L.B. Gale is a literacy specialist in New York City. She studied comparative mythology and fantasy fiction for her Master’s degree at the University of Chicago. She writes articles on both analyzing and creating speculative fiction at www.lbgale.com.

Dancing with Avatars on Mars: On John Carter and Ripoffs

Harold Bloom is a Yale literary critic and a crank. I have no doubt that he would consider Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series to be popular culture trash, and I have even less doubt that he’d look down on Disney’s attempt to translate Burrough’s saga to the screen. Nonetheless, Harold Bloom is famous for a theory that helps explain the most perplexing tidbit emerging from the pre-release buzz surrounding Disney’s John Carter-the fact that the John Carter stories were both original and incredibly influential, and yet John Carter is already being lambasted for ripping off the very stories that likely ‘ripped off’ A Princess of Mars in the first place.
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