Friday Ephemera
Original Planet of the Apes trailer. (1968) “An upside-down civilisation!” // Worryingly detailed Planet of the Apes timeline. (h/t, Coudal.) // Jeff Wayne versus the Martians. Armed with lasers and a big string section. Oh, and a virtual Richard Burton. // War of the Worlds book jackets and illustrations, from 1898 to 2007. // Tom Cruise escapes being vaporised. // The Watchmen movie is coming. A fan starts to obsess. There’s more, of course. // Images of Europa. // George Monbiot makes belated bid for Turner Prize. “I am sitting on top of an excavator the size of a house, dressed as a polar bear.” // UN climate change conference has inadequate parking for delegates’ private jets. // Californian tree hippies. Hand me the gun. // Bruce Thornton on academic free speech. “The political prejudices of the professoriate start at liberal and end at radical leftist.” // Mary Jackson spots resonance in The Arsonists. // Aircraft silhouettes. // German educational charts. The innards of things. (Circa 1950s) // New York subway maps. (h/t, Things.) // A map of the apocalypse. // Tallest buildings of the Old World. // Unspeakable meats. // Places to hide things. // Volcano webcams. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // Photograph yourself. Because now it’s even easier. // Kraftwerk: Das Model. (1980) // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Miss LaVerne Baker.
The timeline is, as you say, “worryingly detailed”.
But fascinating…
“The aliens and their soldiers, a species of winged monkey-demons, pretend to be allies to the United States, all the time watiting patiently for a chance to make their next move to gain control of the planet.”
It always comes back to the winged monkeys.
Yes, I’m sure many hours can be spent pondering the finer points of ape history. The original POTA trailer tickled me. I like how half way through Charlton Heston suddenly has a Troy McClure moment and turns to the audience to tell us how great his new film is. You just don’t get that in trailers these days.
If you haven’t done so, it’s worth reading up on the history of the original POTA movie. Basically, it was the product of the combined talents of Rod Serling and a cadre of Hollywood black-listers. A priori, this would would seem like a ridiculous combination but, in retrospect, it was pure synergistic genius.
The other thing that’s worth considering is how much the film and novel were both a unique product of their era. Obviously, the fantastically rapid technological advances of the post-war period, and the neuroses they created, led to a virtually unlimited demand for anything science-y and vaguely apocalyptic (the 1953 War of the Worlds, the 1954 Godzilla, etc., etc.). But the unique thing about POTA was that Pierre Boulle used this form to present a parable about how our ultimate enemy was not science, or aliens, but ourselves. This seems like a terribly pedestrian, standard issue, liberal-arts undergrad kind of profundity, but the author’s background gives him the credibility to write this without making it into a cliche: he had fought and been a POW in WWII Indochina, so he had seen first hand, in a way that few people ever would, how animalistic and destructive humans could be to each other (his other famous work was The Bridge Over the River Kwai). Hence, the book and movie were a perfect combination of wartime horrors and post-war neuroses.
Also, Tim Burton can go fuck himself. And then not call himself afterwards, because he doesn’t even deserve that courtesy, the common trollop.
Squid,
Yes, Tim Burton’s “reimagining” was a pale imitation and added nothing to the world Boulle and Serling created. (I actually think the original film is better than Boulle’s novel.) The ape make-up was impressive, as were the apes’ movements, but structurally Burton’s film was pretty much a disaster. I believe the expression is “a pile of arse.”