Saw one on a rerun of That '70’s Show that I don’t remember seeing for a while: the ifea that putting a sleeping person’s hand in a bowl of water makes them pee themselves.
Because per convention he was not expected to notice.
The idea was “We could make all the plants/animals and terrain features look alien (but still very fake with our inexistent CGI resources) and spend a lot of money, or we can sort of wink to the audience, pretend that there is nothing wrong with other planets looking like Southern California and spend the money on actors, scripts, directors and general production values.”
IIRC “it was Earth all along” was one of the frequent plots that John W. Campbell automatically threw out when submitted to Astounding. Another related frequent plot was two explorers get stranded on a planet and finally realize they won’t be rescued so they decide to make a life for themselves there. Their names are Adam and Eve.
On second thought I get what you mean, why did Charlton Heston’s character not notice that since supposedly he was “outside” the convention?.
The answer is that he should have, but we, the audience did not know that.
And John Wayne never noticed that the entire American West looks like Chatsworth. Nobody who didn’t first see Planet of the Apes in 1968 should be patting themselves on the back because they figured out Chuck was on Earth all the time before the (frankly, awesome) final shot. (Which any California surfer can identity as Zuma Beach.)
It was accepted in science fiction from the beginning of the genre that intelligent beings on other planets in the universe must be similar to human beings in some ways. This convention was gradually considered to be wrong in higher-level science fiction (i.e., novels as opposed to television and movies) as time sent on. By the late 1960s (of Star Trek and Planet of the Apes) higher-level science fiction no long accepted it as true. It’s now thought that amoeba are closer to humans than any aliens could be. By now, it’s currently thought that it’s extremely unlikely that a random planet has intelligent life or any life at all.
Death of the Author, and all that, but plausibility wasn’t at all what Pierre Boulle was after. The postwar atomic age was when “the absurd had become a form of logic.” (He may not have been in the club with the French Existentialists, but he strolled the same streets of their Paris).
During those strolls, besides observing the apes at the Paris zoo, he also took inspiration from what he saw at the stock exchange: “One cannot imagine for a second that these beings are homo sapiens. It is unimaginable that they act using reason. It is an animal behavior in which intelligence has no place,”
I’m not following that, maybe you’re using the terms differently from what I’m presuming. Would you explain please?
You can find a defense of the idea that conspiracy theorists who believe that the ancient buildings in presently poorer countries must have been built by aliens are acting on their racism:
Fair enough. The whole ancient aliens trope, sometimes combined with “lost advanced human societies” is often used as fuel for various flavors of bigots, racists, and conspiracy theories.
As an example, “No human could have built the Pyramids! It must be aliens, and the THEY is keeping it from you, trust my source of secret knowledge (and then buy my book, product, political policy)!”
Or for the second flavor “No ancient (brown) human could have created this clearly advanced work. It was done by the ancient Aryan (white Atlanteans, lost European colonist, etc.). This clearly proves my racial/social superiority theories, and shows that we must continue to lead/control the others for their own good”
Sometimes the trope is super explicit (especially older works), and sometimes it’s implicit in the assumptions, but it very frequently feeds into the conspiracy theories that further drag people down ever darker paths. Note - I’m not saying it’s always intentionally being done. But the trope is both intellectually lazy, and diminishes human endeavor regardless. And it encourages the ever popular “don’t trust the experts, just trust my secret/hidden knowledge!” which is quite literally killing people when it comes to things like vaccines.
Thanks all.
The night sky must have been cloudy the entire time he was there because the MOON would have been huge hint he was still on Earth.
(Apparently one of the tie-in novels imply the MOON was destroyed during a nuclear war. But THAT just raise further questions.)
I think that might have been in a comic book. When I read it, I remember thinking it would have been easier to suggest a “nuclear haze” obscured the night sky.
If I remember correctly, in the original novel, it was NOT Earth all along, but a very similar planet where there were humans and apes and horses…
When the astronaut returns to Earth, many many years later (he travels in hibernation IIRC) he’s received in the space port by… Apes! (apparently while he was away similar events happened on Earth as in the (other?) Planet of the Apes)
Just like Chimpans B and C.
Nitpick: relativistic time dilation
Right, I’d forgotten that in the (by god!) 38 years or so since I read the book 
Wasn’t that just a couple of weeks in your time frame?
To finish the Planet of the Apes book story, the humans decide to leave the space port after seeing it’s run by apes. They decide to write down their implausible story, and jettison the manuscript in hopes that others would be warned. This is the story that is described by the book, and we are duly warned.
The message is retrieved by a spaceship, whose occupants read to each other. The twist: the finders of the manuscript finish reading it, turn to each other and say “That’s impossible!” while shaking their simian heads.
Here’s an old dead trope - reviving an unconscious person (often someone rescued from drowning) by moving their arms above the head then across the chest. Apparently based on a real technique (Henry Silvester’ method) you see on Gilligan’s Island and other media from that era and before