Friday, July 29, 2011

The Return of Gabriel Hunt



I got this email from Gabriel Hunt editor Charles Ardai not too long ago and have been meaning to share it. Great news for Gabriel Hunt fans.
Friends --

The other day I got a message from a fan of the Gabriel Hunt books asking why there haven't been any updates in such a long time. The answer, alas, is that for the past several months we haven't had any news to share. The publisher we work with to put out the Gabriel Hunt books, Dorchester Publishing, has been going through some tumultuous times (picture them being chased down a grassy slope by blowgun-wielding natives, trying desperately to hold on to their flapping fedora), and as a result our series wound up being abruptly suspended one title short of completion (picture Gabriel Hunt frozen in carbonite).

But.

I'm happy to report that things are finally starting to thaw. The last Gabriel Hunt adventure to hit book stores in our original mass-market paperback format (those little paperbacks that fit in your jacket pocket), Hunt Among the Killers of Men, is about to become the first ever to be released in the larger "prestige" trade paperback format... [It was released on June 6, about a week after I got the email. Did I say "not too long ago"? That was a lie. -Michael]

Then in August...our sixth and final (for now) title, Hunt Through Napoleon's Web, co-authored by the talented and charming Raymond Benson, will finally see print for the first time, also in trade paperback format. You can already pre-order it on Amazon.com [at the link above -Michael] and from other fine retailers.

And the plan is for the first four Hunt adventures to follow in subsequent months, so that before long you'll be able to have a full set in uniform editions.

Now, will there ever be a seventh Hunt adventure? Well, as a good friend once told Gabriel, never say never again. (Picture Sean Connery in a turtleneck...ah, never mind.) But things have been so tumultuous (natives, blowdarts) that we simply don't know. I have confidence in the ever-resourceful Mr. Hunt, so I wouldn't count him out just yet. But after penning six adventures in a little over 18 months, I don't blame the man at all if he requires a little time off to recharge. I like to imagine him on the grounds of the Hunt Foundation's private estate in Bali, sipping from a rum cocktail, while a gorgeous linguist lounges beside him in a tiny sarong. There may be more adventures ahead, but for now we can let the man enjoy one of his rare moments of downtime.

Best,
Charles

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Western Wednesday: Art Show!

Western Wednesday is a weekly tribute to six-guns, steampunk, and sasquatch.



By Stanley Borack. [Illustrateurs]



By Remington Schuyler. [Illustrateurs]



By Stanley Borack. [Illustrateurs]



By Richard Lillis. [Illustrateurs]



[Golden Age Comic Book Stories]



[Golden Age Comic Book Stories]



By Alex Schomburg. [The Comic Book Catacombs]



By Alex Schomburg. [The Comic Book Catacombs]

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Mysta vs. The End



In Mysta's final printed adventure (Planet Comics #62) she fights two different battles. She has to help Garro fight a giant robot that's attacking the undersea farms of the planet Aqua, but meanwhile, back on Earth, her secret identity is being questioned as the result of a standard security audit.

The underwater adventure is cool with the giant robot and two different factions of fish-people, but from the perspective of the overall series the interesting part is Garro's quick inclusion of Mysta in the mission. At the end of the last one he implied that he didn't want her participating anymore, but as soon as another crisis arises, he calls her in. He's conspicuously quiet too about evaluating her performance at the end of the Aqua mission, so what are we to make of him?

Assuming that I was right in guessing that he's in love with Mysta and starting to worry about her, perhaps he's realized that his sexist comment to her after the last mission was inappropriate. I don't mean in a Political Correctness way, but just in a I Like This Woman and Want Her to Like Me Too way. Though - unless there was an off-panel apology we don't know about - he's handling it by pretending he never said it and hoping that Mysta will follow suit. If that's the case, Garro's a complete douche.

