planet of the apes: a complete history

planet of the apes

The Complete History

Planet of the Apes: The Complete History (Applause, February 2022) explores every aspect of this phenomenon—from books to films, comic books to television shows, and video games to merchandise—providing an overview that is truly definitive. Author Sean Egan argues that the series has always been marked by thoughtfulness, exploring serious themes alien to most big budget films.

In this exclusive article, Egan explains how and why he set out to write a comprehensive snapshot of the iconic franchise.

Everybody knows Planet of the Apes – or thinks they do. But Planet of the Apes is an intellectual property-cum-franchise that has now been around for six decades and different agegroups have very different first experiences of

it.

Frenchman Pierre (Bridge on the River Kwai) Boulle kicked it all off with his 1963 novel

La Planète des Singes, setting the stage for endless permutations of the conceit of humans who wind up in conflict with preternaturally intelligent simians. This inaugural take was quite a highfalutin’ affair that was as much philosophy and satire as science fiction. As such, it would have been read largely by people who didn’t necessarily visit the cinema much at all.

The book’s adaptation to the big screen five years later was certainly a cut above science fiction movies, which, up until that celebrated Charlton Heston vehicle and the same year’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, had tended to be rather schlocky. Even so, its audience was a very different demographic to Boulle’s. The generation who saw its famous ending (the remnants of the Statue of Liberty waist deep in sand) when it still had its shock-factor intact (i.e., because knowledge of it hadn’t leaked out) were pretty much the same people who attended the four sequels that followed over the next five years. However, by the time a Planet of the Apes TV series began appearing on screens in 1974, much of its viewership comprised a new cohort who were completely unaware that it had any kind of precedent. In fact, some of the kids of the era only became cognisant that their favourite telly programme was not a wholly original idea when they purchased the contemporaneous Planet of the Apes Marvel comic and found to their bewilderment that

the TV show’s starring trio – human astronauts Burke and Virdon and chimpanzee ally Galen – were nowhere to be seen: the publication contained adaptations of the movies. What we now call reboots have occurred in the franchise

in 2001 with Tim Burton’s film and from 2011-17

with the motion-picture trilogy (Rise of/Dawn of/War for the Planet of the Apes) produced by Peter Chernin: the parents of the young people who consisted of much of those films’ audiences

had been the child TV viewers of yore. All of this means that a complete history takes in a lot of artistic talent and vision. It was

fascinating to research and write about how so many different people have brought their individual and idiosyncratic approaches to the Apes concept. Writing a book in the middle of a pandemic, though, posed challenges. It adversely affected to some degree the procurement of interviews, which are always an important feature of a work of this kind. Some people on my interview wish-list declined to participate on the understandable grounds that they wanted to focus on their families at this unsettled time. However, I was privileged

Facing: Prosthetic makeup design for Roddy McDowell in Planet of the Apes TV series (1974)

to be able to obtain original quotes from several key figures in the franchise’s history. Among them were: Linda Harrison, who played the mute beauty Nova in the first two Planet of the Apes films and was married to Darryl F. Zanuck, the Twentieth Century-Fox executive who gave the first film the green light; Tom Burman, part of the team responsible for the revolutionary prosthetics that made the original Planet of the Apes film quintet so visually stunning; and Rupert Wyatt, director of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the first instalment of the latest, mega-successful Apes series. When working on the ‘68 Apes movie, Tom Burman answered to John Chambers, a “genius” (Harrison’s word) who by the time of Planet of the Apes had already devised an iconic prosthetic in the form of Mr. Spock’s ears. Burman told me of Chambers, “He came in and picked up the script. That was on a Friday. On Monday, as I was walking out of the makeup department, I see John drive up and get out of his car, waving for me to come to him. He said, ‘It’s you and me, Tommy.’ He held up the script, and I saw the title: Planet of the Apes. Then he said, ‘I’m going to win the Academy Award.’” Some might have assumed Chambers to be joking, it being the case that regular makeup Oscars didn’t then exist. However, Burman says, “John was dead serious because he knew the scope of this film and he knew if he could pull this off successfully it would be hard for the Academy to ignore.” It was even harder for the Academy to ignore the entreaties of a Fox bigwig. “He got him a special Academy Award,” Linda Harrison told me of Zanuck. “Dick did that. He was on the board of

