“Things To Come…”
Ninety years ago, a man ran across Mars. His feet touched painted ground, his body sprang into the thin air, and for a moment the machinery of American animation made Edgar Rice Burroughs's planetary adventure visible. The man was John Carter, although the physical movement had begun with an animator in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Bob Clampett photographed his colleague Robert Cannon in live action and used portions of that performance as the basis for animated movement. Around the figure, Clampett and a small group of collaborators built a landscape of unfamiliar creatures, impossible architecture and strenuous swordplay. In one sequence a four-armed Thark rode a great eight-legged thoat. Elsewhere Carter ran, jumped and fought. The experimental footage was made in 1936, seven decades before a new generation would associate screen Barsoom with Andrew Stanton's live-action film and a year before Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs reached cinemas. It offered the possibility of a continuing series of short animated adventures. MGM considered the proposition, then preferred a different Burroughs hero: Tarzan. The Mars project stopped. The surviving fragments carry the peculiar force of a future glimpsed in rehearsal and never allowed to unfold. [1][2]
This September marks the ninetieth anniversary of that attempt. No primary document consulted for this article establishes a precise day or month on which the test reel was completed, so 26 September is my chosen commemorative date, rather than a claim about a premiere or production milestone. The established chronology places the footage and MGM discussions in 1936; a separate account locates the subsequent Tarzantoons organising effort in July and August of that year. The distinction is worth preserving. Film history frequently inherits memorable dates from finished works, while unfinished works survive through correspondence, portfolios, recollections and material rescued from storage. Their anniversaries can be observed without inventing an exact calendar entry. That is how I want to mark this one: by looking closely at what the artists made, what the studio declined, and the winding ninety-year history that followed. [1][3]
The image of Carter moving in 1936 is especially arresting because the larger screen history of Barsoom has been so intermittent. For generations the novels supplied artists and filmmakers with ideas about alien societies, ancient civilizations, strange fauna, aerial combat, romance and planetary journeys. Burroughs's imagined Mars entered popular culture long before motion pictures had the means to render it convincingly. When a major production finally arrived in 2012, it was conceived as the beginning of a trilogy and became, instead, the only instalment. In 2025 and 2026 the author's family company announced a fresh animated series, bringing the story back toward the medium Clampett had proposed. The estate can now invoke the 1936 test in its own description of the project. Nine decades separate two official attempts to establish an animated John Carter. Within that interval lies a history of ambitions repeatedly approaching the screen, and of creative work whose influence spread more successfully than its name. [4][5]
Before the reel: an entire planet waiting in print
Barsoom began in circumstances far removed from the studio economy of 1930s Hollywood. Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875, moved through military service and a series of unsuccessful or unsatisfying occupations, and began writing while attempting to make a living from a pencil-sharpener business. His own account, preserved by the family company, describes a practical decision: he started the Martian manuscript during periods when he was waiting for sales agents to return. Editor Thomas Newell Metcalf encouraged him to complete it after reading the first instalment he had submitted. The result, Under the Moons of Mars, appeared in six parts in The All-Story from February to July 1912 under the pen name Norman Bean. Its opening instalment preceded the magazine publication of Tarzan of the Apes later that year. Barsoom was thus present at the beginning of Burroughs's professional life as an author. [6][7]
The serial introduced an American Civil War veteran who, after a mysterious transition, finds himself on a dying Mars. Carter discovers that the lower gravity confers extraordinary strength and agility upon him. He encounters the nomadic green Martians, becomes closely associated with Tars Tarkas, and is drawn toward Dejah Thoris of Helium, a figure whose appeal depends upon intelligence, courage and political responsibility as much as on the romantic conventions of the period. The world exceeds the dimensions of a single adventure. Burroughs gives it competing peoples, regional loyalties, airships, ancient cities, breeding grounds, elaborate systems of honour, and an environmental history shaped by a diminishing atmosphere. A planet becomes a place when its inhabitants can desire conflicting things within it. The novel's energy comes from the accumulation of such desires, and from the speed with which each new vista suggests several more lying beyond the horizon.
The book edition, renamed A Princess of Mars, appeared in October 1917 with illustrations by Frank E. Schoonover. Burroughs continued the series through succeeding novels, eventually producing eleven Barsoom books, the last published posthumously. The early volumes established recurring characters and geographical features while widening the mythology into unfamiliar cultures, religions, conspiracies and voyages. Literary scholarship describes the series as a foundational example of planetary romance, often called sword-and-planet adventure. That lineage is easier to appreciate when one reads the original work within its publishing context. Burroughs wrote before the iconography of science-fiction cinema had settled into recognisable conventions. His travellers could cross impossible distances, converse with alien peoples and fight beneath other skies without first having to satisfy a modern hard-science account of propulsion. He organised impossible phenomena into a readable adventure grammar, and subsequent popular fiction adopted or reshaped much of it. [7][8]
The same corpus also carries assumptions of its era. Carter's self-presentation, the books' racial hierarchies, their language of civilization and conquest, and some of their representations of women and indigenous peoples invite scrutiny from a contemporary reader. Those elements are part of the historical material. They need not be reproduced unexamined for the setting to be adapted, and a faithful adaptation can remain attentive to the emotional and imaginative character of the work while making considered choices about its inherited politics. The distinction between a text's importance and its perfection is especially useful when discussing stories whose influence has been so extensive. Barsoom is a product of its moment and an engine of subsequent invention. The task of adapting it has always involved selecting which of those qualities should be carried forward, and which can be reinterpreted.
