So, the Fox Movie Channel is billing itself as the Channel of the Apes for Thanksgiving weekend, playing all Apes, all the time—the movies, the TV series, featurettes, etc. Even though I own the entire collection on DVD, I watched the first movie last night while I was working on other things. Other than the dodgy effects at the beginning after the ship crashes (which is cleverly done on the cheap by never showing the spaceship in flight—it’s all done with camera lens pov), the movie stands up very well. It’s hard to believe that it’s been forty years since the first one came out.
I was a big POTA junkie in the mid-70s, when the TV show aired. Like one of the guys interviewed in a featurette, I turned my GI Joes into apes, although apparently with more success than he had. He said that the stuff kept falling off their faces, but I used plasticine and had terrific results. My sister thought it was a real “ape” replica that had gotten soft from sitting out in the sun too long. One year I turned my goaltender mask into a gorilla for Halloween. Yes, I was that kind of geek, which explains why I like The Big Bang Theory so much.
The interesting news from one of the behind-the-scenes bits yesterday is that FOX is exploring the possibility of another POTA movie—a prequel to the first film. “We are very close at Fox on a new Apes script—this one a kind of prequel story before the first story, with a return to the social thematics that mark the first one, but with an entirely contemporary setting—Earth 2009.”
CHUD earlier reported that this could be a remake of the fourth film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, with the working title Genesis: Apes.
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