After watching The Land That Time Forgot, I was reflecting on the plot itself. It was a good plot; the movie just suffered from awkward directing, screenwriting and visual effects. The plot itself was great. I decided to read the book it was based on, and so far, it’s a great book. I have MST3K to thank for introducing me to some great steampunk, exporation-era adventure books!
I think that I was eight or nine when The Land That Time Forgot came out. I remember seeing the poster and it looked totally awesome. When I finally saw the movie, I was a very disappointed tyke. It took forever to get to Caprona and, when they finally got there, the dinosaurs were disappointing.
I seem to recall the book being pretty good.
Edgar Rice Burroughs became a best-selling novelist because he knew how to tell a story, period.
For the movie, well, they had a talented prose writer in Michael Moorcock, but there’s a reason why this is like his only screenwriting credit.
I’m a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. Just pure letting his imagination flow with absolutely no concern about anything else, least of all real world science. I actually find his most famous creation Tarzan to be the least interesting thing he wrote, because a guy raised in the jungle who can communicate with animals is down to earth by his standards.
Burroughs was brilliant, because he was deconstructing the two-fisted hero archetype before that was even a thing.
He also predicted the Nazis two decades early in the John Carter series. It’s honestly uncanny.
If anyone is into table top RPGs, the Tales Of Arcana RPG makes liberal use of much of Burroughs’ work being in the public domain.
I was sorry the John Carter movie didn’t do well, because the Burroughs Mars stories are nutso.
Thank you so much for sending this resource. There are a lot of great ebooks available there.
I noticed it has THE KALEVALA by ELIAS LÖNNROT, which explains, of all things, the Sampo!
And people had been trying to make that movie off and on for nearly a century. Biggest anti-climax in movie history.
It sounds like, in general, his books don’t translate well as movies. I can’t not picture Doug McClure while reading The Land That Time Forgot.
I enjoyed John Carter, although I know I’m in the minority.
If anything, it’s a victim of being too faithful to the source material. The kind of sci-fi goofiness that Burroughs specialized in just can’t get any kind of sizable audience anymore.
That and so much sci-fi was ripped off from Burroughs that the movie felt like it was ripping off movies like Star Wars when it was just telling the story.
Love these two experiments greatly!
Just stumbled across McClure being an irresponsible music promoter in a great episode of CHiPs (search out the slam-dancing demo) who gets his comeuppance :
seems like a jam that Frank & Trace could have done in Moon 13
At the Earth’s Core is a film I really should enjoy. Psychic pterasaurs! Peter Cushing! The delectable Caroline Munro (aside, I was so glad to see her in Starcrash as the action hero lead instead of just standing around looking sultry; shame they dubbed her)!
Somehow it just falls a little flat. I think Peter Cushing lacking the standard Cushing “I make Chistopher Lee’s Dracula cower” vibe doesn’t help. The pacing’s not exactly great, either.
The Disney animated Tarzan was good.
I read the topic name and thought it said, “The Land That Time Forgot & Ate the Earth’s Core.” I spent the next five minutes trying to picture what kind of film could be made with that premise.
I’m thinking this is the same Michael Moorcock that wrote the song “Black Blade” for Blue Oyster Cult. A well written, well conceived song from the early eighties.