Success brought Burroughs an infrastructure that many writers of imaginative fiction never enjoyed. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. was formed in 1923 to administer the author's literary interests, and the business remains family owned in Tarzana, California. The place name itself reflects the visibility of Tarzan, whose screen career soon made him the more secure commercial proposition. By the 1930s, audiences knew the jungle hero through books, comics and films, particularly the MGM productions starring Johnny Weissmuller. Barsoom had a readership and an existing body of stories, but its central images imposed more difficult demands upon live-action cinema: four-armed green giants, giant riding animals, floating craft, aerial cities and a terrestrial hero moving in a different gravity. For someone attempting to sell the property to a studio, the question was practical as well as artistic. What medium could render those things with sufficient continuity, movement and visual conviction? [9]
John Coleman Burroughs, Edgar's youngest child, had grown up inside the imaginative atmosphere that made such a question almost hereditary. Born in February 1913, he was the infant to whom the published A Princess of Mars would be dedicated. His father encouraged his drawing, and he developed an artistic vocabulary under the influence of illustrators such as J. Allen St. John, whose images helped readers imagine Barsoom in the first place. John studied art, graduated from Pomona College, and eventually illustrated numerous books and comics connected with his father's works. His contribution to the 1936 project was therefore neither ceremonial nor incidental. The son of the writer was one of the people most capable of translating the family's imaginary universe into physical designs an animation crew could use. His future wife, Jane Ralston, would participate in that work and later become a substantial, sometimes undercredited collaborator on the John Carter newspaper strip. [10][11]
A young animator goes to Tarzana
Bob Clampett was in his early twenties when the John Carter possibility took shape. He worked in the Warner Bros. animation operation, contributing animation and gags while seeking an opportunity to direct. Burroughs's Mars books had fascinated him since childhood. In a 1978 interview with animation historian Jim Korkis, he remembered going to Tarzana to persuade the author that the stories could support an animated series. Clampett did not arrive with an established Hollywood franchise to administer. He came with a medium he understood, an enthusiasm for the fiction and a proposal to put imaginative adventure into the short subjects that preceded feature films. He was surprised by Burroughs's receptiveness. In Korkis's account, the author recognised that animation could solve visual problems that contemporary live action would struggle to address at an acceptable cost. [1]
Clampett's later recollection also provides a useful picture of the creative arrangement. Burroughs did not demand a literal page-by-page transfer of his books. He allowed the young animator room to devise a self-contained screen adventure inspired by them. This was a practical concession to cinema. A prose novel may stop to explain a society or recount a traveller's thoughts; a theatrical short needs an intelligible conflict and moving images that communicate quickly. Clampett's proposed format was a series of approximately nine-minute cartoons, each containing a complete story. He intended a shorter test reel, generally described as six minutes, to demonstrate the look and feasibility of the enterprise. These lengths should not be conflated with the amount of footage now commonly available online. The plan for a six-minute sales reel and the surviving excerpts are different measures. [1][2]
The collaboration soon became more extensive than a tentative visit to the estate. John Coleman Burroughs made drawings and articulated models to help determine the proportions and movement of Martian life. A surviving model of the thoat, the immense eight-legged mount, is especially revealing. Sculptural reference gave the animator a way to understand how a creature could hold its mass, organise its legs and turn within space. John also prepared written descriptions with unusually specific information about coloration, anatomy, surface and gait. The portfolio records the imagined animal's great shoulder height, flattened tail, smooth dark body, lighter underside and padded feet. Every such observation represents the conversion of literary imagination into a set of production decisions. Before a single creature could be animated, someone had to decide how its anatomy would work from one frame to the next. [2]
The work also took place amid family relationships. John and Jane Ralston had known each other at Pomona, and the family archive dates their marriage to 12 December 1936. During the John Carter effort, when they were still engaged, they helped paint cels. Their involvement reminds us that the project existed at a scale quite unlike a later studio blockbuster. The young artists could work in spare hours, bring drawings to the ranch, share reference material, and negotiate an entire planet with the author at hand. Clampett remained employed by Warner Bros. while the test was prepared, so nights and weekends absorbed much of the labour. Chuck Jones assisted with animation and Robert Cannon supplied in-between work as well as a live-action performance. These names now occupy a central place in animation history, but in 1936 they were workers experimenting with an uncertain new opportunity. [1][10][11]
There was a creative logic in having John and Jane close to the production. For his later Sunday newspaper pages, Jane recalled posing as Dejah Thoris, drawing backgrounds and buildings, and handling colour and lettering. The archive preserves her 1998 description of that division of labour. It gives us reason to attend carefully to her presence in the earlier animation account, even when short historical summaries place her name after the men. John modelled and designed, Jane painted, Clampett directed the experiment, and other Warner artists performed the skilled frame-by-frame labour. There is no need to turn the project into a myth of one isolated genius. The surviving test is the result of several forms of expertise converging in a family property whose owner was unusually willing to entertain a new visual approach. [11][12]
The moving body, the invented world
The test's visual methods now read as a small manifesto for the kind of animation Clampett wished to make. In his account to Korkis, he described filming Cannon bare-chested in Griffith Park because Cannon possessed the broad-shouldered figure needed for the hero. The team used rotoscoping on portions of the movement, tracing or deriving animated motion from photographed live action. Rotoscoping did not automatically produce convincing fantasy. Its value lay in providing a physically coherent base for the human figure, which the animators could modify to show Carter's strength and altered gravity. The connection between an ordinary Californian park and the plains of Mars is one of the most pleasing details in the production history. A real human run became the raw material for a fictional body moving across an impossible landscape. [1]
Clampett wanted a tonal surface different from the heavy outlines characteristic of much commercial animation. The crew applied oil-painted side shading frame by frame, seeking blended modelling that could give the figure volume. He recalled an effort to soften the boundary between line and body so the human form would feel less diagrammatic. The solution was labour intensive and exploratory. Animated fantasy required the viewer to accept Carter's body as one belonging inside the same world as a four-armed rider and an alien mount. It also required those figures to remain readable in motion. The test addressed both issues through an unusually serious interest in anatomy, light and the relation between the figure and its surroundings. It was a proposal for animation that could sustain heroism, danger and physical beauty over successive episodes. [1][2]
The reel presented more than exercises in movement. Clampett devised an adventure involving a Martian people concealed in a volcanic opening who attacked other cities with rocket craft. Carter would oppose them. The production story describes a sequence of him running and leaping, a swordfight, and a green Martian riding a thoat in colour. An opening image sent Mars toward the viewer and announced the hero as Warlord of Mars; prospective title cards suggested additional instalments. The action premise was an invention for the screen rather than a literal condensation of A Princess of Mars. It gave the test an immediate enemy, a battle to resolve and enough variety to persuade a distributor that the same world could accommodate further stories. Clampett intended a lightly humorous current within the adventure, an aspect consistent with his later work but easy to forget when the project is described as simply 'serious' animation. [1][2]
The relationship between colour and scale deserves particular attention. A black-and-white moving figure could demonstrate technique, but Barsoom was sold to readers through the difference between its peoples, its deserts, its architecture and its strange biology. The Thark on the thoat was therefore more than a novelty shot. It promised that figures ordinarily confined to printed illustrations could occupy a coloured cinematic environment. The promotional folio's language makes the commercial claim directly: improved colour-cartoon technique had become the appropriate means to depict the Martian creations after roughly twenty-five years of waiting. The authors had reached a point at which the technology, the installed audience for Burroughs and the demand for theatrical shorts appeared to overlap. Their proposal was made in the language of contemporary distribution, with sales potential as well as artistry in mind. [2]
