and by video, I mean anything that would be visual. So TV, movies, DVD, video games, etc. I realize if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you think I don’t read books. I do. It’s just that I sometimes find it harder to review a book than a video.It’s that visual person thing, but then again, it is also the fact that I grew up reading without the benefit of CGI or video games. I did a lot more reading than watching video.
Now. On to John Carter. The movie. I liked it. There were parts where I laughed out loud. To me, it was an adventure. And outsized, fantastic adventure, and Burroughs prose was full of action and suspense and in some ways, terror. John Carter said or thought something and he was on Mars. I didn’t remember the medallion. And there he was like a god, small ‘g’ of course. And he fell in love with the beautiful princess. Remember too, this was a different time for women, not that they were fragile, but there were not the fighter we see in the Disney movie, John Carter. Not that Dejah Thoris was in anyway normal, she was a princess on the Red Planet.
I remember Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ books as being on The Index that was published in The Tidings, the LA Archdiocese newspaper in the 1950’s. Not banned exactly, but not on the approved reading list either. But Mom and I loved Tarzan and John Carter on Mars, well, it was one more adventure. And I we knew that Tarzana, the town just down Sepulveda Blvd you turned right and you were in the town where ERB lived. He died long before I started to read. Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, lived just down the road a piece in Woodland Hills.
There are lots of good adventure books out there. Lots. But somehow I miss the fact that they can create or recreate the most fantastical of stories and we can see them. LOL, with just the video, it feels very Fahrenheit 451.