#Barsoom seventh ray movie#

The team of Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who went on to write ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, were attached to pen the film with ‘Die Hard’ director John McTiernan behind the camera and plans for mega-star Tom Cruise to be in front of it with Julia Roberts.

In the late ‘80s Disney acquired the rights and began work on a potential production, looking for ‘Star Wars’ levels of success. Hollywood legend Ray Harryhausen, who is most famous for his stop-motion work on ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ took an interest in adapting the books in the late ‘50s but nothing came of it. If it had been released it would have been the first animated feature film, a title that eventually went to Disney’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ in 1937. Test audiences didn’t take too kindly to the first show reel in 1936 and the project was scrapped. Clampett used a very early form of motion capture for the animation - tracing over the movements of athletes - to make his animated characters more believable. Burroughs gave the project his blessing and a team went to work on a reel showcasing the film’s potential. In 1931 the idea of a film first cropped up when an animated version of the stories was concocted by ‘Looney Tunes’ director Bob Clampett, who went to Burroughs with the idea.

#Barsoom seventh ray movie#

Of all the films that occupy that Hell, ‘John Carter’, which is finally released this week, has been there the longest, 81 years in fact.Įdgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp novels, on which the movie is based, began with ‘A Princess of Mars’ in 1912 and continued with ten more instalments of what came to be known as the Barsoom series (Barsoom being what the inhabitants of Mars call their planet). Development Hell is a place where many films lie uncomfortably, waiting for something to go their way.