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Return to the Planet of the Apes Complete Animated Series

| March xxx, 2022 |

The release of Battle for the Planet of the Apes in 1973 made it patently clear the five-installment flick series had not only run out of ideas, it had as well run out of coin. Information technology was a chintzy, slow petty moving picture with a trite happy ending made in a drastic effort to woo dorsum the family audiences who had fled the savagery of the previous year's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes . With Boxing , it was obvious the series was now over once and for all.

The suits at 20th Century Trick, however, had other ideas. At that place was still as well much money to exist made off POTA merchandise. So the side by side yr they coaxed Roddy MacDowell back into chimp makeup and cobbled together a weekly TV series most, yep, ii astronauts who observe themselves on a strange planet ruled by apes and…um, you can guess where information technology goes from there. The series was somehow even less heady than the last movie, amplified farther when everyone began noticing the same storyline was repeated every single goddamn week: the astronauts escape from the apes, are chased by the apes, and are recaptured by the apes. Tune in adjacent week to detect out what happens! Merely the series was accompanied past a inundation of trade, from model kits to masks to trash cans, and a helluva lot more people bought the merchandise than watched the evidence, and that'due south what mattered.

The serial lasted a single flavor earlier existence cancelled, but Fox still wasn't satisfied. Given the activeness figures and lunchboxes and games and ColorForms were mostly snatched up by youngsters, Fox returned in 1975 with (what else?) A Sabbatum morning cartoon. It was a potential godsend. People loved the apes, but were tired of seeing them tromp around unused Western sets, brandishing outdated rifles and having fistfights in barns. That was all the upkeep immune for live action, but with a cartoon the sky was the limit. If someone could draw it you could put information technology in the show. Spaceships, big explosions, crowd scenes, monsters, any you similar. Brand information technology flashy and zing-pow, and the kids'll eat it upwardly. Speaking of which, why not a breakfast cereal necktie in?

Every bit an apes-obsessed kid, I still plant I had little patience for the cartoon, perhaps because my patience had already been scraped raw by the lifeless live-action serial. Looking dorsum at the animated series as an developed at present, I'grand amazed at how smart and nighttime it is, and wonder what the hell my ix-twelvemonth-old self'due south problem was.

Simply let's back up hither a 2nd, because the show'due south full-blooded is worth taking into business relationship. In the early on '60s when Warner Brothers decided to close down its cartoon division, the legendary Friz Freleng, who'd directed so many classic Looney Tunes shorts, teamed upward with David H. DePatie to course an independent cartoon production visitor, DePatie/Freleng Enterprises (DFE), to go along churning out blithe shorts, shows, commercials, any anyone would pay them to practise. Along with dozens of by and large forgotten Sat forenoon cartoons like Here Comes the Grump , they also designed the blithe opening sequence for Blake Edwards' The Pinkish Panther , and won awards for the trippy Pink Panther cartoon that followed.

DFE worked with people from Warner, from Hanna-Barbera, from Disney, from all over the place. Coincidentally several of their shows were co-created by Joe Crimson and Ken Spears, who had created Scooby-Doo for Hanna-Barbera and who left DFE in 1974 to be story consultants on the live-action Planet of the Apes series (they shortly wisely returned to cartoons, where no one notices if you employ the same damn storyline every week).

A year subsequently DFE was conscripted past 20th Century Play a trick on to take their own swipe at the Apes mythology in Return to the Planet of the Apes , a new Sat morning entry for NBC. Doug Wildey, a storyboard artist who also worked on a number of sci-fi fantasy and superhero cartoons like Thundarr the Barbaric , The Incredible Blob , Jonny Quest , Spider Homo and his Amazing Friends , and Godzilla , was brought in to direct. Information technology would exist his offset and final directing job.

Even before the outset frame was written or sketched, Wildey ran into a large trouble. The Apes films (and to a lesser degree the alive-activeness serial) were extremely trigger-happy. Humans and apes akin were shot and tortured and strangled and dragged backside horses, electrocuted, hanged and speared. Information technology was simply part of the fun. But at the fourth dimension cartoon violence was a big no-no. Given the news footage coming out of Vietnam forth with the riots and bombings around the US, cartoons were consciously gear up aside as a protected refuge, a identify where impressionable kids could exist sheltered from all the horrible things people did to one some other on a daily basis.