John's portfolio was an object of persuasion in its own right. The archive at ERBzine reproduces a large ring-bound dossier, preserved through the family collection, containing art and a written explanation of the proposed series. Its opening argues from the existing nine Martian novels, magazine readership and the circulation of John Carter cartoons in print. It presents the property as an established reservoir of adventure ready for the screen. The illustrated pages do what an elaborate modern pitch deck does: they establish consistency of design, suggest set pieces, show the tonal possibilities of the setting and ask a prospective buyer to imagine a programme larger than the proof of concept. The folio also clarifies the production's intended scale. This was an attempt to sell a series of colour shorts. It had a promotional apparatus, a test and a prospective distributor, but it did not have an approved full-length feature in production. [2][13]
That distinction leaves room for the historical possibility that interests me most. If the shorts had found a distributor and an audience, Clampett and the Burroughs family might eventually have moved toward a feature-length A Princess of Mars. Later family histories explicitly contemplate that route. The counterfactual remains a counterfactual: no confirmed commission for such a feature appears in the contemporary record considered here, and success in shorts would not have guaranteed the immense financing and production capacity a feature would require. Yet a successful theatrical series could have created precisely the audience familiarity and artistic experience that make larger adaptations imaginable. Hollywood histories are full of formats that begin with modest experiments and expand after an audience proves receptive. Here the experiment had already produced moving images of the most difficult material. It was a genuine branching point whose unrealised path deserves consideration on its own terms. [3][10]
A production design made from pencil, sculpture, live-action reference and transparent cels also asks us to think about the speed of decision-making. Every figure in an animated film must be resolved repeatedly in drawings that agree across time. Eight legs introduce more than twice the logistical burden of four, because their changing overlap and rhythm must be credible. A four-armed swordsman creates questions of balance, gesture and silhouette that a painter can settle in one chosen image but an animator must solve from many angles. The programme was devised before digital rigs could hold a model's anatomy constant. Articulated sculptures, reference photography and written notes were inexpensive forms of shared memory for the team. John Coleman Burroughs's description of the thoat may seem excessive when read as prose, but its precision becomes entirely practical when a creature must be painted at speed by several workers. A production art archive can reveal how the invented planet was thought through as physical space rather than simply admired as illustration.
There is another reason the footage should be seen alongside the portfolio. An isolated clip can be judged against the finished films we have learned to expect, making its movement appear quaint or its imagery provisional. The pitch documents the intended encounter between a recurring hero and a complete world. Its drawings explain why a hovering craft, a mounted Thark, a Martian city and Carter himself were presented together. The viewer was being asked to accept an unfamiliar visual system rapidly, then return for the next weekly adventure. That demand is different from the aesthetic of a single spectacular short whose entire purpose is to show an extraordinary creature once. A series would have had to establish a dependable grammar of place: how the inhabitants travel, how they fight, how doors and rooms accommodate their bodies, and how a reader's sense of Barsoom becomes a cinema audience's sense of continuity. Such questions occupy enormous animation departments today. A few artists were asking them in 1936 with considerably more modest resources.
Clampett's choice to include humour in the test also complicates a retrospective temptation to imagine an entirely solemn proto-epic. His later cartoon work shows extraordinary interest in kinetic exaggeration, quick reversals and the audience's immediate recognition of a character's intentions. An animated Carter could have used those strengths in dramatic scenes without copying the comic behaviour of the Warner animals. His speed across the landscape, his encounters with alien scale and his responses to unfamiliar customs would all permit wit within adventure. The proposed nine-minute structure placed strict demands on economy, but that restriction could have encouraged vivid set pieces and concise character introductions. If a feature later emerged, it might have carried a visual voice different from either the Disney fairy-tale tradition or the modern live-action science-fiction epic. That unrealised voice is what I see in the reel, even while recognising how little footage survives to let us reconstruct it.
MGM chooses the known name
The test impressed Burroughs, and the accounts preserved by Korkis describe MGM's initial reaction as favourable. Clampett believed the commitment serious enough to give notice at Warner Bros. and begin preparatory work for the first instalment. Then the distributor's judgement changed. MGM had an existing relationship with Burroughs through the highly successful Weissmuller Tarzan films. Its representatives considered a man adventuring on Mars difficult to sell to general audiences, particularly through short subjects in which viewers might have little prior knowledge of the fictional world. They favoured cartoons built around Tarzan, whose identity was already widely recognised. Later recollections can compress complicated business conversations into a memorable reversal, so the precise internal sequence should not be mistaken for a fully reconstructed studio paper trail. The outcome is clear: the John Carter series was set aside in favour of a proposed Tarzan animation venture. [1][3]
The substitute concept illustrates what was lost. The proposed Tarzan shorts were described as largely comic animal cartoons, with the famous jungle hero appearing to rescue the characters near the end. The treatment relied on an already bankable name and a conventional funny-animal grammar. Clampett's disappointment was therefore both personal and formal. Tarzan was a character he could appreciate, but the animated work he had devised with John Coleman Burroughs belonged to a distinctive visual world. The creator of Carter had accepted the risk of a new form; the prospective distributor chose a more familiar route. Some tellings place decisive emphasis on regional sales representatives who worried that audiences would resist the Martian setting. That account comes principally through Clampett's later interview and Korkis's historical reconstruction, not through an extant transcript of an MGM executive meeting. [1]
The proposed replacement acquired the name Tarzantoons, Inc. Historian Devon Baxter records that Clampett, out of his Schlesinger contract, worked with John Coleman Burroughs during July and August 1936 to assemble artists, with Chuck Jones among those associated with the prospective studio. The Burroughs family archive recounts Edgar's travel to Chicago and New York in pursuit of the Tarzan venture and mentions the participation of illustrator J. Allen St. John. The Tarzan production also dissolved. Clampett accepted the opportunity to direct at Warner Bros., where his career would take a path foundational to the style of the studio's cartoons. Tarzantoons therefore forms an unexpected middle chapter between the cancelled Mars shorts and Clampett's better-known achievements. The alternative venture did not become the compensating success its advocates had anticipated. [3][10][14]
The story gains texture when placed beside Disney's contemporary development. Walt Disney had committed to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by 1934. The film premiered on 21 December 1937. Claims that an abandoned 1936 John Carter feature had been poised to beat Snow White to release oversimplify the matter. The proposal in hand concerned nine-minute shorts, while Disney's feature was already under development. Neither side of that history diminishes the other. Clampett's group was exploring sustained action fantasy and a degree of human realism within a commercial short format, while Disney pursued the immense organisational challenge of an animated feature. A successful Carter series could have added a different example to the early vocabulary of cinematic animation, perhaps encouraging studios to consider adventure and science fantasy sooner. We cannot know how such a market would have developed. We can see the path that was offered and the company decision that closed it. [1][2][15]
The timing was unusually rich. The 1930s were already proving that cinema audiences could travel imaginatively to remote worlds. Stop-motion creatures had helped make King Kong possible in 1933, while serial adventures and fantastic productions expanded the screen vocabulary of peril and discovery. Universal's Flash Gordon serial appeared in 1936, giving audiences another route into space adventure. Barsoom would have occupied an interesting position among those works: a visual universe from the older pulps realised through drawn and painted movement rather than miniature photography or photographed actors. Its key effects were inseparable from the whole frame. Human, alien and landscape could all be shaped by the same medium. The cinema of planetary romance might have possessed a prominent animated branch from its formative years if MGM had accepted that proposition.
