' John Carter took 100 years to reach the big screen

Fans of John Carter of Mars long have calculated humans would be landing on the red planet before you would ever see a film made for the hero of novels "Barsoom" beloved of Edgar Rice Burroughs '.

After all, it is a confusing property which has left a number of high-profile directors — including Jon Favreau, Guillermo del Toro and Robert Rodriguez — unable to get off the launch pad.

Meanwhile, parts of the saga are borrowed from countless other sci-fi staples, from "Superman" to "Star Wars" to "Avatar", over the years.

When "John Carter" theaters Friday, has been a century since hits Burroughs introduced readers to his civil war veteran (played by Taylor Kitsch).

Carter is beamed up to the red planet and bestowed with superhuman strength from weakest Martian gravity, just in time to join a war between races, fantastic and save a beautiful Princess (Lynn Collins).

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In the years since "a Princess of Mars" was published in 1912, John Carter's adventures have exploited the imagination of generations of sci-fi fans.

Long before he made the Pixar "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E", Andrew Stanton counted himself as one of them.

His obsession began as a 11 years in 1976, after stumbling upon a sketch comic tars Tarkus, 9-foot-high, four-armed alien ally Carter (played by Willem Dafoe in a motion-capture suit).

"I have invested more than 30 years of desire only to go look at it on the screen," Stanton said the Daily News. "It was the desire of fans that made me take this ridiculous jump in filming it."

So when to raise the subject during a long telephone call in 2006 with the head of Disney Studios is presented at the right time, Stanton pounced and landed an opportunity to cooperate (with fellow Pixar VET Mark Andrews and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon) and directed his dream project.

There were a lot of days that followed on the frigid sound studio in London and blazing Utah desert, however, which made Stanton wonder if he should not have hanging early in the conversation.

As the scene filmed at Lake Powell, not far from where the original was filmed ' planet of the apes ".

Carter and his friends should be quietly sailing along a menacing River on a raft.

But in the background, it was like the scene in "JAWS", where water is chock full of shark hunters boats able to avoid crashing.

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