A Complete Beginner's Guide to the World of 'John Carter'



It’s taken Hollywood 100 years to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels to the screen as Disney’s John Carter on March 9th. The otherworldly epic stars Taylor Kitsch as John Carter, a troubled former Civil War calvary soldier that is transported to the planet of Barsoom (better known as Mars, to you and me). He ends up in the middle of a war between differing species and factions that’s been raging for thousands of years. As it turns out the gravitational changes on Mars turn Carter into something of a superhero, and he becomes a game-changer for the almost decimated planet.

Burroughs packed his 11 Barsoom novels with tons of world-building elements including foreign species with weird names, differing tribes (with weird names) and lots of mind-boggling inventions (with weird names). If you’re uninitiated with the book verse of John Carter, then the movie might make your head spin a bit. Thus, we’ve created this Beginner's Guide to John Carter to help you navigate the faces, names and terms so you can enjoy the adventure - and not bug your seatmates asking “What?” for two hours.