The animator who remained, and the images that survived
Clampett returned to Warner Bros. and became one of the defining directors of its golden-age animation. His contributions to Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and the Warner cartoon sensibility belong to a different history of motion, comedy, timing and personality. His career subsequently encompassed the television and puppet worlds associated with Time for Beany and Beany and Cecil. It is tempting to imagine that Barsoom could have kept him away from all of those creations. That would be another branch of the 1936 counterfactual, and one with losses as well as gains. If the young animator had built a studio around Carter, the precise course of Warner animation would necessarily have changed. The records do not permit us to specify how. What is visible is the kind of creative intensity he carried from one form to another. [1]
One detail links the abandoned project to his later work more directly. Clampett recalled designing a city inside a giant glass dome with a helicopter-like blade on top, enabling the settlement to lift out of danger. He later associated that sketch with the beanie-cap-copter in Beany and Cecil. The anecdote comes from Clampett's retrospective account, and it should be understood as his recollection of an idea migrating between projects. Even allowing for the selectivity of memory, it describes a familiar creative process: material generated for an unrealised work persists inside the artist's imagination and finds another home. An incomplete project can have descendants, even when its title disappears from the release calendar. [1]
The material itself survived because the participants kept it. Korkis reports that Clampett stored storyboards, notes, designs, cels and footage, retrieving them in later years as he began speaking about animation history. The test circulated in excerpts, sometimes accompanied by his recorded commentary. ERBzine provides archival views of the promotional portfolio and related artwork; the Beany and Cecil: Special Edition release included surviving John Carter footage among its historical supplements. The account also includes a photograph of Clampett and John Coleman Burroughs reunited with the portfolio in the early 1970s. These records show an unfinished 1930s production acquiring another life as an object of study, memory and unrealised possibility. [1][2][13]
The clips now available online allow the casual viewer to encounter some of the work without consulting a private collection. They should be described accurately. Online extracts do not establish that a complete six-minute final presentation is publicly available in that form, and the original documents distinguish between the intended test length and the material reproduced in later compilations. What can be watched is enough to justify the fascination: Carter's grounded and exaggerated motion, the creature designs, the contrast between naturalistic shading and fantastic anatomy, and the awareness that viewers are seeing the first version of a larger programme that never reached ordinary audiences. The footage deserves a proper archival presentation with authenticated dating, complete provenance and contextual commentary. It deserves to be understood as animation history as well as Burroughs memorabilia.
John Coleman Burroughs continued to give Barsoom a visual life in print. His illustrated work extended into books and comics, including the colour Sunday newspaper strip published from 1941 into 1943. The ERBzine archive reproduces seventy-three Sunday pages and preserves Jane's recollection of her own contributions. On paper, father, son and daughter-in-law could carry the world forward without depending upon an MGM production order. John adapted the characters into compositions a reader could revisit at leisure, establishing a parallel visual tradition to the vanished film. The comic pages also preserve the relationship between the heroine's designed likeness and a living model: Jane herself. The family's artistic labour did not end with the test's rejection; it found other media and other ways to reach readers. [11][12][16]
Barsoom's screen absence can obscure the fullness of its printed life. The novels continued circulating, their images changed through new editions and artists, and comic-book interpretations accumulated. There were readers for whom Mars was intimately familiar and moviegoers for whom the same planet remained unknown. That separation helps explain an adaptation difficulty that returned in 2012. The source material's influence had travelled so widely that its original arrangements could seem strangely familiar to audiences meeting Carter for the first time. The 1936 test, made before decades of derivative or related imagery had accumulated, captures an earlier moment. Carter's leaps and Thark companionship were not yet cinematic echoes of other blockbuster worlds. The artists were trying to give a foundational fiction one of its first substantial moving bodies.
