Stop Barsoom; I Want to Get Off

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by FriskyWoods

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I just watched John Carter, and I found the film a pretty good (if overbudgeted) adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs book A Princess of Mars. Unfortunately, I hadn't read the novel in so freaking long that I couldn't tell which scenes in the movie were from the mind of Burroughs and which were pulled out of the script writers' butts.

Take for instance the nursery scene. After John Carter is discovered near a nest of freshly hatched Thark eggs, both he and the newborn aliens are dragged off to a nursery. Except it's not a fun age regression kind of nursery, or even a Baby Bottleneck situation where the kids are cleaned and diapered on a conveyor belt. The females of the tribe just splash water on them, dry them off with a handful of sand, dress them in loincloths, and force-feed them chemicals that give them the gift of language. Then they're left in a cave where their only companions are each other and a creature that looks like a cross between a bulldog and a tardigrade.

Basically, it sucks to be a baby on Barsoom. Byron doesn't recommend it.

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