Lost Animated "John Carter of Mars" Footage From The 1930's Is Blowing My Mind Right Now....

Ya gotta love Youtube and the rest of the magic that the 'Net brings to our fingertips. Just yesterday I wrote a post about the upcoming John Carter film from Disney and how I have high hopes for the franchise. But I couldn't help but wonder how a book series that has been around for almost 100 years and has a very famous author (Edgar Rice Burroughs also created Tarzan) has taken so long to formally hit the big screen. So I did a bit of wiki research and found out that legendary Looney Toons director Bob Clampett wanted to do an animated version of the Burroughs series because both he and the author felt that a real life version would have been just to expensive and not actually possible to pull off.

Please continue reading after the jump...

Frank Frazetta's legendary rendering of John Carter (Got Frazetta up twice in one week... sweet!)

Clampett even planned to use rotoscope technology and had Burroughs son as a co-collaborator on the project. But at the last second MGM pulled the project because they didn't think people wanted Science Fiction. A year later Flash Gordon hit the screen and was a hit, and the rest is Sci-Fi history. The test footage was thought to be lost for years, until it was unearthed by Burroughs grandson Danton back in the 70's. Enetr Youtube, where I found the footage. Now I bring it to you. Here are a few examples of test footage from what would have been the John Carter animated film... which if it would have came out would have beat Snow White as the 1st animated full length feature to receive a theatrical release. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

On a side note, I was shocked at the recent false starts on the franchise in the past few years. Robert rodriguez and John Favreau were both attached to this film at some point, and Rodriguez only left the project because of the whole beef he had with the Director's Guild after crediting Frank Miller as Co-Director. Can you imagine if he would have done this movie???? Wow! Thanks to Wikipedia for all teh information... read the John Carter article here.