I recently covered THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT for Todd Mason’s Overlooked Movies. Truly overlooked by me, the effects were cheesy even for the time of the film. It was my discovering that Michael Moorcock did the screenplay that got me to watch the film for the first time. A Moorcock script from a Burroughs novel. How could that miss? As part of my preparation, I decided to re-read the book to refresh my memory for any changes. After all, it had been something on the order of forty years or so since I first read it. I had so much fun that I jumped right into the other two volumes which comprise one story told from several viewpoints.
Bowen Tyler is our hero in the first novel. He’s aboard a liner sunk by a German U-boat during WWI(of course the Great War at the time). He rescues a young woman, Lys La Rue, from 
the waters, is rescued by a tug boat, which is in turn sunk by the same submarine, the survivors taken aboard. Lys was headed to Germany to marry a man who, as luck would have it, was commander of the U-boat. Tyler’s family built submarines and he knew this one intimately, allowing him to take control with the tugboat crew. A traitor amongst that crew messes with the compass and they sail south for weeks before realizing what’s happened.
Low on fuel and food, they come upon an island ringed with high cliffs and Tyler remembers old stories about an explorer’s claim, that no one believed, from a couple of hundred years before. Caprona it had been dubbed. The crew find an underground channel that allows them into the interior where they discover a land of dinosaurs, humanoids of varying degrees of development, and, finally, crude oil. They set up a factory to turn the crude into usable fuel, needed for the long trip north.
Tyler writes it all up and seals the manuscript tightly in a thermos and tosses it off the cliffs into the ocean, hoping someone would eventually find it, get it into the right hands, and come looking for them.
Which is exactly what happens.
The second book, THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, concerns an expedition to rescue Bowen, Lys, and the crew. Tom Billings heads it up and when the yacht finds the island, he flies a small plane over the cliffs and is attacked by a pterodactyl, crashing the plane, and stranding him several hundred miles from where Bowen was thought to be. He has to make his way across the continent sized island, rescuing a young woman, Ajor, from death, traveling with her, and falling in love.
The third book, OUT OF TIME’S ABYSS, finds Bradley, last seen leaving Fort Dinosaur with a hunting expedition in THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, in his own adventures after being captured by winged humans and taken to their island, finding his own love, the beautiful Co-Tan, and the participants of all three books finally coming together at the end.
The novels present evolution decidedly different from the norm and we gradually learn the full story as the books go along, discovering the end result.
Pure pulp and I loved every bit of it. It had been a long time since I’d read Burroughs and I’d forgotten just how much fun his books were(well not really, just more sophisticated reading as I got older). But that little boy still lurks inside this weathered old hide and emerged in full glory. I still get it. I found one review, though, of someone who doesn’t seem to get it. He looked upon them as badly written books, racist, a juvenile mentality throughout. I think he judged them from a modern perspective and not in the times they were written. Definitely not great literature, but I like them a lot better than some more pretentious books.
Edgar Rice Burroughs brings back delightful childhood memories — there’s nothing to be ashamed of loving pure pulp
Every now and again — haha
These books are great fun, as are all of ERB’s novels. I’d say the only true way to judge Moorcock’s work on that atrocious movie would be read the screenplay. Barring that, watch with your eyes closed.
Yup, saw the movies when I was under 10 in my pre-Star Wars days. Liked them at the time though my memory confuses this movie with At the Earth’s Core (all that Doug McClure cluttering up my memory). The books were some of Burroughs shortest and had a dashed off feel. I remember liking them and really appreciating that he didn’t continue the series past it’s use. I remember loving the Pellucidar series too. Liked them both more than the Mars series which I thought went on too long.
I loved Burroughs’ loopy Pellucidar series best, but everything Burroughs wrote is worth a look.
I watched the film, an amalgam of the three books, about a decade ago, I think it was, and was struck by the cheesy SPX, but then we are truly spoiled in this very sophisticated age of computer-generated imagery. As for the books, I’ve read them all, of course (never did know why they are referred to as “caspak”) but it’s been a long time. Once you know the secret to the different kinds of people our intrepid explorers come across, it kind of takes the fun out.
this truly is an underlooked series. I much enjoyed them. I have these covers too.
Richard, I couldn’t have told you why they were Caspak until I re-read the series, it had been so long, but that is the inhabitants’ name for their continent.
ah, I thought it was Caprona, as your review suggests.
Caprona was the name of the explorer who wrote of it and, though no one believed him, was the name hung on it.