By DON MANKOWSKI

"For several minutes no one spoke; I think they must each have been as overcome by awe as was I. All about us was a flora and fauna as strange and wonderful to us as might have been those upon a distant planet had we suddenly been miraculously transported through ether to an unknown world. But the life! It teemed. The tall, fernlike trees were alive with monkeys, snakes, and lizards. Huge insects hummed and buzzed hither and thither. Mighty forms could be seen moving upon the ground in the thick forest, while the bosom of the river wriggled with living things, and above flapped the wings of gigantic creatures such as we are taught have been extinct throughout countless ages."
                                                 -- Bowen Tyler

Long before anyone heard of NASA, he took us to the moon. He gave us a grand history of a war-torn, super-scientific Red Planet. To the deep interior of the earth, and beneath the cloud banks of Venus we followed him. And, oh yes, to the myriad lost civilizations of Darkest Africa.

Not bad for someone who couldn't hold a steady job or sell any of his writing for the first thirty-five years of his decidedly non-adventurous life.

While Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is of course best known for his long series of Tarzan novels, his fans will assert that he was at his best as a science fiction author. I was one those fans. My dad introduced me to John Carter of Mars via his dusty old editions, during the time when Burroughs’ non-Tarzan stuff was briefly out of print. ERB was a prolific writer, and he kept this kid reading all the time. No small contribution that, even if it wasn’t exactly "literature."

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Ray Bradbury is another admirer of his work. So are Phillip Jose Farmer and Forrest J Ackerman. Carl Sagan said that we wouldn't be reaching out to the planets but for his influence, and indeed, a crater on Mars bears his name.

Arthur C. Clarke, however, has stated that if you haven’t read Burroughs and you’re over fifteen, it’s already too late. He may be correct. Of course, Burroughs' sci-fi is hopelessly outdated, the style creaky, many of the values outmoded. They read well as fantasy, though, so defy Sir Arthur and give ERB a try.

Burroughs had some glaring weaknesses. He relied too much upon coincidence and tended to re-use plot elements. He was guilty of stereotyping, sometimes crude and cruel (although he could turn it around to great effect). He did know how to keep a story moving, and his simple, unadorned style has held up quite well over the decades. He who lives by the pulp shall … live quite well if he does it right. And he need bow to no man when it came to imagination.

Burroughs toiled at a bewildering array of jobs. He was a cowboy, a policeman, a rough rider, a salesman and a clerk. Then, he published his first novel in 1912, creating Tarzan in 1914. His works were adapted to the motion picture medium almost at once. Tarzan Of The Apes, starring Elmo Lincoln, appeared in 1918, but had been preceded a year earlier by a non-Tarzan ERB adaptation, The Lad and the Lion, a story of lost identity, feral bonding and exotic Arabian intrigue.

Altogether, Tarzan would be the subject of eight silent features or serials, and be portrayed by five actors. But Lad/Lion and 1919's The Oakdale Affair (a small-town mystery-romance) were the only other Burroughs dramatizations. Both are "lost" films, although contemporary sources indicate each did follow its source with reasonable fidelity.

Tarzan has remained a popular subject for the movies ever since, but as exciting as the exploits of Buster Crabbe, Lex Barker and of course, Johnny Weissmuller were, their films rarely rose above the "B" horizon. ERB fans always regretted that Burroughs' Tarzan, a well-educated English lord had been turned into a monosyllabic vine-swinger.

The cultured Tarzan returned about 1960 and continued in the films starring Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney and Mike Henry, although their adventures weren't plotted to any better effect. And the less said about the Bo Derek remake of Tarzan The Ape-Man the better. Well, there was one good thing about Bo’s version … no, two! (Is Richard Harris dead yet, or is he still chewing the jungle scenery back there?)

In 1984 we got Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, a flawed but noble effort. The recent Disney Tarzan is a good introduction to the character (and, we hope, the author) for kids, but nothing more.

Burroughs' two dozen Tarzan books offered ample jungle adventure, frequently in lost civilizations, although they settle into formula about halfway through the series. But what of his other, (better) work?