The long detour to 2012
The intervening development history contains other false starts. Different producers and filmmakers attempted to bring the Mars books into cinema, and the property's rights moved through changing arrangements. Accounts collected by ERBzine trace proposals, changing studios and renewed interest after advances in visual-effects technology. The Conran brothers, associated with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, form part of the story of the 2000s; subsequent plans led to the eventual Disney production. It would be misleading to describe all the intervening decades as one continuous film project. The period is better understood as a sequence of distinct attempts whose plans and technologies changed with the film industry. The recurring challenge was to make an enormous fictional world legible and commercially viable while maintaining the appeal of its older source. [17]
Andrew Stanton came to the work from Pixar, having directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E. He knew the books from childhood and regarded the character and world with longstanding affection. For the 2012 film he collaborated on the screenplay with Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon; the production gathered actors including Taylor Kitsch as Carter, Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris and Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas. Its lavish visual effects realised many elements that Clampett and John Coleman had tried to establish with paint, drawn cels and photographed movement: the scale of the Tharks, the ruined geography, the enormous beasts, aerial vessels and the particular physicality of a man whose body performs differently on Mars. Stanton's cinematic language was of his own period. The connection across seventy-six years lies in the challenge of giving a literary planet a consistent screen existence. [18]
The film opened in the United States on 9 March 2012, one hundred years after the beginning of the original serial's publication. Its centenary status was visible in retrospective publicity, including the home-release featurette 100 Years in the Making, which revisited the longer adaptation history and Clampett material. Stanton intended the story to continue. His proposed trilogy would have moved toward The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars, and in later interviews he discussed the unfinished second film with evident familiarity. The 2012 picture ends with Carter earning the name that its marketing had withheld from the main title. For viewers invested in that final promise, the absence of subsequent chapters remains a peculiar frustration: a first movement that opens the doors to a larger saga without being followed through. [18][19]
The production also became an industry lesson in the relationship between scale, presentation and financial exposure. Contemporary reporting documented disputes or changes around the title and marketing, a very large production and promotion budget, and a reception that left Disney expecting a roughly US$200 million operating loss from the film. Box Office Mojo records about US$284 million in worldwide theatrical receipts, including about US$73 million domestically; gross ticket sales are not equivalent to a studio's returned revenue. The film's commercial result and the company's formal financial disclosure help explain why the sequel plan did not proceed. They do not prove a single neat cause for audience response. Title choice, publicity, release environment, budget and the unfamiliarity of the property to modern filmgoers all enter the retrospective discussion, often with disagreement among those involved. Stanton later acknowledged that he had been given considerable freedom and described the differences between Pixar's iterative production culture and the expectations surrounding a live-action film. [18][20]
It is reasonable to criticise the way the picture was introduced to audiences without pretending that marketing alone determined its fate. I have always thought that John Carter deserved the time its ending asked us to imagine. The film contains striking Barsoomian imagery and moments of genuine feeling, and its insistence upon the emotional reality of Carter's loss gives an old adventure premise a cinematic line of grief and recovery. Others found the narrative crowded or the character's introduction insufficiently distinctive. The financial result could not be wished away. A serious account of this history can recognise affection for the film, disagreement about its qualities and the practical conditions under which large productions receive further investment. An abandoned sequel is experienced as an artistic loss by its audience and as a decision within a studio's capital allocation. Both facts belong to what happened.
Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm was announced in October 2012, months after the March release and Disney's loss announcement. The company thereby gained an enormous established space-fantasy franchise. It is plausible that a conglomerate's ownership of other major properties affects its later choices about development, promotion and distribution, but no public evidence considered here establishes the Lucasfilm purchase as the cause of the cancelled John Carter trilogy. The existing commercial result supplied an independent explanation. The estate announced in October 2014 that the film, television and merchandise rights had reverted to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and that it would seek a new partner. That formal return began another phase in the adaptation chronology. The 2012 film remained, but its planned continuation was no longer the active path. [20][21]
The years between the first paperback or hardcover encounter and a screen encounter matter especially for an adaptation with so much imagery already lodged in readers' minds. A printed Barsoom never belonged to a single stable design. Each cover artist selected a different version of Carter's physique, Dejah Thoris's bearing or the anatomy of a Thark. Readers joined those illustrations to a private reconstruction of the spaces between them. Film asks a production designer to choose one form and maintain it. The 1936 group approached that choice while the author could still respond directly, and John Coleman Burroughs's models provided an unusually close family interpretation of the material. The 2012 film worked in a very different situation: the author had been dead for decades, the literature had acquired a complex visual afterlife, and the audience's expectations were shaped by effects-driven cinema. Stanton's team could make far more convincing bodies and environments technically, while also having to define a visual identity amid decades of related work.
One should also remember the scale of Stanton's task as a storyteller. The source novel moves through repeated shifts in Carter's status as captive, outsider, fighter, ally and romantic partner, and the mythology of the later books continually enlarges the geographical and ideological frame. Stanton's adaptation made choices about Carter's personal history, his reluctance to take part in another war and the structure of the political conflict between Helium and Zodanga. Those choices gave the film a particular emotional centre, and also drew debate among readers attached to the books' faster, stranger narrative current. Adaptation criticism becomes more illuminating when it identifies decisions of this kind rather than reducing the whole outcome to a single promotional error. A successful film would still have required further choices for each sequel. The unrealised second and third pictures are especially frustrating because we never saw how that evolving interpretation would have handled the increasingly peculiar mythology of the novels.
The 2012 failure also distorted the public record through the language used to report a large commercial disappointment. A reported accounting loss became a compact shorthand for the work itself. That sort of headline can outlive the particular financial quarter from which it emerged, especially when a studio declines to continue the story. Yet a film does not cease to circulate when the opening weekend ends. Home viewing, streaming, critical reconsideration and the conversations of people who discover it years later are different histories from theatrical receipts. They cannot retroactively finance a sequel, and their size should not be invented. They can, however, sustain interest in a property and make a new adaptation intelligible to an audience that never encountered the original marketing campaign. The choice to revisit John Carter in animation fourteen years later is compatible with both the original film's financial result and the persistence of affection around it.
An inheritance scattered through other worlds
One of Barsoom's enduring ironies is that some of its imaginative conventions became familiar through works bearing other names. The abandoned 1936 series might have given audiences an early audiovisual association between Carter and the motifs his books helped popularise. By the time Stanton made his picture, the public had lived with generations of cinematic planets, desert cultures, alien companions, interstellar adventure and elaborate invented histories. It would be too simple to draw a direct line from each familiar image back to Burroughs, since the genre developed through multiple writers, artists, scientific ideas and production traditions. Yet the Mars books occupy an acknowledged early place in the lineage of planetary romance, and the estate and several filmmakers have remarked upon their reach. The visual grammar that once made Carter difficult for MGM to market had become a common property of blockbuster science fiction. [7][8][17]
This is part of why the 1936 material has such historical appeal. It shows the source attempting to take screen form before the medium had absorbed much of its vocabulary. The concept of a terrestrial adventurer becoming extraordinary in another environment, a friendship that crosses species and a romance tied to planetary politics might have been encountered first through Carter on cinema screens. A continuing series could have habituated audiences to the four-armed Martians, the thoats and the geography of Helium. Subsequent screen science fantasy might then have been described in relation to a widely recognised Barsoomian tradition. That future is imaginable; it is not recoverable as a factual outcome. The point of studying the test is to identify an actual opportunity and its constraints, then allow the counterfactual to remain honestly uncertain.
There is an equally interesting cost on the other side of the fork. Clampett's subsequent Warner cartoons are part of the language of twentieth-century animation, and the people who assisted the test had further careers of their own. A successful Mars programme could have brought some of those artists into different working relationships and given MGM a separate animation identity. It might have altered the balance between realistic adventure and character comedy in theatrical shorts. It might also have struggled to sustain the expensive rendering and intricate anatomy visible in the test. The attention paid to oil shading and rotoscoped human movement was precisely what made the material distinctive, and those techniques demand time and money. A distributor's reluctance, however disappointing, existed within the commercial limitations of the short-subject market. A history of what could have been should retain the actual labour and cost of making it.