There was even a clause in the NBC contract which stated that a drawing could non portray any trigger-happy deed that could mayhap be emulated past a six-year-erstwhile. So right off the bat, the apes in the show could not use guns, knives, clubs, battle axes, grenades, or any hand-held weapon. The gorillas could conduct guns simply weren't immune to fire them, maybe giving the tykes in the audience the impression those rifles were just fashion accessories. So that was a glutinous wicket—what the fuck were the apes supposed to do, Dance the humans into submission? Ask them nicely to get into the cage?

Wildey, being a clever type (and apparently besides a smartass), went to NBC'southward lawyers and asked if possibly the apes could use Howitzers. After some long debate, the lawyers had to acknowledge they couldn't really imagine a situation in which a half-dozen-year-old could use a Howitzer. It was a decision that would change the nature of the PoTA universe dramatically and brand the cartoon stand out from all the previous entries. Even after being given the all-articulate on the Howitzer question, I still don't know how the hell Wildey got away with some of the things he did.

Okay, try to imagine the Saturday morning landscape in 1975. You're nonetheless in your pajamas, parked in front of the TV within the impregnable walls of your sofa fort. You have a bottomless basin of Super Sugar Crisp with a side of Pop Tarts, and now it's time to make a decision. Return to the Planet of the Apes was facing potent contest from the likes of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters , Grape Ape , Hong Kong Phooey , and The Flintstones Teens . flip through the dial and it was clean-cut, All-American, lightweight and warm-hearted fare, full of friendly cartoon characters being overnice to each other. So you hitting NBC.

The Return to the Planet of the Apes title sequence opens with a pan over the images of four apes crucified upside downwardly in a arid landscape equally Dean Elliott's spare, advanced, and percussion-heavy score sets a less than jovial tone. Watching it recently for the first fourth dimension in nearly 40 years, I do have to wonder how I could've not been gaga over this when I was nine.

The highly stylized artwork rests somewhere betwixt Jonny Quest (which Wildey worked on) and Ralph Bakshi'south fantasy films. Stark, detailed backgrounds in by and large muted and heavily shadowed grays, blacks and browns, with smears of dirty green and imperial and the occasional splash of startling color (the gorilla general's bulbous helmet, e'er a metallic black in the films and TV show, is an intense orange for some reason here). In order to relieve time and money, the camera does a lot of panning over still images to give the illusion of action or intensify character reactions.

Stylistically it's not that much different from several other adventure series of the time, but much darker and moodier, punctuated by more than Bergmanesque extended silences than y'all'd expect to discover in a Saturday morning cartoon. The temper is mortiferous serious, with nary a joke or smile to interruption up the overwhelming sense of tense dread that seems to overwhelm the story (the one brief exception being the inclusion of a state song, "I'm Goin' Humanoid Over You," which is heard playing on a radio in the background).

Then in that location'due south the story itself. Unlike most any other animated show of the twenty-four hour period, Render to the Planet of the Apes quickly reveals itself to be an ongoing series, with each episode catastrophe with some kind of cliffhanger to set up the following week's installment. Miss 1 and you might exist lost ("Wait a second…who are these guys in the white robes at present?").

What begins with your standard PoTA premise, three astronauts (Jeff, Bill, and Judy) crashlanding on a planet ruled past intelligent apes, soon becomes something very different not only when compared with other Apes films, but when compareed with anything else you'd find on Saturday forenoon.

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For the first three or four episodes the series appears to be a uncomplicated amalgam of the previous franchise offerings. Cornelius, Zira, Dr. Zaius, and Nova are here, every bit is full general Urko from the TV serial. Other names, plot elements and scenes are clear and obvious nods to the films (especially Beneath the Planet of the Apes , though all the others are tapped as well), and it quickly dawned on my wife that what I was watching was a show not aimed at the wee folk, just at hardcore Apes fans.

The point was driven home non only by the grim temper, merely the surprisingly sophisticated dialogue. What half-dozen-yr-old is going to make any sense at all of lines like, "A truly complimentary ape is 1 who is willing to follow a thought through to the cease"?

(Well, okay, maybe ane of those really precocious, spoiled six-year-olds, but they wouldn't be watching Saturday morning time cartoons anyway so it'due south a moot indicate.)

