Conquest of the Planet of the Apes remake

My friend David Widdicombe sent me this link. Pant-hoot!

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Virgil

Those who've read my novel Wake know that an orangutan named Virgil figures in the plot. My Virgil is named for the character played by Paul Williams in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and, according to the nifty Yahoo! Groups Planet of the Apes group (of which I'm a member), he'll be named Time magazine's Simian of the Year in 2018!

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Star Trek: The Original Series Blu-ray review

Splurged on a nice new Blu-ray DVD player yesterday (Sony BDP-S560, recommended by my video-guru friend H. Don Wilkat); also, got the lovely boxed set of the Planet of the Apes films on Blu-ray; quick check shows the first film looks stunning.

Next purchase: the remastered original Star Trek episodes on Blu-ray. The Canadian website DVDBeaver has a wonderful detailed review of the first season on Blu-ray, with amazing screen captures showing the improvement in quality over standard DVD. See here

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Planet of the Apes 40th Anniversary Blu-ray set

In Canada, both Amazon.ca and Futureshop.com have the 40th anniversary Planet of the Apes Blu-ray box set on sale for the terrific price of Cdn$59.99. Just ordered me a set.

(Now have to buy a Blu-ray player so I can watch it!)

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New Apes novels coming!

Rich Handley, who created the magnificent Timeline of the Planet of the Apes, is editing two new officially licensed Planet of the Apes novels -- w00t! Can't wait!

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Hail, Caesar!

Hey, didja know that Gordon Jump -- Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson himself from WKRP in Cincinnati -- was in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes? He plays the auctioneer who sells Roddy McDowall's Caesar to Governor Breck, saying:

Lot eight: one male chimpanzee in early prime and perfect physical condition. Under observation, appeared so familiar, obedient, docile and intelligent with humans that conditioning was not considered necessary, but can be provided on request. What am I bid for this superb specimen?

Well, Governor Breck's got nothing on me! I just won an auction on eBay for this 12-inch fan-made resin statue of Caesar:


A statue, you say? That's right -- because the very last shot of the very last film in the series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, of a statue of Caesar.

That original life-size statue lived for many years in Roddy McDowall's garden, but he donated it to the Motion Picture & Television Fund, where it now stands serenely in the Roddy McDowall Memorial Rose Garden:


Unlike with Governor Breck, I don't think my winning Caesar in an auction is ultimately going to cause my downfall ... well, at least not until Carolyn finds out! ;)


(click plaque for larger image)

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Timeline of the Planet of the Apes

After my misadventure with Lulu's shipping costs to Canada, I managed to get ahold of a copy of Timeline of the Planet of the Apes via an auction by author Rich Handley on eBay -- and I'm glad I did!

Rich Handley's Timeline of the Planet of the Apes is a magnificent labor of love. He's taken on the staggering task of trying to make sense out of the jumble of contradictory facts and figures -- not to mention temporal paradoxes -- in the five original movies, the live-action and animated TV series, Tim Burton's remake, and more, presenting a fascinating chronology of humanity's downfall, the rise of the apes, and the ultimate fate of our planet.

The book is gorgeously designed, handsomely printed, copiously annotated, and more fun than -- you guessed it! -- a barrel of monkeys. Highly recommended.

More info is here on Rich Handly's site and here at Lulu.com.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Planet of the Apes 40th Anniversary

Forty years ago today, Thursday, February 8, 1968, the original Planet of the Apes arrived in theaters. It is, in my opinion, one of the very best science-fiction films ever made, and was hugely influential on me and my career.

Its stature wasn't always obvious to everyone, though, and, indeed The New York Times was rather dismissive in its review (written by the then 29-year-old Renata Adler), which appeared the next day:

"PLANET OF THE APES," which opened yesterday at the Capitol and 72d Street Playhouse, is an anti-war film and a science-fiction liberal tract, based on a novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote "The Bridge on the River Kwai"). It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch.

A most unconvincing spaceship containing three men and one woman, who dies at once, arrives on a desolate-looking planet. One of the movie's misfortunes lies in trying to maintain suspense about what planet it is. The men debark. One of them is a relatively new movie type, a Negro based on some recent, good Sidney Poitier roles -- intelligent, scholarly, no good at sports at all. Another is an all-American boy. They are not around for long. The third is Charlton Heston.

He falls in with the planet's only human inhabitants, some Neanderthal flower children who have lost the power of speech. They are raided and enslaved by the apes of the title -- who seem to represent militarism, fascism and police brutality. The apes live in towns with Gaudi-like architecture. They have a religion and funerals with speeches like "I never met an ape I didn't like," and "He was a model for all of us, a gorilla to remember." Some of them have grounds to believe, heretically, that apes evolved from men. They put Heston on trial, as men did the half-apes in Vercors's novel "You Shall Know Them." All this leads to some dialogue that is funny, and some that tries to be. Also some that tries to be serious.

Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall and many others are cast as apes, with wonderful anthropoid masks covering their faces. They wiggle their noses and one hardly notices any loss in normal human facial expression. Linda Harrison is cast as Heston's Neanderthal flower girl. She wiggles her hips when she wants to say something. -- R.A.

In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the original Planet of the Apes "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Odd, from four decades on, to see what a first viewer picked up on, and what she missed.

That it is a liberal film is very true, I think, but the reviewer seems to sneer the term, making it the pejorative it so often is in the US today; it is good, though, that she saw it as an anti-war film, since it is very much indeed that.

The exterior of the spaceship, I think, is absolutely lovely, one of the nicest ever put on film (and based very much on NASA's winged Gemini variant that had been on the drawing boards then); to call it "most unconvincing" seems groundless.

The comment about the "Negro" astronaut, of course, is of its time -- but the notion that the character is based on other movie characters is wrong-headed; the portrayal of a black astronaut, and a black scientist, was a significant social statement (one Stanley Kubrick utterly failed to echo in 2001, which came out the same year). The dismissiveness in the review is ... well, may we all be forgiven for things we wrote decades ago.

Even in 1968, there was no way at all that any educated person could say that the humans portrayed on screen where "Neanderthals." This relates to discussion elsewhere in my blog about why people look down on genre fiction: genre expects a familiarity with a canon beyond just a handful of works, and an understanding of science. A person who confuses a Neanderthal with a Homo sapiens simply is using big words that he or she doesn't understand.

The notion that Linda Harrison is overtly sexual in the film ("wiggles her hips") is simply not supported by what was on screen. It's a kind of reviewing I hate -- when the reviewer decides he or she has a line that will make him or her look oh-so-clever and so shoves it in regardless of whether it is an accurate response to the work in question.

And, of course, the attempt by the reviewer to spoil the fun -- to draw attention to the question of what planet this really is -- is simply unfair, in my view. A reviewer is welcomed to say that the ending sucked; a reviewer is not entitled to spoil the ending so that he or she can affect an ennui-laden yawn and look down his or her nose at the reader and say, "Oh, come on, surely you saw it coming!"

"I'm a seeker too. But my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than The New York Times. Has to be." -- Colonel George Taylor, more or less

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site