Re: Only a Moran or a Monkey could have written that....
It's 50 years to the day since the film first screened. What's odd about that timing?
On a cold, dry evening of February 9, 1968, cinemagoers at New York's venerable Capitol Theatre were the first members of the public to be taken to a new but worryingly familiar world. Ahead of the film's nationwide April opening, patrons of the picture palace at 1645 Broadway half a century ago caught an early glimpse of the …
This post has been deleted by its author
"...you dam dirty ape!"
Can't help noticing a complete absence of Bonobos in all of the Planet of the Apes films, but istr that PotA had a restricted certification (an 'A' cert in the UK at the time) anyway and I guess that typical Bonobo behavior would have raised the cert to an 'X'.
"I'm not too sure I'm a poitical nut,"
You bring political shit into a completely unrelated thread and you are still not sure?
Actually, I don't know why I am bothering to act surprised, it's not like self awareness is something political nuts excel at.
You bring political shit into a completely unrelated thread and you are still not sure?
Well the core story of the movie was that, wait for it... politicians blew up the world.
And there was political conflict among the monkeys.
Or have you not seen the actual movie?
The core of the original text story was the question of what exactly constitutes and identifies a 'person,' rather than an animal.
Recall the big inquisition of Taylor by the ape tribunal in the movie. I find it amazing that Hollywood allowed even THAT much of the original story theme to survive the cinematic process. And it's the only movie scene that lifts such dreck above the level of mindless fun. I guess they knew they'd have a joke movie without it...
This post has been deleted by its author
Is it just me and my permanent private browsing, or is youtube and pretty much every other Gurgle product aside from search itself, slow and clunky to the point that you seriously wonder if that's the same company that runs the most visited site on the web?
> or is youtube and pretty much every other Gurgle product aside from search itself, slow and clunky
Not to mention that three clicks later you end up in some conspiracy theory video or another (but let's blame the Russians, you know).
That's the place, time and date I first saw TPotA. How do I remember? Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had taken a huge leap for mankind the day before ... and 3PM shows mid-week were 30 cents that summer.
I thought the movie was hogwash. Still do. Apollo still fascinates me.
The movie was never meant to be more than a matinée fare with a (then) current events relevant message.
Cheap moralizing I believe it is called with a twist ending.
In that form, it worked. The sequels sucked, but I have not seen the latest one.
And not forgetting Kim Basinger when she was cartoonified in Cool World.
It's amazing how well that film hasn't aged* :P
*Brad Pitt looks like he just left infant school, whereas these days he looks like he's had 150 years sucked out of him by 'The Machine' in Princess Bride.
Jessica Rabbit had one of the best ever one-liners:
I really liked the original, saw the Wahlberg one at the London premiere.
I’m not too keen on the newer reboots, the originals had the premise that the apes evolved, now where told they came about due to human meddling. I Preferred the evolution angle.
The most recent movie was utter tosh though. Like Star Wars, the media reviewers loved it and raved about it, the overwhelming majority of the paying viewing public where not as generous.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3450958/reviews?ref_=tt_urv
I personally hated it and am saddened by what they’ve done to the franchise.
I really want a return to gritty passionate sci-fi as good as WoK, alien, Star Wars iv, silent runnings, moon, love, predator, gattaca etc.
"I really want a return to gritty passionate sci-fi as good as WoK, alien, Star Wars iv, silent runnings, moon, love, predator, gattaca etc."
I watched Silent Running for the first time in at least 20 years. Worth it, even if it's really not as good as I had (mis)remembered, with some over-caffeinated acting, and not enough story; the design is still terrific though.
What's WoK? (I'm prepared to be embarrassed at my brain fade here . . .)
...The premise is that in 3978, many hundreds of years after a nuclear war destroyed human civilisation, our near-relatives, the great apes, underwent the same evolutionary leap that had taken our bloodline from forest-dwelling apes like Ardipithecus ramidus...
A jump from Ardipithecus to Homo took around 2m years, and a jump from Homo Habilis to Sapiens took us another 2m. The Pan genus must have some pretty impressive mutagens to do a similar leap in 2k years....
...which picked up a handful of Oscars for makeup, costume and musical score...
It was up against 2001 - A Space Odyssey. 2001 had incomparably better make-up/costume, including an accurate (for the time) tribe of Ardipithecus, and I presume that I don't need to remind you of the 2001 musical score. With shots of Jupiter 'on location' from the probes. And Planet of the Apes won...
