![]() Shaffner, and with talents like The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and the formerly blacklisted writer Michael Wilson taking care of the script, this was mainstream entertainment of the highest pedigree. It was Heston who recommended director (and future Oscar winner) Franklin J. Charlton Heston too, deserves credit for taking on such a potentially idiotic property and playing it absolutely straight. Fox’s Richard Zanuck alone saw the potential. So with the War For The Planet of The Apes being declared this week, let us catch up on the story so far…Īrthur P Jacobs had been trying to film an adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel, La Planète des Singes since it came out, but sci-fi at the time was considered an unworthy, costly and slightly embarrassing genre, so there were no takers. Without it, it’s hard to imagine films like Logan’s Run, Westworld, Soylent Green or The Omega Man being green-lit. Apes was the film that took science fiction movies out of the drive-ins and into the mainstream theatres. However, you could just as easily argue that without Planet of The Apes (released the same year as 2001), there would be no Star Wars. “No 2001, no Star Wars,” is a line Lucas often uses to praise Kubrick’s 1968 milestone. ![]() Amazingly, this is the same 20th Century Fox who later saw such little mileage in their own upcoming Star Wars toy line that they gave George Lucas the exclusive merchandise rights… 20th Century Fox licensed the Apes iconography to the highest bidders and made a fortune from books, action figures, comics, masks and toys. In pure storytelling terms, the circuitous plot links the first five movies (and the new post-Rise cycle) into a pleasing, if relentlessly pessimistic, self-perpetuating full-circle.Įnormous box office successes in their early stages, they spawned a merchandising explosion later on in the wake of the Apemania of the mid-1970s, when all five films were screened in hugely popular “Go Ape!” marathons. However, for all their child-pleasing capers (the family-friendly G rating was a mandatory stipulation from the studios), the Apes movies deftly juggled important themes and arguments about slavery, free-will, nuclear war, vivisection, racism and oppression, and man’s innate capacity for cruelty. ![]() ![]() The spin-off TV show was quickly cancelled, further dulling the lustre and few people even remember the animated series that finally put the Apes to bed until a rude awakening in 2001. With each film, the budget was sawn in half, leading to a successive pattern of diminishing returns that led to a cheapening of its esteem. The original Planet of The Apes movies occupied a curious netherworld of critical opinion. ![]()
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