Twenty Things You Never Knew About Planet of the Apes

1. The original Planet of the Apes started life as a French novel,
La PlanŠte des Singes, by former World War 11 spy Pierre
Boulle.  Based on his experiences as a prisoner of war, the
relations between apes and man were a metaphor for the brutal
treatment of Allied prisoners at the hands of Japanese soldiers.
Boulle also wrote the novel on which The Bridge on the River Kwai
was based.

2. Charlton Heston, who played astronaut Colonel George Taylor in
the 1968 film, compared the tale to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels.  'You can look at it as a big slice of adventure,' he
said, 'or a satirical comment on society.'

3. 'Somewhere in the universe there must be something better than
man,' ran the 1968 sales pitch.  'In a matter of time, an
astronaut will wing through the centuries and find the answer.  He
may find the most terrifying one of all on the planet where apes
are the rulers and man the beast.'

4. Filming in the heat of the Arizona desert created problems for
the original production - the actors' sweat caused their
prostheses to fall off.  They sat in refrigerated trucks to keep
cool.

5. The human imagination knows no limits; film budgets, sadly, do.
In the novel, apes drove, flew and had space satellites.  To save
money, the apes in the 1968 film were less technically advanced.

6. During breaks in filming of the original Planet of the Apes
(PotA), the actors seemed instinctively to form groups according
to their species: gorilla hung out with gorilla and chimpanzee
took tea with chimpanzee.

7. The cost of making the original PotA was ś4 million.  This
year's remake - sorry, 're-imagining' - cost about ś75 million.
That's inflation for you.


8. For the Sixties soundtrack, the wind section played their
instruments with the mouthpieces on backwards.  Composer Jerry
Goldsmith allegedly wore a monkey mask to conduct.  Perhaps he was
wearing earplugs, too.

9. In the original denouement, when Taylor discovers the Statue of
Liberty half-buried by the sea, he was supposed to say only, 'My
God!' Heston claims that he wrote the closing. lines: 'You blew it
up!  Damn you!  God damn you all to hell!' At the time, 'God damn'
was still banned by the Hollywood censors.  But Heston argued that
he was using the phrase precisely - 'Taylor is literally calling
on God to damn the destroyers of civilisation' - to get the scene
passed.

10. For the new PotA, the actors studied apes in the zoo and (on
video) in the wild.  Roddy McDowall claimed he studied Groucho
Marx as research for his role as the ape Cornelius in the
original.


11. Lassie Come Home star McDowall spent three hours having his
ape make-up applied and 90 minutes having it removed.

12. PotA spawned four big-screen sequels: Beneath the Planet of
the Apes (1969), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971),
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the
Planet of the Apes (1973), before finally descending into self-
parody.

13. The summer of 1974 saw the peak of the PotA mania, with 11
cinemas in New York alone showing all five films back-to- back in
an eight-hour continuous programme.

14. In 1974, with the re-release of the five films, more than 300
items of merchandise, from lunchboxes to models and Halloween
masks to bubble gum, were made.  Arrow Games' Planet of the Apes
board game featured an 'exciting, three- dimensional,
spring-release human trap'.


15. A two person PotA stage show, Meet Zira and Cornelius, toured
the United States in 1974.  Today we have Apemania, a nine-strong
group who dress up as apes from the film and hire themselves out
for private functions.

16. As soon as it had begun, ape fever was over.  A PotA
television series in 1974, starring McDowall was axed after just
13 episodes.

17. Director Tim Burton shot some of the action for the new PotA
at Independence Bay, in Arizona, several miles from where scenes
for the original were filmed.

18. For the new PotA, filmmakers scouted the world for the ideal
jungle bog before building their own at LA Centre Studios.
Designer Rick Heinrichs explains: 'What we needed was the sense of
the jungle, not the literal jungle.' The problem with the literal
jungle, apparently, was that they couldn't move the trees around.


19. It took 100 people four months to build Burton's Ape City out
of wood, steel, foam, plaster and concrete.

20. For the new film score, composer Danny Elfman used percussion
'instruments' including dustbins, miners' pans and Schlitz beer
cans.













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