You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I’ve just learned they’re not the first animators to take a crack at ERB’s manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers’ famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).

According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios — unthinkable, I know! — but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:

I don’t know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the ’40s. The running thoat — the eight-legged animal — is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the “If Only” file…

(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)