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Serious question re John Carter of Mars costuming

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Commodore
Commodore
Although I have heard of John Carter of Mars before ("it's like Tarzan on Mars"), I never really read them. Now they've not only "greenlit" the movie but are actually about to start casting

So I'm on wiki looking over the entry for it, and they explain it thus:

"Except for some jewelry and harness for weaponry, all of the planet's races seem to eschew clothing. Burroughs describes Dejah Thoris thus:

And the sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life....Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect. She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.
Click to expand...
So apparently, the "Red Martians" look more or less like humans (albeit like the different between one major ethnic group and another, in their case their skin is tinted a bit reddish) and apart from jewelry and stuff he seems to pretty much directly state that Thoris is effectively naked the whole time (this is the guy that wrote Tarzan; it's a prepubescent boys' fantasy book, unappologetically)

Still I'm confused: are they just going to have Thoris effectively wearing Slave Leia metal bikini-level stuff (i.e. really not that different from something you'd see at the beach), Scifi Channel original productions level crud, or are we talking full-on Stargate: The Showtime Years level stuff?

How are they going to handle this?
 
As a rule, book covers for John Carter of Mars books put Dejah in some sort of metal-bikini garb, though I've seen a couple of images that had her accurately nude. Here are examples of one of each from the same pair of artists, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (the latter of which is not safe for work):

http://io9.com/5127107/john-carter-of-mars-gets-the-barbarella-treatment

I profoundly doubt that a movie adaptation would go the full-nudity route, because R-rated movies don't make as much money as PG movies, because the studio will want this to be accessible to the child and teen audiences they expect for sci-fi adventure flicks, because you'd never get any actress with a decent career to agree to go through a whole film naked, and because Hollywood has never been in the business of doing faithful adaptations of books.

In fact, although it's reported to be live-action, this movie is being made by Pixar and is being written by WALL-E's Andrew Stanton. So no, I don't think this is going to be an R-rated movie, so expect clothes on the Martians.
 
I think at best you'd get a fleeting glimpse but otherwise I think it's going to be like Scorpion King level or whatever.
 
Andrew Stanton stated that they're shooting for a PG-13 movie, I'm pretty sure they'll be clothed.
 
I would expect Bond-level sexiness, which is pretty much the only way to go. It's one thing to mention in prose that a heroine is naked throughout; it's another thing to show her that way onscreen for two hours. Especially in what ought to be a swashbuckling, kid-friendly adventure . . . which is what the ERB books essentially are.

Nothing new here. The early Bond movies routinely toned down the nudity in the original novels. In the book, for instance, Honey Ryder was NOT wearing a bikini when she emerged from the surf in DR. NO . . . .

The movie worked fine regardless.
 
^^Yep... 'tis a shame. Somehow, it's perfectly harmless to let little kids see movie heroes killing people by the hundreds with bullets or bombs or swords, but flash a nipple and it supposedly scars them for life. We are one seriously warped culture.
 
Oh, that second one is the other "nude" cover I was talking about above, though I mistakenly credited it to Vallejo. That actually is authentic to Burroughs's descriptions; Dejah and the other Martians are wearing nothing but elaborate ornaments. The thing around Dejah's waist looks more like a belt than a thong, especially when you consider the Martians in the lower left, who wear only weapons and belts for holding them.

And the Thuvia one is topless. So, in short, not a model that the Pixar movie for family audiences will emulate.
 
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