The Land That Time Forgot

[xidrep]

You all know I'm neither a hero-worshipper nor a hagiographer. But I've just read that Mr M was involved in the writing of The Land That Time Forgot.

>Perdix rolls over like hybridised cuddly eight-week-old kitten/ labrador puppy from bog-roll advert<

How cool is that?

You know that film is the reason why I ended up covered in dust and bloody camel poo in the Gobi Desert? And got dysentery in the Ural Permo-Triassic deposits of the Sakhmara valley? And built the Loch Ness 'Phoca' submarine camera? And nearly drowned in the wreck of the Thistlegorm in the Red Sea.

That film, in combination with the mounted stiffs in the British Museum (Nat. History), was the catalyst for all that stuff...

Are you following me around?

Or vice-versa?

It's all your fault...

Ta! :D

Mind you, At The Earth's Core's got a lot to answer for, too...

[devilchicken]

Is that the one with the samurai troglodytes?

Vive le Doug Maclure!

[xidrep]

And the Type VIIB U-boat...I used to get excited just by the Poster dammit!

I can remember re-enacting the whole thing (with embellishments) in the back garden; British Museum highly-accurate dinosaur models (the dimensions and details were vital); a battery-powered submarine in the pond - newts played the plesiosaur role; a volcano made out of sand spewing old sump-oil from Dad's Hillman Super-Minx which we lit (the oil, not the car) to simulate lava; and an Airfix 'Dogfight Doubles' Bristol Fighter as a near-period aircraft. HO-OO scale soldiers as actors. Filmed it on Super-8. Halcyon days. Always comes back to me when I go somewhere remote - I remember finding this huge plateau out on the mongolian steppes, surrounded by huge mud-cliffs. We called it The Lost World! Got the same feeling in Tanzania, on Kilimanjaro and Meru, looking out over the Great Rift. Don't know precisely what I'm getting at here, just that I get a feeling of odd nostalgia-cum-wish-fulfilment when I think about that film!
Same with King Kong (1933)... :)

[devilchicken]

I'd forgotten - there were 2!

The Land That Time Forgot

and

The People That Time Forgot

That second movie was the one with the evil troglodytes.

[DeeCrowSeer]

Re: The Land That Time Forgot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That film, in combination with the mounted stiffs in the British Museum (Nat. History), was the catalyst for all that stuff...

Sure, it's all fun and games for you with the poop and the drowning, but when I tried to mimic Fantastic Voyage by "injecting" myself into a defecting scientist, there was a terrible scandal! :(

Perhaps I should have shrunk myself first? Ah well. You live and learn...

[xidrep]

Ouch! Poor DeeCrowSeer, I visualise you as a nasty case of thrombosis!

Let's get funding to make a sequel!

The People that forgot that they were in the Land that Time Forgot and Went on an Incredible Journey

Will you help us with the screenplay, Mike? Pterosaurs, U-boats & troglodytes please. and Doug McClure. :)

[Krimson]

For this one, there would be no point in trying to top Jurassic Park for the special effects. So then, why bother? Let's use sock puppets instead.

[Whiskers]

You might find this link useful and I do believe that Max over at The Terminal Cafe has some info.

[broken link]

[Michael Moorcock]

I was very lucky in being given the authority by Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc to write a movie as close to the first part of the book as possible, but even then the producer managed to stick a volcano in, which I had insisted not be in the movie (making it difficult to continue the series according to the books!). Jim Cawthorn broke the book down into scenes and I wrote the script. We used the German submarine commander as the biologist on board who could explain the theme, rather than have a stereotypical U-boat German of the period (WW1) when the books were written. Even then his dialogue had to be overdubbed by Anton Dolin (I think) who had a rather more convincing voice than the actor who played the commander. Given the budget, I thought they did pretty well, using glove-puppet dinosaurs mostly. They got the atmosphere of the sub finding the secret way into the island very well, I thought. My main trouble with the dinosaurs was the fixed wing pterodactyl and there was also a certain amount of dimensional problems here and there. All things considered, however, I thought it came out pretty well. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc for some reason didn't exercise the same control over the sequel. After learning what the producers intended, Jim and I left the project, whereupon one of the producers took it over. Milton Subotoski was a nice guy, but he was incapable of writing a decent script, as many of his movies attest. For really awful films, I would recommend his Last Siege of the Saxons, which used so much library footage I reckoned it covered something like fifteen hundred years of history, forcing the actors to dress up in the costumes which were in the library footage -- including what was evidently an old Robin Hood movie! Robin Hood, calling himself King Arthur, fights the Viking invaders!

