It's unclear how or why Disney plans to sell John Carter, the outer space adventure movie based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, to the audience who watches Good Morning America. But they're doing their best anyway, shipping Taylor Kitsch to Times Square to chat with Robin Roberts and premiere some of the new John Carter trailer for the GMA audience. The full trailer will be available online tonight at IGN starting at 9 pm PST, but in the meantime we've got the clip posted by ABC online. Take a look below.



According to director Andrew Stanton on his Twitter feed, a longer version of the trailer will air on Late Night With Jimmy Kimmel tonight-- a much more logical target audience, by the way-- and then be available online. The brief bit they've shown, though, is emphasizing the massive spectacle and battle scenes of the Mars world that Stanton has built, with a kind of Avatar-esque vibe of an American roughneck who engages in battle in outer space (Avatar, like much of the other sci-fi of the last century, was of course inspired by the original John Carter of Mars). It's still hard to look at this, with its alien creatures and flying spaceships and man in a loincloth, and assume that anybody beyond hardcore sci-fi audiences will go for it.

What I think will make John Carter work is the story, pounded out relentlessly by Pixar veteran Stanton, and it's hard to get a sense of that in a trailer that seems to be all about spectacle. We'll see what the full version of the trailer has to show us tonight or tomorrow, and of course, get a look at the full film when it comes to theaters March 9 next year.