This idea is a little difficult to communicate, but it’s something that bugs me.
i grew up on science fiction – first in the movies and TV shows and comic books of the forties, fifties, and sixties, then later reading the literature itself. They still ran the old Flash Gordon serials (and the West German TV series), and I’d heard rumors of a character named Buck Rogers that guys of my father’s generation were familiar with, but which I never saw anything of. I’d also encountered relics of something called “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet”, but all you saw were View Master slides or a rare comic book. No one movie or series dominated the medium, and you got a lot science fiction from lots of authors and viewpoints. Between science fiction and Pop Science books, articles, and TV shows I picked up knowledge about science and space. Including a lot that was outdated and wrong, but which still showed up in both Pop Science and science fiction – Mars has canals, and maybe life. Science fiction held that Mars was a desert with which maybe had ruins of lost civilizations, Venus was a swampy abode of life. But I also picked up a decent knowledge of gravity and how it varied from planet to planet. How space is a vacuum, and so on. Enough so that when The Twilight Zone showed people on an asteroid with earth-normal gravity and an atmosphere, I knew we were in science fantasy territory.
Star Trek came along and at first it was the embodiment of good SF – they pretty much stuck to the laws of physics, although the FTL travel was a stretch (but not an unusual one in SF). They featured scripts written by science fiction authors whose names I knerw, or would come to know. But through the years it came to dominate TV abnd movies as its “universe” expanded. Also Star Wars became hugely popular, but that was Science Fantasy, keeping the trappings of science fiction but not adhering so closely to the recognized laws of science. Other movies and franchises , if not exactly like these, closely imitated them, so that, in the public mind, Star Trek and Star Wars were Science Fiction, and sort of elbowed a lot of other forms of the field. You had to explain to non-fans that “transporters” were not really a thing. Nor Artificial Gravity or Warp Speed/Hyperdrive. Science Fiction that wasn’t in the Star Trek or Star Wars universe became the oddity.
Besides these two dinoisaurs, a few other franchises sprang up to fill in the gaps, and continued to crowd divergent forms out. These included:
Planet of the Apes – It all started with Pierre Boules’ 1963 novel La Planète des singes , which was translated in the US as “Planet of the Apes”, but in the UK as “Monkey Planet”. The French admits to either translation. The creatures involved were, indeed, tail-less apes, but I suspect the UK translation, with its links to “Monkey Business” and suchlike was a more appropriate translation. This wasn’t a major work of fiction, just a bit of fluff. L. Sprague deCamp and P. Schuyler Miller had covered much the same ground with their novel Genus Homo (1941, 1950), which in some ways was closer to the later film series.
But then, fatefully, Arthur P. Jacobs bought the rights to the Boules book and convinced 20th Century Fox to make the film. Rod Serling wrote the original screnplay, and it still shows. He;d envisioned the Ape society as being like the contemnporary 20th century society, but they extendsively rewrote the script, turning it into a much more primitive society close enough to subsistence that feral humans raiding their farms can be a serious problem. The ape architecture and the film score created a weird and effective atmosphere, but too many things in the film didn’t add up. The apes speak English, and this doesn’t tip the astronauts off that they’re back on Earth? (And how did the ship get turned around and crash-land on Earth? That’s a typical Rod Serling-ism – gloss over the gross improbabilities and jump into the setting). They’re living in a primitive, barely able to feed themselves society, but they set aside a large space for a modern museum? They can support a class of scientists who don’t have more pressing duties that can study the humans? And so on.
Still, it’s an interesting film, with great visuals, and a twist ending that’s completely ludicrous. It wasn’t Serling’s doing, but it’s his style – finding a half-buried Statue of Liberty on the beach to tell them that they’re back on Earth… It’s a helluvan iconic image, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Would’ve been a great one-shot. But there was money in the idea, especially if they minimized the use of that budget-eating ape makeup. So we got the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franciscus (Charlton Heston-Lite) and some heavy-handed satire of Vietnam era Hawks and Doves that looks cringe-worthy today. And (spoiler) they blew up the world at the end.
But there was still monmey to be made, so they made another sequel, where some of the Apes somehow resurrect one or both of the crashed space ships, refuel them, and take off, providentially going backward in time to then-contemporary Earth. A great savings in ape makeup. Escape from the Planet of the Apes made money, so they made a couple more sequels.
At which point it kind of took off. Marvel produced a magazine-size black-and-white comic book series based on the films. They produced a Planet of the Apes TV series, which still starred Roddy McDowell in ape makeup. An an animated TV series.
The virus lay dormant for years, but then Tim Burton sorta remade the original movie, only with an even more contrived plot (although the ending was more faithful to Boulle’s book. It still confused audiences). The studio was the push behind this, although it fit Burton’s style. It also featured great makeup by Rick Baker, the King of ape makeup. Things had advanced considerably since 1968.
It might have ended there, were it not for the Dawn of CGI and the start of a whole new series, with Andy Serkis performing the lead role in a motion capture suit, and with four movies this far. And plots that diverge very, very far from Boulle’s original.
It amazes me that this extremely minor book gave birth to such a huge franchise. It seems grossly disproportionate, and it has definitely colored public perception. One science fiction producer, pitching an idea to Hollywood executives, was asked if he could find some way to work intelligent apes into it. That wouldn’t have happened unless this franchise existed. And cases of SF novels that DO feature intelligent apes – like Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave – don’t get made. When they adapted Robert Heinlein’s story involving an intelligent chimp, Jerry was a Man into an episode of masters of Science Fiction, they changed Jerry into abn android instead, kinda missing the point.
I don’t know why apes are popular. DC comics exec Julie Schwartz claimed that putting an ape on the cover increased sales, which is apparently why they had so many ape-themed stories back in the 1950s and 1960s, and characters like Detective Chimp and Congorilla. And why Marvel much later had a series with apes as Marvel superheroes.
Why are apes popular? This does go beyond the Planet of the Apes thing, but that was clearly the most important pillar of Ape Fiction after 1968. Director of the Center for Antiracist Research Ibram X, Kindi claims the whole Planet of the Apes franchise is thinly-disguised racism, a successor to King Kong movies and Tarzan movies, in which the apes are intended as stand-ins for blacks, and the series represents white fear of a black takeover. I don’t buy his theories, myself, but they do make you look at it all a little differently.
And don’t get me started on Godzilla…
Mole hunts are probably the second most common spy plots, and they do it well.