Willem DaFoe was born to play an alien. So it’s good news that he’s been cast as one of the leading alien roles in Disney/Pixar’s upcoming adaptation of John Carter of Mars. According to Variety he’ll play Tars Tarkas, a fierce, green skinned Martian warrior.

In Edger Rice Burroughs original “John Carter” universe, Mars is populated by two distinct races. One, human in appearance, represents civilization. The other, more alien looking and green skinned is a race of barbarians. John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) befriends leaders both groups and leads them into battle. In fact, Tars Tarkas is the first Martian John encounters and he quickly becomes John’s chief companion. He’s present in all the books, at Carter’s side. That should mean plenty of DaFoe, and really you can’t go wrong with that.

Lynn Collins is Dejah Thoris

Taylor Kitsch is John Carter

Disney has just cast the leads in their upcoming John Carter of Mars movie. Here’s the weird thing: They’re pinching the cast of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Here’s what THR has to say:

Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins will star in “John Carter of Mars,” the adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs book series that Andrew Stanton is directing for Disney… Kitsch will play the title character, Carter, while Collins is playing Dejah Thoris, the heir to the throne of Mars’ Helium kingdom.

For those who haven’t read the books, they’re a series of novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the early 20th century. The tell the story of an American Civil War army officer named John carter, who falls asleep in a cave an wakes up, mysteriously, on Mars. The Mars he appears on is not the lifeless Mars we now know it to be, but a savage place full of barbarian warriors and beautiful, naked women. Over the course of the books, Carter falls in love with a beautiful, powerful, alien princess named Dejah Thoris and helps conquer the planet.

I continue to be really worried about John Carter of Mars which is being turned into a live action movie by Pixar. That’s right, Pixar, the animation studio. Burroughs’ classic sci-fi novels should by all rights, be R-rated, adult fiction when translated on screen but it’s hard to imagine the family friendly Pixar folks and their corporate masters at Disney producing anything that’s not family. That probably means that when they start filming, Dejah Thoris will be wearing clothes.

At least we know when they’ll start forcing body shame onto the beautiful Martian princess. Salt Lake City radio station KSL reports that they plan to start shooting the movie this November in Utah. The Utah deserts will be stand-ins for Mars, where mysteriously transported Civil War soldier John Carter has his off world adventures.

What better place to turn an R-rated sci-fi novel into a watered down family movie than Mormon country. Unintentional symbolism in the extreme.

Science fiction hasn’t always been the nerdy endeavor of slick computer effects, transforming robots, and wise-cracking space ship captains. Just a couple of decades ago it had grit, it had style, it had tits. That’s the sci-fi I grew up loving, a world of imagination where men made out with apes, where alien lizards tortured women in the nude, and where green skin meant three tits and non-stop horniness.

Sex seeped into science fiction early. In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published the first in his John Carter of Mars series, featuring a powerful, sculpted alien princess with a disdain for the trappings of clothes. In the 30s sex and nudity in sci-fi continued and by 1960 it was soaked in it. All through the 60s, 70s, and 80s sci-fi paperbacks came emblazoned with men holding guns next to scantily clad, occasionally naked, pin-up girls. Outer space was a place where astronauts got laid and women cast off the sexually repressed mores of society to take control both of their lives and their libido. Writers like Robert A. Heinlein used their powers to write not just about new gadgets, but about a hopeful cultural shift which freed mankind from all of our hang-ups pushing us into a place where we all finally grew up and felt free to get busy. Once upon a time science fiction foretold not only a time where man mastered technological achievements beyond imagination, but also finally broke free of the cultural shackles of shame to build perfect societies of toned bodies and absent nudity taboos.

That carried over into sci-fi on television and on film too. In the 60s, every week Star Trek’s costume designers competed against themselves to come up with even more deceptively skimpy outfits to show off the female bodies of their guest stars while script writers worked on new reasons for Captain Kirk to rip off his shirt. Around the same time, Barbarella pranced on screen, teasing us with bikinis and laser guns. The late 70s and early 80s brought us movies like Total Recall and Alien, in which Sigourney Weaver, even in the midst of fighting acid-spitting assholes from space, finds time to strip down and show off her barely there underwear. In the 80s it seemed like we were really going somewhere, a place where maybe geeks might even start getting laid. Nerds subscribed to lusty sci-fi publications like Heavy Metal, full of depictions of female skin which were, even more fantastic than the stories they put them in. read this entry »

Pixar’s big screen adaptation is still underway and they’ve hired the writer of Spider-Man 2 to help them make it happen. Screenwriter Michael Chabon tells a fansite:

I’ve been hired to do some revisions to an already strong script by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews. I wrote my original screenplay The Martian Agent back in 1995 because I wished I could do [Edgar Rice] Burroughs’s Barsoom. So this is pretty much a dream come true for me.”