Planet of the Apes

The 1960s, a time of feverish experimentation in almost all areas of human life: the sexual revolution is going on, new drugs are being taken for recreation, censorship is being pushed back, gender roles are being re-defined, racial tensions and demands for racial equality are growing, the world sits on the atomic knife-edge of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Vietnam war is raging, Crumb and other underground Comix creators are pushing comics and taste as far as they can and then a little further still while music changes and changes again as crew-cut men in white shirts plan the first moon walk. Out of this period of personal, societal, technological and artistic turmoil would come a novel which would lead to an extraordinary film.

It’s the early 60s – 1962 actually – and the respected French author Pierre Boule, who had written Bridge on the River Kwai (which became an Oscar winning film) publishes La Planète des Singes, a tale of explorers on another world where apes, not humans, are the top of the evolutionary ladder. A few years later and Hollywood producer Arthur P Jacobs and one of the biggest stars of the screen, Charlton Heston, are trying to persuade an understandably cynical studio to stump up a budget for a movie about talking apes. The 60s may be an era of experimentation but spending millions on talking monkeys??? And this is long, long before Star Wars made SF movies the big budget, big earning industry it would become.

And yet somehow they managed to wheedle a few thousand dollars to try shooting a make-up test scene with no less an actor than Edward G Robinson (who would later bow out of the movie because of age and fitness concerns) and a short test script written by the great Rod Serling, the man who opened the door to the Twilight Zone. A very tense screening of the improvised scene was shown with everyone hoping desperately that the viewers wouldn’t burst into laughter at talking monkeys. They didn’t and the film-makers got their money – a movie legend was about to begin and you really would believe an ape could talk (in fact John Chamber’s make-up was so astonishing that the Academy created a special Oscar category just for him).

The movie which evolved diverged considerably from the book – for example, facing budget constraints Boule’s vision of a technologically advanced ape civilisation was revised to a more primitive society. However, the biggest change was to be to the ending – Boule had set his novel on an alien world, but the film altered this drastically to make the world the astronauts land on actually our own world many years after a nuclear war. Normally I dislike film adaptations taking such liberties with the source novel, but in this case it is hard to fault since it gave cinema – and popular culture – one of the most iconic movie moments ever, when Heston’s astronaut stumbles upon the remains of the Statue of Liberty projecting from the sands at the end of the first movie and realises the awful truth: he is home and his civilisation is gone.

“Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

Therein I think lies much of the success of the original Planet of the Apes – on one level it is an enjoyable SF romp but for those who want to look further it is full of allusions to our own world and the human condition (as the best fiction of any genre always is). Racism, sexism, casual violence, brutality and the fear of that which is different; these political themes would resonate with a 60s audience and, alas, still resonate with modern audiences as it draws attention through fantasy of the many flaws humanity can be heir to, then and now. Even today a viewer could re-interpret the film and its sequels to contemporary events; just as with Orwell’s 1984 or Moore and Lloyd’s V For Vendetta, Planet of the Apes can be endlessly re-interpreted by new audiences, always the hallmark of good storytelling.

It was also, long before the late 70s SF boom, pretty much the beginning of the big SF franchise with merchandise (I remember playing with the 8 inch dolls, packaged just like the Star Trek dolls of the period), comics, more books and a number of big screen sequels before moving into a live-action television series (still warmly remembered by many SF fans today) and even an animated series. And then there are the multitude of pastiches and homages – not least the many in the Simpsons alone over the years (can we ever forget Troy McClure in the musical version?) – which showed that Planet of the Apes was now a part of the common currency of popular culture.

Which brings me to the main point – why am I reminding you all of this classic slice of SF today? Well, because we just added this utterly stonking box set to our site today: Planet of the Apes Ultimate Collectors Edition Ape Head. It is a 14-disc set containing every film – including Tim Burton’s version, which itself boasts hour of extras – from the original Planet of the Apes through Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape From Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Now between those and the legions of extras that is a pretty impressive collection, but this also includes the fondly remembered Planet of the Apes TV series from the mid 70s, including the episode Liberator which wasn’t aired with the original run and, for the first time on DVD, Return to the Planet of the Apes, the 13 episode, hard-to-find animated series. Basically this is about as complete a Planet of the Apes set you can hope to own unless you kidnap Roddy McDowell, covering more than three decades of one of the first great SF franchises. Oh and I nearly forgot – the entire 14 disc set comes packaged in a hand-painted Ape head and shoulders bust with rooted hair, all numbered for collectors; it is a big run for a limited series, being 12,000 but it is a one-off – once these are gone, that’s it, so as well as being so complete it is eminently collectable.

As one of my colleagues observed, the Ape Head packaging is as good as some of the more expensive replicas and busts we sell and an attractive object in its own right for collectors. It weighs in at a hefty £149, which isn’t quite so heavy when you consider what you are getting for that – and of course FPI are offering our customary generous discount, with us knocking 27% off the list price to give Apes fans the chance to obtain this excellent set for £109.99. I can see a lot of people claiming sick days from work to watch this. I think I really want to get my damned dirty paws on this!