Burroughs' John Carter inspired generations of authors, filmmakers, scientists

If not for John Carter, pop culture would not have Superman, "Star Wars" or "Avatar."

The release Friday of Disney's "John Carter" is a movie event 100 years in the making. In 1912 the source novel, "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, appeared in a pulp magazine, and protagonist John Carter became the Harry Potter of his day.

An oviparous, copper-skinned princess ... four-armed green men 15 feet tall ... a Martian hound with 10 legs and three rows of sharp tusks. Swordsman Carter of Virginia encountered them all as he fought his way across a dying planet and inspired generations of authors, filmmakers and scientists.

I wouldn't be a writer today if not for my early love of Burroughs. His "Tarzan of the Apes" hooked me at age 10, and within two years I was racing in imagination across the dead sea bottoms of Mars. Eventually I collected all of Burroughs' works, including a signed first edition.

I'm not the only person with Midland connections who has waited decades to see Carter on the silver screen.

"Of all the Burroughs series, John Carter was the one that captivated my imagination," said Burbank, Calif. filmmaker Michael D. Sellers, who lived in Midland in 2006. "Burroughs ... conditioned me to think big and seek out adventure."

Sellers, who discovered the books at age 11, told me his current quest is to encourage 12-to-18-year-olds to read "A Princess of Mars" through a program he helped to develop. Guidelines for the John Carter Reading Project are at thejohncarterfiles.com.

"The best thing that could come out of the John Carter movie would be to re-introduce Edgar Rice Burroughs to an entire new generation of readers -- and by doing that, to stimulate reading at a time when reading books is not exactly second nature for most kids," said Sellers.

Even science fiction icons such as Ray Bradbury speak of Burroughs with awe.

"Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world," Bradbury said in the book "Listen to the Echoes." "By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special."

Among Carter's pop culture offspring was Buck Rogers, who first appeared in a 1929 comic strip. Four years later, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster looked to Carter as a model for Superman, who could "leap tall buildings at a single bound."

Siegel explained the parallel in 1983.

"John Carter was able to leap great distances because the planet Mars was smaller than the planet Earth, and so he had great strength," he said.

In 1934, Alex Raymond drew upon Carter in crafting another comic strip hero, Flash Gordon, who followed Buck Rodgers and Superman into TV and cinema.

Decades later when George Lucas was unable to secure film rights to Flash Gordon, he developed his own movie. In a May 1, 1975 synopsis, Lucas described his story as "in the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'John Carter of Mars,'" according to "The Star Wars Genesis," an online article by Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier.

From Lucas' synopsis sprang "Star Wars." When he began work on a sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back," Lucas hired screenwriter and novelist Leigh Brackett.

"I was introduced to Edgar Rice Burroughs at a very young age," she said in 1976. " ... That changed the course of my life ... My fascination for Mars came from the fascination for his Mars."

In 2009 James Cameron paid his own tribute with the biggest grossing film in history.

"With 'Avatar,' I thought, forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys' adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like 'John Carter of Mars,'" he said in The New Yorker of Oct. 26, 2009.

But the impact of Carter hasn't been limited to fictional universes -- it extends into the fringes of the real one.

"The Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs ... aroused generations of 8-year-olds, myself among them, to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility," said the late Carl Sagan in the 1980 PBS series "Cosmos."

Astronaut Terrence Wilcutt never went to Mars, but he did make four shuttle flights. In a magazine interview, he said during his boyhood he "really liked John Carter" and that his early reading stimulated a yearning for adventure that guided his career path.

"The people who write science fiction are dreamers," said Wilcutt, now a NASA administrator. "I would have never gone into space had it not been for someone in the past who wondered one day if space travel was possible."

Bradbury had an even more dramatic take.

"I've talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were 10 years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic," he said. "Burroughs put us on the moon."