I only read Princess of Mars for the first time last week, so I'm no expert, but the narrator of the novels is John Carter himself, isn't it? Unless something changed in the later novels (I've downloaded a couple more for Kindle, but haven't read them). In Princess of Mars, the foreword is from Burroughs, but then the story shifts to first person. Stanton was a big fan of John Carter, but how does he get something about the novel wrong like this? Or is he just focusing on the Foreword to the book alone? I'm not a great fan of John Carter (I do believe the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. If I'd read this when I was 12, I'd be a John Carter nut), there's too much of the novel that I know is plainly impossible. Astral projection, air on Mars, canals, etc, that it's hard to read the novel without being distracted. However, I thought the strength of the novel was that it was the voice of John Carter himself. The novel (the first one, anyway) wasn't a guy in a bar telling me a story about his uncle, it was the uncle telling me directly. I haven't seen the movie yet (but I wanted it to succeed because they went with a relatively unknown cast. Finally, a big budget story allowed to stand on its own, too bad it didn't stand very tall at the box office), but I wonder if anyone can comment as to whether this might be why the movie doesn't work? Did Stanton get the novel wrong? Am I reading too much into his statement here?