the Little Mermaid vs the Martian tripods

[sergebroom]

Comments

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Where the heck did that come from? I was not at all prepared for the end!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I found this on YouTube by typing in 'martian tripod'. Pretty neat, isn't, even though it turns out to be an ad for what appears to be a European equivalent of WalMart.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, everybody goes to Tesco. That was just such a surprise ending! And I liked the way the legs curved on the tripods.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

The curve does make them look more spider-like. Now, if someone could replace its head with that of the tripid in Spielberg's movie (and if the latter got rid of Tom Cruise's head), I'd be willing to buy the DVD.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

LOL Poor Tom. He puts himself out there and people just kick him.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I know, I'm such a meanie. Heheheh...

Back to tripods... I wonder where Wells got the idea. From his own imagination, I presume, and that must have taken quite an imagination to come up with ideas like that in the 19th Century. Still, I wonder if there's something that inspired him, maybe some technological innovation that he warped around.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Or maybe real spiders, that he changed so they wouldn't look like spiders.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Still, I wonder if Wells ever wrote about the genesis of his story. Verne didn't really invent anything. Very primitive submarines existed before he wrote about the Nautilus, but he extrapolated from them. But what of Wells? The Martians had that deadly black smoke. I thought that gas as a weapon was conjured up during the Great War, but it may be that someone had already been working on something like it. Or maybe i was all his imagination, which went for wilder speculations than Verne did. After all, where else but from imagination could a 19th-century person have thought up heat rays and cavorite?

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

The bookgroup discussed A Princess of Mars today and we wondered much the same things. Some of it has to just be imagination.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I was rather awed by Burroughs's concept in that book that Mars needed factories to keep replenishing its atmosphere. And that was written when? In 1912?

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that they had had atmosphere and lost it, so they had to keep making it and distributing it. I think they needed finer distribution, though. There were factories for other things in 1912, though, and that may have tickled his imagination.

You should see what Steve did with our bookgroup Christmas picture:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13012571@N07/3123874493/

I'm the fifth from the right.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Neat photo! By the way, I seem to remember reading that Burroughs preferred writing about Mars than about Tarzan and that his publisher only managed to coax him into writing more about the latter by accepting further tales of Barsoom. I read that during my college days though and I may be remembering it incorrectly. (Pixar is making a movie from A Princess of Mars, by the way. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.)

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

He'd be stuck with Earthly things with Tarzan; he could use his imagination more with Mars. We didn't have a problem with the A Princess of Mars books, but there's a couple new Red Dwarf episodes coming out and non-bookgroup folks checked out most of the Red Dwarf books at the library!

[pedanther]

Speaking of film versions of A Princess of Mars, have you read this?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

That certainly was interesting. I kept on reading, expecting it'd be like the hoax about Orson Welles's Batman movie starring Gregory Peck.