My fascination therefore rests on the reel itself rather than on a fantasy in which every industrial objection disappears. It proves that a group of artists in 1936 could conceive and partially execute a Barsoom animation programme. It shows that the author approved their imaginative departure from his text, that his son built the visual reference, that colleagues from Warner participated, and that MGM came close enough for Clampett to reorganise his employment around the prospect. That is a more concrete claim than saying Barsoom was fated to become an animated feature. There were contingencies, negotiations and alternatives. An idea reached a stage at which it could be watched and evaluated. Another decision was taken. A history can be shaped by a short subject that never reached the audience for whom it was made.
An anniversary of the imagined world
The 1936 attempt belongs to a larger calendar of Barsoomian anniversaries. February 1912 marks the first appearance of Under the Moons of Mars, and October 1917 marks the first hardcover publication of A Princess of Mars. March 9 marks the United States release of Stanton's film. I would also like June 10 to become a widely recognised day for Barsoom, because that date comes from a narrative occasion Burroughs selected himself. The connection is especially satisfying for a world that has spent so long seeking a renewed public presence. Its literary creator supplied an in-universe date on which Earth and Barsoom become meaningfully connected. [7][8][22]
The date appears in The Moon Maid, published in 1923, whose prologue opens on Mars Day, 10 June 1967. Burroughs imagines a future in which researchers have long attempted communication between the planets. Signals, replies and the patient development of an intelligible shared system eventually allow Earth to receive an understandable message from Helium. That message conveys goodwill from a sister world. John Carter assists the communications process through his knowledge of both peoples. The celebration unfolds aboard and around an advanced transoceanic aircraft, where a narrator encounters the stranger who will begin the novel's generational history. Readers have subsequently treated June 10 as an informal Mars Day. The date has an actual textual basis and a subject that suits an annual commemoration: first contact, communication and recognition across worlds. [22]
The source should also be read in full. Burroughs's imagined 1967 opens after a prolonged global conflict and includes explicitly racialised claims about its political resolution. I would not make those assumptions the content of a modern observance. The first-message event offers a different point of emphasis, and one that can be identified precisely without claiming that the entire fictional future is benign. A contemporary Barsoom Day could celebrate the stories, their art, their adaptations, their readers and the idea of seeking intelligible contact with an unfamiliar world. It could acknowledge the historical text from which it takes the date and invite critical engagement with that text. The in-world celebration is stronger as a basis than an arbitrary marketing date, because the author's own fiction establishes it. I do not know why Burroughs chose the tenth of June as a calendar number, and I have found no reliable authorial statement explaining it. The narrative reason for observing it, however, is unambiguous. [22]
There is a pleasing symmetry here. The 1936 test was an attempt to communicate a fictional world through a new medium. In The Moon Maid, Mars Day commemorates a message from one world to another after a long effort to construct a common language. The test reel, its models and its painted frames did something comparable for cinema. They tried to teach an audience how Barsoom looked and moved. The 2012 film made a second, grander transmission through contemporary visual effects. The newest proposed animated series aims to speak in a medium closer to Clampett's original choice. June 10 would give those scattered moments a common day without requiring the fiction to be reduced to one studio, one actor or one release.
The comparison that keeps returning: Dune
Barsoom's history makes me think of Frank Herbert's Dune, another immense imagined world whose cinematic future was troubled for decades. The comparison is imperfect, as useful comparisons usually are. Dune arrived in print in the 1960s and has different literary concerns, an ecology and politics with a more explicitly analytical structure, and a distinct history of rights and production. Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade version has become one of cinema's famous unrealised projects; David Lynch directed a 1984 adaptation with an enduring cultural life and a disputed reputation. The material kept attracting filmmakers because its central images and ideas offered enormous possibilities while resisting easy compression into a conventional feature. Barsoom's 1936 reel belongs to a comparable history of ambitious work whose development survives partly as an alternative version of film history. [23]
Denis Villeneuve's recent films demonstrated what can happen when a difficult work receives a coherent long-form screen treatment with substantial resources and a consistent directorial approach. Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) placed Herbert's world before a broad theatrical audience with an integrated visual and sonic identity. Their casts included Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem and many others; their production teams treated the design of Arrakis, the material cultures of its factions, and the scale of its political and ecological world as a sustained cinematic undertaking. The first film received ten Academy Award nominations and won six Oscars. The second was nominated for Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards and won for sound and visual effects. Awards are not a universal measure of artistic merit, but in this case they document the extent to which a once notoriously difficult literary property became a major international filmmaking enterprise. [24][25]
As of September 2026, Dune: Part Three is being prepared for a December theatrical release, with Villeneuve again directing and much of the creative and performing ensemble returning. That continuity is the dimension of the comparison that interests me most. A single film can establish the visual world; later chapters allow its inhabitants, conflicts and consequences to develop. Stanton's John Carter was designed to begin a process of that kind and was denied the opportunity to complete it. A future Barsoom adaptation need not imitate Villeneuve's style, budgets or aesthetic. It would benefit from the same confidence in the source's scope and the same willingness to make the world legible across more than one instalment. Its own distinctive strength could be the freedoms of animation, an art that makes a creature's anatomy and a planet's light part of one designed image. [26]
The expression 'Barsoom needs its Denis Villeneuve' therefore names a desire for a director or creative team with sufficient authority and stamina to give the world a durable screen identity. It is not a request to make Burroughs's planet resemble Arrakis. Barsoom is more exuberantly romantic, its hero's transformation more immediate, its cultures and contraptions organised around a different adventure rhythm. Its colour, movement, monsters and improbable geography may be particularly well served by animation, whether hand-drawn, computer-generated or a considered combination. The 1936 animators perceived that affinity before any modern blockbuster infrastructure existed to support it. Their choice of medium remains a persuasive starting point ninety years later.
The comparison also invites a practical question about length. A single feature must manage arrival, orientation, major conflict and resolution within a few hours. The great appeal of an unfamiliar world often emerges in the apparently secondary things: a transport system, a set of rituals, the appearance of a distant settlement, the complicated history between two characters. Villeneuve's two-part opening gave Arrakis enough screen time for such details to accumulate across films. The serial format Clampett proposed could, in another register, have let Barsoom accumulate through recurrence. An animated television series has still another arrangement of time. It can introduce the great narrative landmarks while preserving quieter moments in which an audience simply lives inside a place. The new John Carter project's format therefore deserves attention as an artistic decision, quite apart from the marketing question of where it might be distributed.
