Feathers! Martian airships don’t have feathers!

Yes, I am now starting my rants about Andrew Stanton’s John Carter, based on the eleven volume series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. There’s a new trailer for the film, previously called John Carter of Mars, that should more properly have been called A Princess of Mars, Burrough’s title for the first book.


Now I know that all my complaining about the look of the film will amount to nothing. I also have great respect for director Andrew Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo (“the sea monkeys have my money”) and Wall-E, two great Pixar films. And I know that the decision to cast Taylor Kitsch as John Carter, fighting man of Virginia, was based on his youth and looks and I can’t really fault Walt Disney Picture’s for that decision. For all I know Kitsch is a great actor and will ably represent Carter, and Lynn Collins will do a great job portraying Dejah Thoris, that incomparable princess of Helium, over whom wars are fought.

And I remain hopeful that Stanton’s film will do justice to Burrough’s story of a former Civil War captain, transplanted to Mars after an encounter with an Indian shaman in the hills of Arizona. On Mars he is adopted/captured by the fierce four-armed Green Martians and later he helps Dejah Thoris, whom the Green Martians have also captured, to escape. The book is filled with great white apes and desperate rides across the Martian desert on the back of an eight-legged Martian thoat and an airship war between Zodanga and Helium.

John Carter movie airshipAnd it is concerning the airships that I want to express my fears. As a long time reader of these books, I have always been a fan of the airships. A Martian airship is kept aloft by buoyancy tanks, filled with the mysterious eighth ray of propulsion. Combined with the radium powered engines that drive propellors, the Martian airship can be a gargantuan floating battleship or a sleek Gar Wood flier. Instead the trailer for the movie shows some sort of wishbone-shaped thing with mechanical feathers, in outline looking a lot like the Shadow ships from Babylon 5.

Swords of MarsAnd because I am a long time fan, I’ve grown accustomed to the airships shown on the covers for his books, a depiction that I think would be a lot closer to what Burroughs had in mind because it would have been something familiar to him. Of course, I’m sure with the release of the movie, the new releases for the Mars books will show this new airship design.

So to be realistic, I know it is not a foregone conclusion the movie will be ruined just because the trailer shows airships with feathers. But I also recall my misgivings once I saw the new Enterprise in J.J. Abram’s Star Trek and thought, Why did they have to go messing around with a great design? And I have to say I have the same misgivings now. But I’ve got to hope Stanton’s track record means I’ll still enjoy this movie; I’ll just have to cover my eyes whenever one of these feathered contraptions makes an appearance.

Incidentally, many years ago I tried my hand at designing the classic Gar Wood version of a Martain flyer, which you can see here.

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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