The original Planet of The Apes came out when I was 2.

 

I remember staying up late watching it on TV. I remember all the sequels. I remember the action figures and the Saturday morning cartoon show and I remember how in first grade all the cool kids watched Planet of The Apes on Fridays, and all the dorks watched The Brady Bunch.

 

Of course, the standard for Planet of The Apes will always be that first movie with Charlton Heston. You know, especially that last scene with him on the beach screaming and cussing at the Statue of Liberty. What a great line. It's fun to repeat that at various times just to see how folks will react.

 

 

 

I've seen each movie a hundred times. I've seen that first one a hundred times a hundred times. But one thing I never did til just a few weeks ago was to read the original novel by Pierre Boulle. Well, I mean I read it up til the last couple chapters and then took it back to library because it was boring.

 

I once heard (and I don't know whether it's true or not) that Boulle was a racist and a wartime sympathizer  and that the novel was an allegory of what could happen when the "undesirables" took over. As hard as it is to fathom that someone from France would consider someone else an undesirable. Don't they eat snails? Aren't they all free-thinking gay socialist chain-smokers?

 

Well, like I said, I don't know how true that is, but it totally does seem like something a Nazi would write. What I mean is (and again I don't know anything about this Boulle fellow or what he intended it to mean) that that's how extremist fanatics make their points: By warning of the dangers of the other extreme. There's never any middle ground or moderation or compromise.

 

 

 

See how it works? It's one or the other. There couldn't be a movie about how apes learned to talk and how humans adapted to their expanded role and everyone tried to get along. No: The apes take over and hunt us sport! Because we all know, of course, they're just waiting til Koko teaches the rest of them sign language, then they're going to all pick up rifles, climb on their horses, and drag us all through our front yards in nets.

 

Anyway, politics aside, there was always something that bugged me about that first movie and I never quite put my finger on it til today. And maybe it even goes along with what I was just saying. I can accept that civilization collapses and humans turn savage, and maybe even that they forget how to talk. I can accept that apes kind of take over, develop their own civilization, and even that they learn to talk themselves. But not both at the same time. So the humans taught the apes to talk, even inadvertently, and then just forgot how to talk themselves? When has anything like that ever happened in the history of the universe? One might become dominant and kill the other one off entirely, but no one just forgets that they've developed language. It's not like they're off by themselves in a jungle, either: They're right there being kept in cages. By Apes. Apes, that talk. How could they forget?

 

Now see, that's the first movie. By the second movie they're all "Beware the beast Man...he alone among God's primates kills..." and then they meet these freako mutants that talk. By the third movie, Zira and Cornelius tell the modern humans how man used to rule the earth til the apes took over.

 

But...but...but...they said man was a beast, a beast who didn't talk, who couldn't talk, who never talked! Those same two apes freaked out when Charlton Heston talked!

 

Oh yeah, no, yeah.

 

But man used to talk.

 

And then by the last two movies, and the TV show, and the cartoon, both apes and men were talking. Everybody just talked. I'm surprised they didn't have guest stars like Mr. Ed or Scooby Doo or that giant talking flower in Little Shop of Horrors. Just everything talk.

 

See, this is why Planet of The Apes died, and why after that fifth movie you had to wait almost 30 years for anything new to come out. Because like in Star Trek and Star Wars, you have all these characters and histories and technology and everything is woven together and it all fits and makes sense...at least, it makes sense within it's own frame of reference...sort of...

 

But not Planet of The Apes. There was no consistency. Apes talk, no they don't, no humans don't talk, no, yeah, well, they do....

 

Well, I take that back. There was one consistency throughout all the movies and the TV show. No matter what the time frame was or what era in the history of the planet was being shown, there was one Chimpanzee who looked and talked like Roddy McDowell. Roddy McDowell was a prim and proper English butler type, and I don't know what it was about him that made some casting director sit up and say "That's it! That's the chimp we need!" And yet he played Cornelius in the first three movies, Caesar in the last two movies, and Galen on the TV show.

 

By the way, don't ask how I remember that. I don't know. I have to do simple math by counting on my fingers but I remember the name of the chimp Roddy McDowell played on 11 episodes of a TV show when I was 6 years old. And I can sing the theme from The Bugaloos. Weird.