No director can personally guarantee that industrial circumstances will align, and the search for a singular saviour can obscure the hundreds of people required to make an adaptation work. Villeneuve's achievements depend on actors, writers, production designers, cinematographers, sound artists, editors, effects teams, producers and financiers. The 1936 test depended on a much smaller group, but the underlying lesson is similar. A world arrives on screen through a shared set of aesthetic decisions sustained across production. It needs an interpretation strong enough for every department to work from, and an organisation capable of carrying that interpretation to release. The historical wish embodied by the 1936 reel is therefore a wish for continuity of purpose as much as for one extraordinary director. I want Barsoom to find an arrangement in which its artists can complete the world they set out to make.
The return to animation
The latest developments give this anniversary an unusual sense of proximity to the future. On 21 July 2025, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. announced that it was developing John Carter, Warlord of Mars: The Animated Series. Michael Kogge was named to develop the project, with Jim Sullos and Wolf Larson overseeing for the company. The announcement explicitly recalled Clampett and John Coleman Burroughs's 1936 reel and the proposed nine-minute shorts that MGM never commissioned. It stated that the new production would be the first full realisation of John Carter in animation. Kogge pointed to contemporary fantasy-action animation as evidence that the medium could sustain the material. This is an announced development project, not a completed series: the public record available for this article does not establish a release date, distributor or finished episodes. [4]
In July 2026, the estate announced that Mark Andrews had joined as supervising director and co-showrunner alongside head writer Kogge. Andrews directed Pixar's Brave and co-wrote the 2012 John Carter screenplay with Stanton and Chabon. The return of someone who helped shape Stanton's Barsoom gives the new production a direct connection to the last major screen adaptation, while its format recalls the first. Andrews and Kogge were scheduled to discuss the series at San Diego Comic-Con that month. The announcement is substantial evidence of creative development and of the estate's commitment to animation, while leaving financing, distribution, design and completion milestones for later confirmation. The distinction matters especially in a history filled with promising announcements. [5]
The company has also pursued animation elsewhere in its catalogue. A February 2025 partnership with Flying S Films proposed an Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe series led by Victory Harben, with characters including Tarzan, Jane, Carter, Dejah Thoris and Carson of Venus. In June 2025 it announced two anime developments with Rollman Entertainment, Tarzanime: Between Two Worlds and Korak the Killer: Legacy of the Wild. Those are separate projects with separate premises and teams. They suggest a broader willingness to present the Burroughs worlds through animated forms rather than confining the estate to a single live-action franchise. Their announcement does not guarantee their arrival on screen. Taken together with the John Carter series, they show a company actively looking toward visual media capable of accommodating an unusually varied literary catalogue. [27][28]
There is a companion development in sound. The officially authorised John Carter of Mars audio adaptation, associated with Pocket Universe Productions and Kogge, advertises a cast including Sean Patrick Flanery, Wasé Chief, Tim Russ, Bruce Boxleitner and Ian McDiarmid. Sound drama has different resources from animation, but it offers another means of giving voice, pace, atmosphere and performance to Barsoom's people. New adaptations in different media can help reintroduce the setting to people who have never held the novels or seen Stanton's film. The estate's programme is wider than a single television proposal, and the fact that Kogge is involved in both the audio and animated ventures may give the projects a shared familiarity with the material even if they remain creatively distinct. [29]
There is an emotional temptation to regard the 2026 announcement as an ending already written. Ninety years of unrealised projects advise patience. Until viewers can watch completed episodes, the new series belongs to the development history, not to the release history. Yet its existence provides a different way of looking back on Clampett's work. The original experiment can now be studied as the first attempt in a line that is still capable of renewal. Its surviving drawings, models, cels and footage may offer modern filmmakers a sense of the physical and artistic questions that first confronted the property. The path from a 1936 sales reel to a contemporary streaming or broadcast series is not continuous, but the question at either end is recognisable: how does one make a world of this scale move?
The date of this commemoration is also an invitation to examine what we ask an anniversary to do. Some anniversaries celebrate a finished work's release. Others preserve a moment when an imagined future was materially close enough to leave evidence. The Clampett reel belongs to the latter kind. There are many reasons a film can remain incomplete, and the survival of a fragment can be accidental. In this case the reel is accompanied by unusually rich documentation: a large visual proposal, models, later interviews, family reminiscence and identifiable collaborators. Those materials permit an account more detailed than a legend about a lost masterpiece. We can say what format was offered, who worked on it, what technical experiments were attempted, how MGM's preference changed and what became of the artists. The anniversary can bring those facts back into circulation while leaving open the imaginative question of how early popular cinema might have changed if the series had been commissioned.
An archival image is also an argument about care. A painted cel survives because someone kept it long after its original commercial use vanished. A portfolio survives because successive people recognise that the pages contain a record of work, relationships and ambitions. Bill Hillman's ERBzine documentation of the Danton Burroughs collection has made material from the family archive visible to readers far beyond Tarzana. Korkis's interview preserved Clampett's account of the animators' intentions and procedures, while later historians have checked aspects of the production against its industrial context. Each act of preservation makes it harder for the experiment to collapse into an appealing but inaccurate anecdote. That is the standard I want for the history of Barsoom: affection strong enough to do the research, and research precise enough to deepen the affection.
It may also be that animation offers an especially appropriate way to commemorate a world whose fictional history spans generations and whose physical laws are inseparable from its romance. In live action, each unfamiliar creature is an additional production problem to be blended into photographed reality. In animation, the entire frame can be composed according to the requirements of the world. That does not make animation cheap or simple. It makes its technical burdens available to a coherent artistic language. The 1936 team addressed that language through drawing and paint. A contemporary team would have access to different materials and tools, but its choices about weight, gesture, atmosphere, colour and scale would remain recognisably related. When I watch the surviving figures move, I see the earliest draft of a conversation that can still continue.
