Geoff Boucher of the LA Times demonstrates his own geek cred while interviewing Andrew Stanton on his upcoming John Carter film:
This source material has such history and such a legacy, but all of that is lost on most people today. You’re not going to have a chance — at least not with the movie posters or television commercials — to really communicate the fact that this is the Rosetta stone for decades of off-world fantasies like “Star Wars” and “Avatar.”
In the story, John Carter is a Civil War veteran who finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars, where due to the gravity he is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so to speak, a conceit that would pop up in the 1930s in Superman. A battered, hardened solider, he learns of the alien culture and falls in love with a brightly hued princess, not unlike “Avatar.” In the Burroughs tales, leaders are called Jeddak, there are beasts called Banths, there’s a warrior rank of padwar — all of those seem to echo in the Lucas universe, as do key concepts and themes. Does any of that present a problem? Does it box you in or create the risk that “John Carter” will feel derivative to audiences that don’t know or don’t care about the chronology of the heritage?
This is a problem with any classic work. I found this watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now and Casablanca. You’ve heard all the good lines before, you’ve seen all the good scenes in a dozen other (later) movies, and the bits that are new are the boring bits that weren’t worth stealing.
Or there is the description of Shakespeare as a series of cliches strung together to retell some well known stories.
Especially so with films. You see a movie where something was done first (camera shots in Citizen Kane, jump shots in Breathless) and, if you don’t know the history, you see only the use of a standard technique not done as well as you are used to it.
I might go a step further and suggest that this seen-it-before problem exists almost exclusively on screen, because my experience with pop-lit classics — like Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels, or Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories — is that they’re so much better than the derivative works that you’re left thinking, So this is what everyone else is palely imitating!