 After
graduating from Pomona, John Coleman Burroughs did preliminary work, with
friend and former Otis Art Institute classmate, Bob Clampett, on an animated
version of John Carter of Mars. Clampett, who had developed the
Porky Pig and Merrie Melodies cartoons at Warner Brothers, convinced ERB
of the potential of developing his fantastic stories into animated features.
Since Clampett was still holding down a full-time job at Warners, the work
on their short test film had to be done at night and on weekends. Clampett
did the animation, while Jack and wife Jane painted the cells and designed
the characters. ERB took the finished product to MGM but, although they
were interested, they believed that such a project should involve the wildly
popular Tarzan which already had a proven name. So, in 1936, Burroughs
travelled to Chicago and New York to lay the ground work for launching
a Tarzan cartoon feature under the company name Tarzantoons, Inc. He even
convinced J. Allen St. John to help out with the project but when Leon
Schlesinger offered Clampett a chance to head up his own production unit
at Warners, the Tarzan project fizzled. If they had sold A Princess
of Mars, it would have been the first full-length serious cartoon ever
done -- preceding Disney's Snow White by quite few years.
"The paintings of Danton Doring were done as tentative ideas for a moving
picture script that Bob Clampett and I sold to a producer who had developed
a unique and startling method of photographing insects with great clarity
and of a quality far surpassing any previously done in that field up to
that time. At the time Bob and I were working together on the John Carter
of Mars animation project . . .
"Realizing the potential of a fantasy series of cartoons based
around Burroughs' characters, I went out to Tarzana to see Burroughs himself
and tried to convince him that I could film and sell a series of cartoons
based on his JOHN CARTER OF MARS stories." Bob Clampett
Excerpted from:
Lost Cartoons: The Animated "John Carter of Mars" By Jim Korkis
ERBzine 0934
See
an excerpt from the 1936 John Carter Project
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