Ninety years of what could have been
There is a phrase that returns whenever I think about Barsoom's screen life: the bridesmaid, never the bride. The world has repeatedly approached the occasion for which it seemed prepared. A writer created a vast planetary mythology in 1912; his son and a young animation director gave it movement in 1936; the distributor chose Tarzan. The books circulated, the illustrations multiplied, the world entered the imaginative inheritance of later writers and filmmakers. Stanton finally brought Carter to a global cinema audience in 2012, and the proposed trilogy ended after its first film. More than a decade later, animation again became the declared route forward. The recurrence can sound like a curse when reduced to a list of disappointments. It becomes more revealing when each project is restored to its particular conditions, people, techniques and decisions. [1][4][18]
What could have been in 1936 is a story about artistic possibility within an industry whose dominant products and commercial assumptions were changing. A group of young animators believed that audiences could follow sustained planetary adventure in colour shorts. A novelist trusted them to reinvent his story for movement. His son created the tools with which they could build creatures and characters. MGM saw promise, then preferred the certainty of a known property. Clampett returned to Warner and made other landmarks. The reel remained. To commemorate it is to recognise labour that achieved something real even without a commercial release. The frames demonstrate a world taking form, and they identify the people who gave time to that undertaking before anyone could know how it would end.
I would like to see the test given the public archival recognition it deserves, with the surviving footage properly presented and the portfolio available to scholars and readers. I would like younger viewers to encounter the art before they encounter a chronology of cancellations. I would like June 10 to acquire wider currency as Barsoom Day, grounded in Burroughs's own fictional message from Helium, while February continues to mark the publication that began the world. I would like any new animated production to show confidence in Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas, Carter and the immense setting around them, including the parts of its literature that warrant thoughtful reconsideration. A world survives when people are willing to return to it, argue over it, adapt it and hand it to those who have yet to discover it.
Perhaps the 2030s will finally give Barsoom a sustained screen life. That is a hope rather than a forecast. Dune has shown how a long and difficult adaptation history can open into a coherent series of internationally recognised films when the circumstances and creative stewardship align. Barsoom has the additional historical satisfaction of being able to return to the form its earliest screen advocates chose. If the announced animated project reaches audiences, it will do so ninety years after Clampett, John, Jane and their colleagues painted a Martian adventure into motion. If further seasons or films follow, a long-deferred possibility will have developed into something durable. [4][5][24][25]
For now, I return to that small body of film. A man in Griffith Park becomes John Carter. The drawn figure runs over the red planet. A Thark rides an impossible animal. The work is unfinished, and the world it promises extends beyond the edge of every surviving frame. The anniversary belongs to Bob Clampett, John Coleman Burroughs, Jane Ralston, Chuck Jones, Robert Cannon, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the others whose contributions made the trial possible. It belongs, too, to the people who preserved the drawings and footage and allowed later generations to see them. Ninety years of what could have been can still be commemorated through what actually was: a serious, vivid, technically ambitious attempt to bring Barsoom to the screen. In 1936, for a few minutes, Mars moved.
Sources and archival notes
[1] Jim Korkis, “Bob Clampett's ‘John Carter of Mars’,” Cartoon Research, 19 July 2019. Based on Korkis's 1978 interview with Clampett. Open source
[2] ERBzine, “The John Carter Animation Project: Promotional Portfolio by John Coleman Burroughs,” Part I, including material from the Danton Burroughs Tarzana Archive and Korkis's earlier historical account. Open source
[3] Devon Baxter, “‘When's Your Birthday?’ (1937),” Cartoon Research, 8 May 2023, on the July and August 1936 Tarzantoons work. Open source
[4] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., “John Carter, Warlord of Mars Animated Series,” announced 21 July 2025. Open source
[5] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., “Oscar-Winning Filmmaker Mark Andrews to Direct ‘John Carter, Warlord of Mars: The Animated Series’,” 22 July 2026; see also TheWrap, 20 July 2026. Open source ; Open second source
[6] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., author biography, including Burroughs's account of writing his first story and Metcalf's response. Open source
[7] The All-Story, February 1912 issue, digitised copy and bibliographic record for Under the Moons of Mars. Open source
[8] Library of Congress, bibliographic record for the 1917 edition of A Princess of Mars. Open source
[9] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., corporate history. Open source
[10] ERBzine, “John Coleman Burroughs,” biographical archive. Open source
[11] ERBzine, “John Carter Animation Project,” Part II, and Jane Ralston Burroughs tribute. Open source ; Open second source
[12] ERBzine, “John Coleman Burroughs' John Carter Sunday Pages,” including Jane's 1998 letter describing her work. Open source
[13] ERBzine, archival portfolio and illustrative material, Parts I and II. Open source ; Open second source
[14] ERBzine, John Coleman Burroughs biography, on Tarzantoons and J. Allen St. John. Open source
[15] D23, Disney company history and Snow White production chronology. Open source ; Open second source
[16] ERBzine, seventy-three archived John Carter of Mars Sunday pages. Open source
[17] ERBzine, “Evolution of John Carter of Mars on Film,” historical project overview. Open source
[18] Rebecca Keegan, “Director Andrew Stanton Looks Back on John Carter's Rocky Path,” Los Angeles Times, 8 September 2012; film credits and box office from Box Office Mojo. Open source ; Open second source
[19] TheWrap, “John Carter Director Andrew Stanton Reveals the Story for Unmade Sequel,” 9 March 2022. Open source
[20] Los Angeles Times, “Disney Expects $200-Million Loss on John Carter,” 20 March 2012, and TheWrap, development and marketing retrospective, 2022. Open source ; Open second source
[21] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., rights-reversion announcement, 20 October 2014. Open source
[22] Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Maid, prologue, “The Message from Mars,” available in the Project Gutenberg edition. Open source
[23] Mark Olsen, “Jodorowsky’s Dune Explores an Unrealized Yet Influential Film Vision,” Los Angeles Times, 29 March 2014; Phil Hoad, “David Lynch’s Indie Empire,” Sight and Sound / BFI, 20 January 2026. The comparison in the article is interpretive rather than a claim of shared production history. Open source ; Open second source
[24] Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 94th Academy Awards (2022), Dune nominations and awards. Open source
[25] Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 97th Academy Awards (2025), Dune: Part Two nominations and awards. Open source
[26] Warner Bros. / Legendary, official Dune: Part Three site, release and production information as available in September 2026. Open source
[27] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe animated series announcement, 19 February 2025. Open source
[28] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., Rollman Entertainment announcement concerning Tarzan and Korak anime, 5 June 2025. Open source
[29] Pocket Universe Productions, official John Carter of Mars audio-series project page. Open source
Editorial note: This essay distinguishes established events, later participants' recollections and explicit counterfactual speculation. The precise completion day and month of the 1936 test are not verified in the sources above. “Six minutes” describes the intended sales-reel length reported by Korkis, while the available excerpts are not necessarily a complete print. The new animated series remains in development as of 26 September 2026.