Before this month, I had never heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It seems he was a pulpy writer from the Golden Age of SF. He also invented that jungle vine-swinging hero, Tarzan.
Why do I bring him up? Well it seems Disney has taken it upon themselves to make the first ever movie adaptation of A Princess of Mars, an epic fantasy novel set on a 1910’s to 1930’s era conception of Mars. Despite credit as an inspiration for many alien monster-containing movies and TV shows, nobody has before taken the initiative to turn this adventure story into a big-screen feature. The film is called, John Carter, named after the protagonist of the story.
Now as a newly initiated volunteer for LibriVox, the group dedicated to transliterating public domain works into audio format, it occured to me that this 1911 classic (likely in the public domain by now) had probably been recorded previously. I looked around and found that it had! In fact, it was done as a collaboration first, then handled by a solo reader after that (the link above is to the latter recordign). I’ll be talking about LibriVox a little more in a future post.
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