At the Earth's Core story
A British Victorian scientist and his US financier make a test run of their Iron Mole drilling machine in a Welsh mountain, but end up in a strange underground labyrinth ruled by a species of giant telepathic flying reptiles, the Mahars, and full of prehistoric monsters and cavemen. It was based on the 1914 fantasy novel At the Earth's Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
15 total · 8 major · 7 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| Hollow Earth | major | Dr. Abner Perry and David Innes accidentally bored deep into the Earth and found a civilization living in a vast open spaces there. |
| human vs. captivity | major | Henchmen of the Mahar's captured Abner Perry and David Innes and brought them to the Mahar city to toil as slaves. |
| life in Victorian Britain | major | The film was set in this time and place. |
| romantic love | major | David and the princess Dia fell in love with one another. |
| slavery | major | The Mahars used humans slaves to do the manual labor in their city. |
| social oppression | major | The Mahars enslaved primitive people through the use of a combination of mind control and plain old brute force. |
| the need for freedom | major | The primitive inner-Earth people rose up with the help of Dr. Perry and David and overthrew their tyrannical Mahar overlords. |
| travel into the Earth | major | Dr. Abner Perry and his US financier David Innes made a test run of their Iron Mole drilling machine in a Welsh mountain, but ended up in a system of vast caverns ruled by a species of giant telepathic flying reptiles. |
| human sacrifice | minor | The Mahars ritually sacrificed a number of young maidens. |
| human vs. beast | minor | Abner Perry and David Innes were attacked by a giant, bipedal, beaked reptile upon arriving at what Perry took to be the center of the Earth. David and an inner-Earth man teamed up to battle a quadrupedal reptile. |