The vocalization talent on mitt is serviceably straightfaced only unremarkable with two exceptions. Austin Stoker, who provides the phonation of Jeff, the blackness astronaut, played MacDonald in the concluding two Apes films, making him the only PoTA alumnus to accept whatsoever connection with the cartoon. And the great Henry Corden plays the warmongering, human-hating General Urko. If the name doesn't band an firsthand bell, Corden was the voice of Fred Flintstone. Corden's voice is unmistakable. He's Fred Flintstone wherever he goes, whatever he does, so when Urko rants near killing all the humanoids, what comes out is Fred Flint raving near genocide. As entertaining as that is, information technology tin can exist a little distracting. Oh, and for those paying close attending, that's Ted Knight from The Mary Tyler Moore Testify in the opening credits shouting "Render! To the Planet of the Apes!"

Anyway, back to the show. By episode three other elements pitter-patter in equally the Apes universe begins to evolve. We are told, for i thing, the year is 3979, twenty-five years subsequently the globe got blowed up existent good at the terminate of Beneath the Planet of the Apes . While in the films and TV series the apes depended on horses for transportation, here they accept trucks, motorcycles, airplanes, and pickups. They have electricity, televisions, and nightly newscasts. They also have tanks and, yes, Howitzers, and so apparently in those years post-obit the finish of the world, ape civilization reached the mid-20th century in technological terms.

While a group of psychic humans who can create very believable illusions is indeed living in the ruins of the New York Public Library (the revelation they've landed back on Earth doesn't seem to bother the astronauts much), they aren't a bunch of bomb-worshipping mutants, though they do take their issues. It's with their introduction the testify becomes more than than a pastiche of references. Yes, the gorillas chase the astronauts and Zaius argues history, science, and philosophy with Cornelius and Zira, but there's much more than going on. There are of a sudden multiple conspiracies afoot, as well as a few ancient prophecies that demand fulfilling, a threatened war, political ability struggles, an ongoing debate most evolution and public secrets, and a touch of mass hysteria.

i doubtable information technology was around the halfway bespeak in the series that an NBC executive tuned in to watch the bear witness for the commencement fourth dimension, and nigh choked on his Sugar Pops. Not only did he have no idea what was happening in the story, there was NOTHING happening in the story. No big chases, no explosions, no Howitzers, fifty-fifty! Instead it was all exposition, a lot of yakkity yak as characters discussed what would exist happening in the episodes to come. Worse withal, what'southward with these monkeys using terms similar "specific gravity" and "aerodynamics"? What is this shit? Kids tune in Saturday forenoon, they don't want continuing talky soap operas! With all that sugar in their bloodstreams, they want a fiddling zing-pw!

With several storylines stilll dangling, Return to the Planet of the Apes suddenly took another precipitous turn with a standalone episode, a pure adventure yarn about a balloon (though it did involve a mountaintop community of simian Tibetan Buddhists), utterly unconnected to anything that came before. While the episode that followed hearkened back to a few small-scale and nearly forgotten plot points from earlier episodes, information technology too was substantially a stand alone Jonny Quest -manner adventure most re-routing a lava catamenia before information technology reaches a nuclear reactor.

After iii stand-alones, I doubtable the satisfied NBC exec turned his attention to Grape Ape and forgot all about it, considering once over again Wildey picked up where he'd left off, re-establishing a continuing serial format tracing several plots and subplots. Judy is rescued from the Underdwellers, the astronauts continue trying to move a homo colony to a new safe habitation, a genocidal state of war is looming, the power struggle betwixt Urko and Zaius heats upward, Cornelius and Zira fence loyalty issues and science. Easy references can in one case once again exist made to earlier episodes without fear, the dialogue becomes startlingly sophisticated once more, and tiny details from early in the season accept on great significance. Plus there are lots of chases and explosions and shit.

With several old threads revisited and tied up only several more left dangling (and a cliffhanger ending to boot), NBC pulled the plug on Return to the Planet of the Apes after 13 episodes. I guess it'southward piece of cake to see why. Although in that location is no overarching social commentary at play here (autonomously from a clear anti-military opinion), and with the exception of those three stand-alones, the show played less like a Saturday morn cartoon than a complex and intelligent adult-themed five-hr Planet of the Apes miniseries, only one that happened to exist animated. Information technology hearkened back to what the whole damn series was in the beginning, every bit nighttime and grim as the first four films, earlier the franchise became a mere vehicle for selling toys.

It's simply a shame it didn't come along a niggling sooner. Cartoon or no, it actually did salvage the franchise reputation. Or would have had anyone been paying attention.