Disney's afraid to market it, but fans aren't....

I spent much of my adolescence off-planet. Oh, I looked like I was here, in my tee shirts and bib overalls, the bib pockets sprouting a live of different-colored ball-point pens. But I wasn't, and you'd have to look in a different pocket to understand why. In the right-hand hip pocket would be a paperback from Ballantine Books, and the hundred or so pages of fine-ish type therein were actually a fiendishly powerful teleportation device, through which I spent much of my life under the hurtling moons of Barsoom:



This book has been adapted by director Andrew Stanton, famous for his work for Pixar, into a movie that Disney will be releasing on March 9, 2012. You may not know that, because Disney seems to have no idea how to market the movie, and therefore sort of isn't.

Here's an example of how they aren't marketing it: As you see above, the title of the first novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic "Mars" series was A Princess of Mars. But Disney's marketing department put their foot down. "No boy will ever go see a movie with Princess in the title." So the movie was re-titled John Carter of Mars. Disney's marketing department weighed in again. "No girl will ever go see a movie with Mars in the title!"

Hence, you might possibly, when visiting your local cinema, see a particularly boring poster, essentially a red rectangle emblazoned with the title:

JOHN CARTER

Yeah, that's it. Perhaps it's a sequel to "Michael Clayton?"

Well, no. The official trailers for John Carter, although they have some of the cool stuff, don't help much in giving a flavor of what the movie is going to be. But this fan-made trailer does a dandy job:



Yeah. I'll go see that! I hope some of you will join me under the hurtling moons of Barsoom.