In the meantime, Burroughs had devoted eleven novels to the creation of an ancient civilization on Mars, where long swords still clash in the shadow of incredible futuristic devices, such as atomic firearms, invisible aircraft, brain transplants and synthetic men. There is an extended roster of plant, animal, human and semi-human life forms--much of it scientifically absurd, but fun.

Why, the best supporting actor in the chronicles of Barsoom is green, fifteen feet tall, has tusks and six limbs. Another good one is nothing more than a huge head that can scuttle on crablike legs to animate a headless body of its choice. They're white, red, black and yellow and best of all, memorable.

Seven times Burroughs took his readers to the center of the earth (more on that later), and four times to cloud-shrouded Venus, a world of giant trees, immortal humans, animated dead, amoebae people, and the usual assortment of exotic and dangerous fauna, flora and aphroditology (can’t say "geology").

With a few adventures in ancient Rome, medieval times, the American Old West, to the Moon and Beyond the Farthest Star, from the Neocene Era to the far future, Burroughs continued to entertain his readers with escapist thrills in over seventy volumes. Yet, it would be a long time before these other themes would be exploited.

The Land That Time Forgot was a novella published in the pulp Blue Book Magazine back in 1918. Its setting was the World War, just prior to the Unites States' involvement therein.

(That phrase "That Time Forgot" is so evocative. Alas, I don’t know if ERB originated it. Anachronism alert: nobody called it "World War One" back then. No one did until there was, most unfortunately, a sequel. Lawrence Welk allegedly misread his cue cards once and said that the Lovely Lennon Sisters would entertain us with a ballad from the days of World War Eye.)

Bowen Tyler is an American engineer whose ship is torpedoed in the Atlantic. Aided by the crew of the British tugboat that rescued him, he manages to commandeer the surfaced U-Boat. Burroughs, an anglophilic American patriot who favored Germanic villains, almost makes you believe it could happen.

The Allied force reaches an uneasy alliance with the German submariners. Due to sabotage (and other complications too numerous to explain here), the sub is misdirected, and ends up in sight of a fog-bound, lost continent near the South Pole — Caprona, named for Caproni, the Italian navigator who described it long ago.

Caprona is isolated from the rest of the world by its towering barrier cliffs. You can enter through a submerged passage in the barrier, provided you have a submarine, and that's just what the desperate party, low on fuel and provisions, does. Almost at once, the adventurers contend with giant reptiles thought to be long extinct. So far, it’s Mysterious Island or The Lost World once again. So far.

Near the southern end of the continent are found the Holu, apes and ape-men, and just north of there the Alu, primitive humans lacking speech. We next encounter the Bo-lu, people with primitive speech and armed with clubs.

Lys, the obligatory gorgeous woman in the party, learns to speak with Ahm, a captured Bo-lu man. Ahm refers to all of the outsiders as "Galus," and voices the opinion that he too will one day be a "Galu." This is dismissed at the time as something akin to religious doctrine. Yet, clearly, in Caspak (the inhabitants' name for the continent), man is defined by his weapons. Recent anthropologists such as Jane Goodall would endorse that theory, but I’ll bet it was a radical number back in 1916!

Each successive tribe encountered speaks a more advanced form of the same basic language. Moving northward, we find the Sto-lu, hatchet wielders; next the Band-lu, spear bearers; the Kro-lu, bow-and-arrow men; and finally the Galu, the rope people, who seem to have reached the level of modern humans of the outside world.

It appears that the lost continent supports co-existent life at various levels of evolutionary development. This is probably chauvinistic, to have evolution proceed from south to north. He might have had it from east to west, which is perhaps even worse. I don’t consider it fair to impose political correctness retroactively. Keep in mind that this was written a few years before Bryan, Darrow and the Scopes trial!

But there is something even more peculiar about Caprona. It appears that the inhabitants of the continent experience evolution within a single generation, migrating northward as they transmute into more advanced species! Ahm is transformed into a Sto-lu right before our reading eyes!

