John Carter of Mars

John Carter of Mars technically refers to the main protagonist of the Barsoom Sword & Planet novels written from the 1910s onward by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but is commonly used to refer to the Barsoom universe as a whole.

Basic Summary

The Barsoom books revolve around an adventurous Virginian man named John Carter, who is somehow mentally projected to Mars - a dying world of red deserts and rocky badlands inhabited by myriad alien races, who collectively refer to their world as "Barsoom". Filled with a spirit of adventure and a "good ol' boy" sentiment, and granted superhuman strength by Barsoom's lighter gravity, John Carter becomes a great leader who rescues (and ultimately marries) the princess of the surprisingly human-like "Red Martians", ultimately going on to bring peace to Barsoom by uniting its once-warring cultures as the Warlord of Mars.

Barsoom Lore

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Barsoom was once a lush, verdant world, dominated by five seas and inhabited by several tribes of human-shaped indigenous peoples, but it is now a dying world that has largely dried out into a massive expanse of red sand dunes and rocky barrens, to which life tentatively clings.

Most of Barsoom's intelligent humanoids are known by the naming scheme of "(Color Prefix) Martians", due to their appearance, but some races do have different names. Despite looking like humans, they are actually more closely comparable to reptiles, reproducing by laying eggs. They have vastly longer lifespans than humans.

Red Martians are the most widely spread of Barsoom's races, and represent one of the two "common" races of Mars, alongside the Green Martians. These Barsoomians resemble humans with deep coppery-red skin and black hair, and are believed to be the result of centuries of interbreeding between Orovar, First Born, and Okar.

Green Martians are the second-most dominant race of Barsoom in its current dying state, inhabiting the dead sea bottoms. They are the most inhuman-looking of all Barsoom's races, with green skin, prodigious tusks, small antennae-like ears, and a bizarre "double-torso". This unusually structured and elongated upper body gives Green Martians six limbs and the option to either stand upright, towering at up to 15ft tall and with four arms for greater fighting abilities, or to drop down into a centaur-like posture, employing their intermediate arms as forelegs and giving them greater speed. They are intelligent and have their own civilization, but their culture is brutish, cruel and warmongering; the Red vs Green Martian conflict is largely one of civilized peoples versus savage barbarians, until John Carter arrives.

White Martians are actually a collection of three different Barsoom races who resemble Caucasian humans.

• Orovar were the original White Martian race, resembling blonde, blue-eyed Caucasians. They are all but extinct in the present day, clinging to life in the ruins of their last city, Horz.
• Lotharians are an offshoot of the Orovar characterized by their auburn hair and natural affinity for psionics, but which has come at the cost of race-wide madness. Like the Orovar, they exist only as a remnant population in the lost city of Lothar.
• Therns are the "modern" White Martians, and initially appear as blonde, blue-eyed Caucasians - in fact, they're actually completely hairless, and wear yellow wigs out of a cultural obligation. Whilst they promote themselves as the last pureblooded descendants of the Orovar, they're actually the result of crossbreeding Black Martians with white apes. They are the secret manipulators behind the religion of the Red, Green and Yellow Martians, which they use to lure them to their homeland to use them as slaves and food. Ironically, they've fallen for the same trick and exploited in the same way by the Black Martians.

Black Martians, also known as the "First Born", are one of the three original Barsoom humanoids, resembling humans with polished ebony-colored skin, black irised eyes, and black hair. They are cannibals who consider all other humanoids of Barsoom fit only to be used as tools and food.

Yellow Martians, or "Okar", are one of the three original Barsoom humanoids, resembling humans with skin the color of a ripe lemon. They are an insular people who inhabit glass-domed cities in the frozen northlands of Barsoom.

Kaldanes are a horrid race resembling a cross between a giant spider and a disembodied head, imbued with powerful psionics and with a borderline-religious obsession with becoming the ultimate brain. They are served by bizarre creatures called rykors, which are non-sapient beasts resembling headless Red Martians; rykoks act as both beasts of burden and as food, although the Kaldanes happily eat any of the humanoid Martians too.