[Michael Moorcock]

The racism in the Tarzan books can be pretty horrendous and is thankfully missing from most modern versions, including the audio version read fairly recently on BBC. There have been projects to make A Princess of Mars for years and years but they never seem to get very far. Currently, as I recall, the guy who made Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (which I haven't seen yet) also counts Princess as one of his ongoing projects. That movie has had more potential directors and producers than almost any other.

[xidrep]

Even Subotoski can't have done a worse job than De Laurentiis on the 1970's Kong remake...surely?? 8O

[Michael Moorcock]

The racism can be pretty awful, actually, though I agree he didn't apply it to his completely fictitious races! Stereotypying and worse, however, in the Tarzan books. He denied any knowledge of Rousseau or of Kipling (who of course did the Mowgli books first) and I honestly think he produced his stories pretty much out of whole cloth, with very little conscious imitation or inspiration. Gulliver of Mars is thought to be the 'original' for Princess and its sequels, but it's a fairly hard bit of logic to prove, in my opinion. That said, I read all the stuff which George Orwell persuaded people would turn youngsters into fascists and worse and I didn't exactly turn out a fascist. I think one is pretty colour-blind as a young reader and it's the rest of the culture around you which infects you with prejudice, if you are going to be infected at all. We used to get quite a lot of fan mail from black readers in Africa when I worked on Tarzan Adventures. There were enough 'noble blacks' in Burroughs for everyone to identify with, I guess.

[manmiles]

What books did Orwell say will turn you into a fascist?

[Michael Moorcock]

Specifically, the Magnet and the Gem, magazines pretty much entirely written by Charles Hamilton under his Frank Richards and Martin Clifford pseudonyms. He's best known as the creator of Billy Bunter. The irony of the stories is that they were full of cads who went to the bad through smoking, drinking and gambling and Richards spent the large part of his income smoking, drinking and gambling... I forget the title of the essay by Orwell. As I recall it appeared in Horizon. In my childhood, too, reading comics was thought to send children to the bad. My school actually banned them and I remember one trip to the village where I spotted a Tiger Tim Annual and pointed to it with enthusiasm, only to be strongly lectured on the evils of reading the Rainbow... Even Kipling was banned at my school, since his imperialism and racialism was considered liable to corrupt youthful minds. Because I'd read Kipling, therefore, I was able to persuade my fellow boarders that I had been raised in the jungle by wolves. All went horribly wrong when I got stuck up a tree in the school grounds and couldn't get down. Some of my fellow scholars tended to view my stories with a certain amount of scepticism after that. I was also told that I had more imagination than was good for me. Guess it wasn't good for me earning my living as I've done for the past nigh on fifty years... :D

[Michael Moorcock]

Phew! I thought you meant me for a moment. I knew I hadn't been feeling 100% lately, but didn't know I was actually dead. Well, I'm very pleased to get your letter. That, of course, was entirely my intention. It's always very nice to learn that someone got the message! At the end of my own homage to ERB, Kane of Old Mars, I also suggest that you should 'look for Mars within yourself' or somesuch. Meaning that we all have wonders within us. (Actually these days I'd modify to 'some of us have wonders within us' since life's taught me that not everyone is naturally imaginative). And didn't David Bowie say something about us all being heroes ? It was the prevailing understanding of that brief Golden Age I knew I was living through at the time and which the Bushoviks say is the cause of all our present ills. That's right -- Make Love, Not War and what's so funny about Peace, Love and Understanding ? -- turns us all into uncaring kill-crazy scaredy-cat fundamentalist antisocial psychofreaks, eh ? You've got to admire those speech-writers. They must have read a lot of Orwell along with their Machiavelli...
Oh, and speaking of racism, I just heard the TV news. Guy said 'As you know we report from time to time on the human toll of the war in Iraq.
There are now 1,200 (odd) Americans killed.' It's official. Iraqis ain't human.