Terror on the Planet of the Apes

Way back in the 1970's, Marvel was putting out a magazine called Planet of the Apes. In addition to running comic adaptations of the five Planet of the Apes films (at that time), they ran original stories that were only loosely associated with what at the time was Apes canon. The longest-running and most intriguing of these original stories was a serial called Terror on the Planet of the Apes.

The plot roamed widely, and included quite a few science fiction elements, including mutants, aliens (with winged monkey soldiers), cyborgs, and much more, but at its heart it explored questions of race in the real world through the interaction of apes and humans (including different types of apes, and with different communities of humans, some of which were completely integrated).

The villainous Inheritors, led by their brains-in-jars leaders were "living machine" mutants, bent on destroying all life that wasn't mutant, but not above forming alliances with the gorillas who were, themselves, bent on slaughtering all the humans (in a thinly-veiled KKK analogy, complete with hooded gorillas burning down human houses). It was a wonderfully intricately written storyline, and would make a terrific setting for an RPG.

One of the best things about the series, though, was the artwork by Mike Ploog, Frank Chiaramonte, Tom Sutton, Herb Trimpe, and Virgilio Redondo. It's very trippy in places, and is definitely a child of the 1970's. Boom comics, which is currently publishing several Apes-related titles, had originally announced they were going to be doing a reprint of Terror on the Planet of the Apes, but unfortunately the project was cancelled last March, apparently due to low sales. More's the pity-- I would definitely have snatched them up! Fortunately at least some of the earlier chapters are available online in various places, for those who are interested in this fascinating bit of science fiction.

Two Sad RIP's

The genre has lost two of its stalwarts. Both Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan died today. They were 88 and 80 years old, respectively.

Ricardo Montalban was, of course, Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically enhanced superman who conquered a quarter of the Earth in 1992 and ended up fighting Captain Kirk in both the original series of Star Trek and the generally-acknowledged-best of the Trek films, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He also played Mr. Roarke on the long-running television show Fantasy Island, and a host of minor roles on television for decades. But it was that role as Khan that will always stick with me. He was just so... perfect. It's not just that Khan as a character was a match for Kirk, but Montalban as an actor was a match for Shatner, chewing up the scenery and commanding the screen in every scene. A terrific actor and one to be missed. EDIT: And curse me for a mongoose, I failed to mention that he also played Senior Armando in Escape From and Conquest Of the Planet of the Apes.

Patric McGoohan is perhaps a more enigmatic, but no less important, genre presence. He was, of course, Number Six in the baffling and brilliant British television show The Prisoner. He was also, we must remember, a fine actor of stage and screen, star of multiple television series ("Danger Man", etc.) as well as the villainous king in Braveheart. He won an Emmy for his work as a guest villain on Columbo. And a quick check of IMDB reminds me that he was also one of the bad guys in Scanners. But it will always be The Prisoner that draws me to this terrific actor (he also created the series). To this day, having seen every one of its seventeen episodes umpteen times, I still don't know exactly what was going on. Especially with that final episode. But each was imprinted with his undeniable presence and charisma, and he commanded every scene in which he appeared.

Two giants lost. Alas.

Reflections on the Planet of the Apes

I am a huge fan of the Planet of the Apes series. The movies, the television show, even the cartoon. Growing up, I had all the action figures, the play sets, the Marvel Comics magazine, the record album (they had a live tour show to promote the album, and I went to it three times while it was at the Morris County Mall; "Cornelius" signed my album, as I recall). And of course a crush on Linda Harrison. By the way, there as no 2001 film, as has been widely reported. Never happened. Nope.

On Thanksgiving weekend, Fox Movie Channel played nothing but Apes. All of the original films, multiple times. The movies they made by mashing two of the television episodes together. Tons of mini-documentaries in between. I was in hog heaven. But it also got me thinking about some issues with the Apes time-line, and what do you know? I happen to write a blog that might be a good fit for those thoughts.

As with most things involving time travel (occasioned by when Cornelius, Zira, and Milo go back in time to 1973) there are two timelines in Apes. T1 is the "original" timeline, created before the paradox of the three apes time-travel was introduced. In T1, we know that Taylor et al take off from Earth in the spaceship Icarus in 1972. Brent does too, on his rescue mission. Cornelius tells us (in "Escape") that sometime after that, the dogs and cats of Earth would be wiped out by a plague, and eventually replaced by apes. Eventually those apes would be enslaved, and revolt on an historic day when an ape named Aldo dared to speak up and say "no", sparking the ape revolution, presumably the nuclear war that wiped out human civilization, and leading to a time when humans were mute and their glorious history forgotten. That's the time we see in the original film, in the year 3955.

However, that timeline is thrown into chaos, and a new timeline (T2) created by the time-travel of the three apes as recorded in "Escape". The introduction of the baby Milo (aka Caesar) changes everything. No longer is it Aldo who leads the ape revoltion, but Caesar. The dog and cat plague happens on schedule, in 1981, but the revolution happens in 1991. We get the impression that in T1, the apes were enslaved for much more than ten years; Cornelius seems to imply that it lasts for centuries. But in T2 the whole process is accellerated; Caesar leads the ape revolt after only a decade of servitude (less than that, as it would have taken some time to ramp-up the whole institution of Ape Management).

Aldo is still there in T2, but now he is forced to play second bannana (heh) to Caesar in the post-nuke ape/human society we see in "Battle". Given the glorious role he seemed destined to play in T1, it turns him into a somewhat more sympathetic figure. His thunder was stolen by Caesar, even if he had no way of actually knowing it.

The events at the very beginning and ending of "Battle" show the very different direction that T2 has taken. Rather than being persecuted and descending towards mute savagery, humans and apes seem to be at a rough level of equivalancy. This, I think, is where the television show come into play. Apes are in charge in the year 3085, but humans are at least equal technologically. The change of Caesar for Aldo as leader of the ape revolt has set history on a different course.