the Academy Awards and when Dick believes in somebody, he makes things happen. He had that authority.” Zanuck’s intervention to secure Chambers an Honorary Award for Outstanding Makeup Achievement raises issues of propriety, not least because, the previous year, lobbying by Fox had managed to get the studio’s badly received flop Doctor Dolittle an eyebrow-raising nomination for Best Picture. However, few would dispute Harrison’s observation of Chambers and Planet of the Apes, “It was groundbreaking and without Johnny it couldn’t have been made.” With the Chernin trilogy, a whole new approach was required. The idea of using actors in prosthetics foundered on the fact that apes in this narrative are not the simians of previous projects, wherein humans had been catapulted through time and/or space to find themselves on a world brutally ruled over by evolved beasts. In this new telling, the time is today and the simians are ordinary apes whose intelligence is boosted by an experimental drug. Wyatt points out, “Real apes don’t actually have the same anatomy as human beings. Their arms are way longer, their torsos are much shorter, all of those things. So there was no way we could actually do a Planet of the Apes in the original mould.” Instead, Wyatt and his team were responsible for bringing to the franchise stunningly lifelike Computer-Generated Imagery. Wyatt only knew in post-production what the simians cooked up by New Zealand special-effects company Weta Digital would look like on screen. He recalled to me of the first evidence Weta provided him of their intentions when it came to transforming actor Andy Serkis into central character Caesar: “It was Caesar behind the bars in the ape sanctuary watching one of the handlers walk past his cage. It literally looked like they’d taken Andy’s eyes physically out of his skull and put them into a shot and made him into an ape. It was unbelievable. It was the thing that made everybody just take a breath and realize that we actually had the possibility of making a really strong film.”

Above (top): Planet of the Apes Magazine, Volume 1 Above (bottom): Charlton Heston, star of Planet of the Apes (1968), at a Civil Rights March in 1963 Facing (left): The book’s cover Facing (right): The lead cast of the Planet of the Apes television series: James Naughton as Burke and Ron Harper as Virdon There have been Planet of the Apes chronologies before, some of them very good. I like to think that this book offers something new in terms of completeness, and not just because it unusually covers the property right from the beginning to present day. I considered it vital that a proper examination of the Apes phenomenon should fully explore some things that normally get relegated to passing mention. For instance, the Planet of the Apes merchandise craze that raged in the middle of the 1970s was the very first time that people bought in huge number toys, utilities and souvenirs simply because they were plastered with imagery related to their favourite media property of the moment. Those who assume that it was Star Wars that

turned ancillary product from a side issue into a phenomenon have simply not taken into account the simian tsunami that preceded it by several seasons. As merchandise has now become a key part of the financing and marketing of motion pictures, it seemed only right to devote an entire chapter and more to the subject. Comics is a key branch of the Planet of the Apes tree that also merits protracted attention, in this case because the notion of ‘expanded universe’ – as seen subsequently in the thousand-and-one novels and comics

tied in to other media properties – was partly created by the stories that appeared in Marvel’s publication, where the adaptations of the original movies sat alongside new and hugely imaginative tales set in the Apes universe devised by Doug Moench, one of the Seventies’ most original comics scriptwriting talents. (I also had the pleasure of interviewing Doug.) Additionally covered to a far greater degree than usual is the subject of novelisations. The book-of-the-film is a market that barely exists anymore, but in a world prior to video recorders – let alone streaming – people who wanted to re-experience the Sixties and Seventies Planet of the Apes films could only do so via prose adaptations. Ditto for the two Seventies TV shows. (There was a 1975 animated series, Return to the Planet of the Apes, which veered between thoughtful and buffoonish). Some of these books are surprisingly good, numbering acclaimed SF writers among their authors.

Planet of the Apes is such a long-running and wide-ranging phenomenon that the potential audience for a book about it is correspondingly large. Not only does it encompass several different generations, but it includes cineastes, science fiction fans, comics readers, the nostalgic and the curious. Happily, the book has already received significant UK print coverage, garnering four-star reviews in Total Film (leading movie magazine) and SFX (a glossy sci-fi monthly devoured by the types who flock to Marvel superhero films). It was also named Book of the Month in Yours Retro (nostalgiathemed offshoot of women’s magazine Yours). Reviews and ratings on Goodreads and Amazon have so far been largely positive. The Planet of the Apes saga continues: a new film is in preparation as we speak. No doubt, this and other projects will necessitate an update of my book in future years, but that goes with the territory when it comes to relentlessly successful and expanding franchises. For the time being, Planet of the Apes: The Complete History hopefully serves as a comprehensive snapshot of what is and what has been in Apes-land, and will satisfy the thirst for more knowledge on the part of those people who have experienced its many and varied iterations.

Planet of the Apes: The Complete History (Paperback, 9781493057252, £20.95) by Sean Egan

publishes February 2022.