Goolians, or "Kangaroo Men", are an unimportant Martian race that exists in the Toonolian Marshes, resembling pointy-eared humans with the legs, tails and pouches of kangaroos. Arrogant and boastful, they are in fact inveterate cowards, though they seem psychologically unable to accept the fact that they are not the brave geniuses they claim to be. Though they lay eggs like all Martians, they also use pouches to incubate their eggs and to carry the young until they become self-sufficient.

Hormads are deformed living weapons created by the mad scientist Ras Thavas from Red Martian stock. Artificially grown in bubbling fleshcrafting vats, they are invariably hideously deformed, but compensate with tremendous strength, resistance to pain, and regenerative abilities. If Green Martians are the orcs of Mars, then Hormads are its trolls.

Also bearing brief mention are the Plant Men, which are non-sapient predatory plants named as such for their vague resemblance to a humanoid form, and the White Apes; six-limbed white-furred gorilla-like creatures with a Neanderthal-like intelligence and social development level.

A Winning Formula

Barsoom was a huge hit, so much so that not only did Burroughs himself try to repeat his success with the Carson of Venus series, but at least two other major pulp novel series were born out of the style.

Leigh Brackett, perhaps better known these days for developing the love-triangle in The Empire Strikes Back, back in 1949 to 1951 had created the Eric John Stark stories. These were pulp magazine novellas in Planet Stories, before she rewrote them several times over up until the '80s. Eric, who combines and arguably slightly parodies elements of both John Carter and Tarzan, is the son of space-miners who died in a cave-in, leaving their child to be adopted and raised to maturity by the primitive humanoid aliens of the Mercurian Twilight Belt... who were killed by space pirates when Eric was a teenager, who would have killed him in the same way if a space cop hadn't shown up and rescued him. Skin burned a deep, glossy black by the intense sunlight of the Twilight Belt, Stark's origins made him intensely empathic towards the plight of the enslaved and oppressed aliens of the Solar System in the face of the colonizing Human powers, and he fought against them.

Then along came John Norman in the 1970s, whose Gor novels start out with the Barsoom formula, with an ordinary Earth guy being snatched away to a primitive, warlike "Counter-Earth" secretly ruled over by highly advanced insectoid aliens and becoming a much-respected warrior... then quickly devolved into exulting our protagonist and all his friends being a psychopathic bunch of misogynists who run around raping any woman who dares to think she has a life outside of cooking, cleaning and being a sex-toy.

The Games

Whilst the Barsoom books had their influence on Dungeons & Dragons - the Girallon is based on a Barsoom monster, whilst Dark Sun is basically copying Barsoom's aesthetic - the books actually have their own roleplaying games.

The first, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, is an RPG that was published by Heritage Models in 1978.

A year later, Simulations Publications, Inc would produce a John Carter: Warlord of Mars board game.

In 2015, Modiphius announced their plans to revive John Carter as both an RPG (using their new "Momentum" ruleset, a lighter version of their original 2d20 RPG system), a board game, and a miniature warband game.

That Movie

The whole Barsoom series languished in development-hell because the special-effects weren't there for true live-action and also because, we suppose, nobody had consulted Ralph Bakshi who normally would be first in line to crap all over someone's IP with badly rotoscoped animation. Finally Andrew Stanton nagged and nagged and, at last, got his dream into theatres: A Princess of Mars, which we saw in 2012 as John Carter.

For pity, nobody outside 1d4chan saw it.

Disney's marketing was terrible: the trailers selected the more-boring parts of the movie, there was no care to cite the century-old lore (everybody thought it "ripped off" Star Wars and Dune when... er... other-way-'round, bro), and the title made it sound like a biopic about another of President Carter's drunken half brothers. It didn't help that there weren't any movie-stars in here; although if it had sold, Taylor Kitsch would assuredly have become one. We leave to others to speculate upon Disney's motivations for tanking their own movie.

As for the movie itself, it was actually... good. The CGI does its job, all the actors did much better than anyone expected them to, the script was fine.

But it was a massive flop. The CGI (which was necessary) cost so much that Disney took a write-off. It is unlikely we're getting more kino in this series until Elon himself builds a film-studio on this planet.