At the time Arthur Clarke said "Maybe they didn't give us the make-up prize because they thought we used real ape-men..."
As much as it pains me to say this, Accuracy doesn't necessarily correlate to movie quality. I do still think that 2001 is a better film than PotA and deserves more than it got.
Also, 2k years + nuclear fallout. In the timeline of the movie, I've always just considered that the apes got lucky.
"PotA "
Y'know, every time someone writes out POTUS in these forms, I always read it as Planet Of The Apes :-)
(Although I should say it started appearing with alarming regularity without explanation rather suddenly. A fast spreading meme for which I had to ask for an explanation.)
point of order though - Apes are not monkeys
Yes they are. In fact, yes we are.
It's called cladistic taxonomy and it's all the rage these days.
You are an ape. And a monkey. And a mammal. And a vertebrate. And a chordate (even though only as an embryo, it still counts). And a deuterosterome. And an animal. And many, many other things (those mentioned are merely interesting points along the way).
In the earliest stages of embryonic development a ball of cells gastrulates: it forms a dimple, which grows into a pocket. Later, that pocket tunnels all the way to the other end, forming a doughnut shape. The central hole becomes the digestive system. In deuterostomes, like us, the dimple end becomes the anus. In protostomes the dimple end becomes the mouth. In case you were wondering, protostomes include arthropods (spiders and insects), nematodes, etc.
For more details on why you're a monkey, see this.
Anyone remember the Wild Bill western show that did the rounds back in my youth, '70's I suspect.
I saw this at the Essex county show ground and included a hefty Plant of the Apes section.
From my recollection it was not that bad, and fitted in quite well with all the horse riding stunt stuff.
My big sister was a great fan :)
I think my favourite homage to Planet of the Apes is in Will Self's rather excellent novel Great Apes.
It's about a bloke who wakes up one morning to find that everyone has been replaced by apes. In one scene, the apes take our hero to a screening of "Planet of the Humans" and he's not impressed as the humans in it are clearly just chimps wearing rubber masks.
****Spoilers ahead****
I love the part where the chimp psychiatrists take the chimp protagonist to a human reservation in the mountains to seal his recovery from this delusion that he was ever a human. "Out of the mists could be heard the calls of the humans. 'Fuck off. Fuuuck off!' "
*** End Spoilers ***
And Mr Self write it before Twitter was a thing.
Space aliens in movies were kinda similar for a long time. Lots of humanoids (amazingly the same size and proportions as humans) or butt-ugly weird looking things meant to unsettle with their ALIENness.
Planet of the Apes did something totally different by using a future Earth full of basically Earth creatures. For the first time, English-speaking humanoid aliens made total sense. The humanoids are plausible because they're our genetic cousins, they speak English because that was a dominant language from their past. For all its gee-wow, even Star Wars had no explanation for why the inhabitants of a far-away galaxy were basically human. In Planet of the Apes it all made sense for once.
Now they took it much, much further and explored much more of the world of the Apes.
Memories are fading now, but ISTR a scene with some apes (Gilbert the Gibbon?) living in Abraham Lincolns nose on Mt Rushmore. And some sort of huge wooden ship, crewed by ape pirates.
Could this be a new TV show? Everyone and their auntie seems to be buying up Marvel and DC characters for TV series these days.
Proof of the old canard that a roomful of chimpanzees with typewriters will eventually reproduce the works of William Shakespeare? Or perhaps just a way to profit off the Bard's intellectual property. We all know how literate the weekend morning cartoon crowd is....
And the Tim Burton remake was kind of crap. Especially the end where Mark Wahlberg returns to Earth and finds out that somehow this ape general is now lionized there, even though the movie took place on another planet. It would have been a good ending if Wahlberg was unable to return to Earth and ended up back at the ape planet, only to find that the general (who had been disgraced before Wahlberg left) really had been proven right by time and his vision that apes and humans cannot co-exist as equals had been born out.
(Mine's the ape suit on the hook by the door.)
When they revealed that the mission was to populate a new world with three men and one woman.
Completely the wrong way round; very much all your eggs in one basket. She arrived dead anyway.
Presumably so they could focus on the manly crew doing manly things as they were killed off to leave one alpha male as the main protagonist. With no adverse reactions to apes killing (or otherwise mistreating) fine examples of American womanhood.
Not a bad romp, though, and thoroughly enjoyable.