Back when Andrew Stanton confirmed that he was writing John Carter of Mars for Pixar, I walked through the long and twisty history of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sci-fi classic and all the attempts to bring it to the big screen.
It all started with Bob Clampett, the animator best known for Beany and Cecil, as Jim Korkis explains:
When he graduated high school in 1931, Clampett got a job at the Harman-Ising Studio which was turning out cartoons for Warner Brothers. Clampett even got to work on the very first MERRY MELODIE. For a few years, he was content to learn the craft of animation and to work himself up to a position where he was not only animating, but contributing story ideas for the various cartoons.
However, Clampett was ambitious and wanted to take the next step up into directing animated shorts. At the time, there seemed to be only a slight possibility of this dream occurring at Warners so Clampett decided to use his spare time to develop a project on his own.
In a bold move, he arranged a meeting with Edgar Rice Burroughs himself who lived in a small community named Tarzana (named after his famous jungle king character) in the nearby San Gabriel Valley. “I had been fascinated with the Burroughs books since I was a youngster, especially the Mars books,” Clampett once mentioned in an interview. Years before the Fleischer Studio would consider producing the justly memorable SUPERMAN series of shorts, Clampett realized that animation didn’t need to be just the limited domain of wild slapstick and funny animals.
“An animator can take a pencil and put the city of Rome or a strange planet on a small piece of paper and have a character do anything that comes to his imagination. There is no other medium that allows you to exert such control over every frame of film,” Clampett told me in 1978, “Realizing the potential of a fantasy series of cartoons based around Burroughs’ characters, I went out to Tarzana to see Burroughs himself and tried to convince him that I could film and sell a series of cartoons based on his JOHN CARTER OF MARS stories.”
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For the test reel of footage, Clampett realized he had to have a major conflict that got resolved, introduced the main characters, and established the world of Mars. The basic plotline that Clampett settled on concerned an exotic race of Martians who lived in the mouth of a volcano. Periodically, they would venture out from their hidden lair in rocket ships to attack and plunder the cities of Mars.Of course, it was up to hero John Carter to stop them. Interestingly, Clampett would later adapt this plot of one of his BEANY AND CECIL puppet shows with the sea sick sea serpent taking the place of Burroughs’ hero.
While it was Clampett’s plan that the series would be composed of nine-minute long cartoons each of which featured a complete story, he decided that six minutes of test footage would be ample to convince any distributor of the viability of the series.
Edgar Rice Burroughs himself had already contacted MGM about buying the animated series. MGM was anxious to keep Burroughs happy since they were enjoying success with their Johnny Weissmuller film version of TARZAN and they were generally dissatisfied with their animated short subjects at the time. So, Clampett was under pressure not only to make test footage that would satisfy Burroughs but also the more pragmatic accountants at MGM.
“I wanted to do something quite imaginative, with tongue-in-cheek humor throughout. Chuck (Jones) helped me animate and Bobe (Robert Cannon) inbetweened. In fact, I filmed Bobe in live-action as the hero; he was very heroically built, all shoulders and no hips. I filmed him in Griffith Park, and we rotoscoped part of it,”Clampett said with a smile.
Robert Cannon, nicknamed “Bobe”, was a “terrific draftsman” according to Tex Avery. When Avery came to Warners to head up his own animation unit, Tom Palmer assigned him Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Bobe Cannon. Palmer explained to Avery that “I’ve got some boys here…they’re not renegades, but they don’t get along with the other two crews. They’re not satisfied with the people they’re working with.”
It was the success of this unit that caused Leon Schlessinger to establish the famous Termite Terrace where many classic Warner cartoons were made. In later years, Cannon became a director and animator at U.P.A.
Because Clampett and the others were still working full-time at Warners, the JOHN CARTER work had to be squeezed in at night, on weekends and whenever a spare moment managed to pop up. Even John Coleman Burroughs and his fiancée Jane would sometimes help out by painting some of the cels for the cartoon themselves. Clampett wanted a different look for the animated series and was once again forced to experiment.
“We would oil paint the side shadowing frame-by-frame in an attempt to get away from the typical outlining that took place in normal animated films. In the running sequence, for example, there is a subtle blending of figure and line which eliminated the harsh outline. It is more like a human being in tone. We were working in untested territory at that time. There was no animated film to look at to see how it was done,” Clampett explained.
In 1936, the test footage was completed. It featured John Carter running and leaping around the Martian surface, a Thark riding a thoat in full color, Carter involved in a swordfight and other vivid sequences which were quite unlike anything else being done in animation at the time. There was an opening title sequence of the planet Mars hurtling toward the screen with lettering proclaiming John Carter in the “Warlord of Mars” and title cards announcing future episodes.
It was planned that these scenes would be in the first film if the series sold. Burroughs loved the final work and more importantly, so did MGM. Clampett gave notice to Warners that he was leaving and he started production work on the first episode.
Then disaster struck.
The local sales representatives who were primarily from the Mid-West and the South expressed their concerns to MGM that the project would be a “tough sale”. They felt audiences would not be able to understand nor accept the concept of an Earth man having adventures on Mars. It all just seemed too strange. They pushed for a Burroughs cartoon series featuring Tarzan who was already well-known and well-loved by the public.
“I had already given notice to Warners and was preparing to start on the JOHN CARTER series when MGM’s change in decision came down. The studio said, ‘No, we do not want the JOHN CARTER thing; we want TARZAN’. Aesthetically, Jack Burroughs and I were very inspired by the Mars project. And the idea, as much as I like Tarzan, to do the alternate series was simply not the same. Somehow, I just lost my enthusiasm for the new project,” Clampett told a variety of interviewers over the years.
One of the reasons Clampett’s enthusiasm was crushed was because of the concept of the TARZAN series. The studio wanted funny jungle animals doing silly things and at the end of the cartoon, Tarzan would appear and save these foolish animals from being caught in quicksand or facing a vicious predator.