The Movie That Time Forgot or A Review With Plenty of Whingeing

One of my favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series is the Caspak novels. There were only three, or three segments of a larger work. You can see it either way. In paperback they were published as The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss. In the Pulps they were published as segments of a serial and then published as one whole in hard cover. Hugo Gernsback reprinted them in 1927.

I recently watched the 2009 film directed by and starring C. Thomas Howell and could do nothing but shake my head. This series deserves so much better. Bad CGI aside, the vast panorama of Caspak was reduced down to a stupid Bermuda Triangle idea, dotted with small leftovers from the books (like the Germans and the T rex). Timothy Bottoms was probably chosen for his previous experience with badly done T. rexes in 1991-92’s The Land of the Lost.

What makes this such a shame is that Burroughs did some fine work in this series, building his idea of evolution played out in a physical theater. Each of the short serials built on the last, abandoning one character for another but tying up nicely at the end. Bowen Tyler, Tom Billings and Bradley are the heroes of each piece but it is really Caprona, the island known by the locals as Caspak that is the star. You have all the usual ERB inhabitants, cavemen of various degrees of development, dinosaurs and my favorite, the Wieroos, winged men who are innately evil.

I believe the Caspak novels show how brilliant Burroughs could be. Yes, it is adventure fiction with all the usual romance stuff in it, but when you look past the obvious, there is some pretty good Science Fiction (for the time) here too. The 1975 film (written by Michael Moorcock and starring Doug McClure) was much closer to the mark but suffers from the usual budget constraints and pre-Star Wars effects. What we really need is a television mini-series with decent CGI. We get hints of what that could be like in Lost. (I really expected a T. rex to come out of the trees in that first season.) Again in Aquaman, in that little snippet where Aquaman could have been in Caspak or Pellucidar.

With the copyright passing into the public domain, we are going to get more mutts like the 2009 film. And the Sabato John Carter, which I haven’t seen but… Hopefully, someone with money can look past the dregs that weaken interest in Burroughs, and give us a solid version of Caspak. (You see me holding my breath over here?)

For any of this to succeed you need a writer who can remain faithful to what is best in Burroughs while modernizing only as needed. And yes, it will be needed otherwise the female characters will turn out to be about as interesting as the two female actors in the 2009 film. The Disney John Carter of Mars did better at this, making Dejah Thoris more than just jiggle factor. The most recent The Legend of Tarzan film also succeeds here with Margot Robbie as Jane. Any work that is 100 years old is going to have out of date ideas in it. As neither of these films was a huge block office winner, I doubt any producer is going to lay that kind of movie down on a Caspak film. (It doesn’t even have Tarzan in it for name value.) A film that discusses evolution as an idea might also be a hard sell to certain audiences (even 100 years later).

So, until that day, when Netflix or Prime finally runs out of material, or when Dune gets everybody excited about old SF again, I will just have to stick to the good old stuff. Comics like Russ Manning’s Tarzan in The Land That Time Forgot. Manning does a great job of continuing the Caspak series with Tarzan making a visit. This kind of cross-character stuff was one of Burroughs’ best techniques and Manning does it seamlessly. Maybe that idea would work to make a film with Tarzan appeal. And you can always have him to Pellucidar in the next one…