Young |
RSS Feed