The females of Caprona/Caspak perform ritual bathing in a continent-long river that sweeps their eggs to the southern end of the island--all except for the Galu, who have attained the status of live-bearing humans! Not every individual reaches "the top:" some are destined to remain, and die, at intermediate stages.

The Land That Time Forgot, the first part of the trilogy ends with Tyler and Lys stranded on Caprona as some renegade Germans flee with the submarine.

Back in the mid Seventies, Amicus Films (a short-lived rival to Hammer’s British empire) produced The Land That Time Forgot, the first non-Tarzan Burroughs feature since the silent days. Well, there had been The Lion Man (based again upon The Lad And The Lion) back in the thirties, and a Jungle Girl serial in the forties, but these were ERB adaptations in name only. Now, for a Burroughs purist, only a "Masterpiece Theatre" miniseries would satisfy, but I still took note.

The 1975 movie is set in the proper period, and it follows the printed story reasonably well, two matters that apparently never occurred to the "Tarzan" scriptwriters of four decades. Like the book, the framing device is a manuscript found in a bottle.

Land plays out mostly as a straight adventure story. It exploits the more exploitable aspects of the story: there will be dinosaurs and stone-age beasties. There are oblique references to the unique evolutionary process being witnessed, although these seem swamped by the action scenes. Michael Moorcock, a top sci-fi novelist contributed to the script, and perhaps he was responsible for striving to retain this focus. The wartime setting is rather good. This time, director Kevin Connor almost makes you believe that the ragtag good guys can really dominate that evil Teutonic crew.

The film spends altogether too much time--they might have eliminated a set of counter-mutinies--aboard the submarine, time that could have contributed to better pseudo-scientific exposition. Still, they had sufficient time to deliver. And sadly, that's the letdown.

Rather than employing the impressive stop-motion ("Ray Harryhausen" type) effects, Amicus went the "Godzilla" route, i.e., stuntmen in dinosaur suits, and employed oversized models in addition. Ambitious though it sounds, the jerky monsters are all too obviously mechanical to be truly frightening. Once the first monster appears, supposedly menacing but clearly unable to move its freakin' feet, the film takes an abrupt dive toward Unknown Island absurdity, and it's a rather difficult recovery from there.

The sad thing is, convincing dinosaurs and such aren't truly essential to the story, which could have concentrated upon the exotic evolutionary theory and the human reaction to it, with only peripheral contact with exotic fauna. But, once the producers decided that it was more important to provide screams for the children, they'd found their audience and had to live with it. In one pterodactyl swoop, Land was consigned to Saturday morning entertainment, right beside those RKO programmers featuring the overweight Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan in combat with hackneyed extras and the occasional tired lion.

Land starred stalwart Doug McClure (you may remember him from such television series as The Virginian) as Bowen Tyler. I've heard it conjectured that McClure and James Drury, given their long (1962-1971) tenure on that landmark 90-minute weekly series, were the most-filmed actors ever, and surely that's a distinction.

The cast includes Susan Penhaligon as biologist Lisa Clayton (replacing ERB's Lys LaRue character), Bobby Parr as caveman Ahm, and John McEnery as Captain Von Schoenvorts. If McEnery sounds familiar, it's because Anton Diffring, a veteran of many British horror films, dubbed in his German-accented voice!

The Land That Time Forgot had the material for the best "lost world" movie to date. Too bad it missed the mark.

Burroughs followed up with two sequels, The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss (both also 1918). The solution to the evolutionary puzzle was revealed slowly.

Ironically, Amicus and Kevin Connor followed up with a couple more Burroughs-derived pictures, and I'll be discussing those in a future article.

(Don Mankowski waited even longer than did Burroughs to get something published, but did his homework despite nightly excursions to Barsoom, Amtor and Darkest Africa, and is presently a software engineer in Merritt Island, Florida. He's published several recent pieces in Cult Movies magazine. You can contact him at his Website.)

Thanks so much, Don, for showing us the "monstrous" side of Edgar Rice Burroughs and its filmic spawn.  You're right--this film had the right stuff, it coulda been a contender, but...

Article copyright © Don Mankowski.   Visit his Website.

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