Something else that may inform the situation though is Mysta's being referred to throughout this story as Technician 3. In the last adventure, her title was Technician 106, which seemed to be an ID number of some kind. As this story opens, she's called Technician Grade 3. That sounds like a job title, but it's immediately truncated to just Technician 3 as the story progresses and used in the same way that Technician 106 was used earlier. Has she gotten a promotion? Like, a really huge promotion? If 106 and 3 refer to grade levels...well, maybe Garro's found a way to apologize after all. Not a cool one, but then Garro's not a cool guy.

As for the security audit, the woman conducting it figures out right away that something's not right about Mysta. We finally learn Mysta's cover name in this story: Ana Thane. The problem is that Mysta's apparently done a lousy job of creating that cover, because there are no records of such a person existing. It's hard to believe that Mysta would have screwed up that badly, so I'm suggesting another theory: that Bron, desperately wanting Mysta to give up her extended undercover mission and return to the Moon, hacked into the Safety Council's servers and purposely erased whatever background Mysta had created for Ana. Frankly, I wish he'd succeeded.

Unfortunately for Bron, he didn't realize that the auditor is a corporate tool and an idiot who's too afraid of making waves to report any discrepancies she finds. Her exact thought is, "If I tell[...]Garro he'll think I'm looney! Perhaps I'd better just close the files on this case." And so she does. Mysta's secret is safe.

Since this was the last Mysta story that Planet Comics published, we'll never know what eventual plans they had for the character, but I'm not sure that's important. I enjoy trying to explain the twists and turns and inconsistencies - creating my own subplots in the process - but I don't seriously think that the writers had long-range plans for the character. The series feels very much like they were making it up as they went along. That's part of its charm, not a criticism, but it does leave it to the reader to create his or her own ending for Mysta's story.

Sleestak likes the idea of Mysta's giving up her Moon fortress for good and settling down more or less permanently in her role as a Safety Council technician, "allowing humanity to once again control their own destiny." That's a great ending from Sleestak's perspective, because he's tended to see the early Mysta as a harsh gatekeeper who controls scientific knowledge through her own strength and technological superiority. He's always acknowledged that her motives were good, but disagreed with some of her draconian methods.

Something about Mysta's first appearance made me want to like her more than that though. Maybe it was the tragedy in her origin: how she was stolen from her crib (along with a male baby) by a scientist who then raised her and her "brother" on the Moon while he poured all the world's knowledge into their brains, how the God of War possessed her "brother" and forced him to kill their "father", and how Mysta had to then kill her own "brother" in self-defense. I think that got to me in a way that made me want to give her the benefit of the doubt as her story unfolded. Even when I questioned some of her choices, I wanted to support her as much as possible.

Which means that I've seen her as less manipulative than maybe Sleestak has. If he's right, I hope with him that she's leaving that behind as her series ends. But if Mysta's mission has always been noble - and executed as nobly as possible - I'd love for her to come clean to Garro, move back to the Moon with Bron, and work openly with the Safety Council to continue keeping the universe safe.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Planet of the Apes (TV series; 1974)



Blastr recently included the Planet of the Apes TV show on their list of 5 Awful Movie-Inspired Sci-Fi TV Shows. I read that list before I’d dug very far into watching the show for myself, but even then I knew that I disagreed with them. For the record (and if you don’t feel like clicking links), here’s what writer Krystal Clark said about it:
How many different ways can you show us a world dominated by apes? By the time this show hit the air there had already been five Planet of the Apes movies. Not two or three, but five that harped on the same premise! This show, along with the animated series that was released the following year, really beat a dead horse. (Or should we say ape?) They beat it, skinned it and burned it alive before they finally let it go. (Oh wait a minute, we forgot Rise of the Planet of the Apes is heading to a theater near you! Sigh.)
You’ll notice that Clark never actually says what’s wrong with the show. In fact, she’d never have to have even seen it to write that paragraph. (I’m not saying that she hasn’t seen it, just that you can’t tell it from reading her “criticism”.) Her first sentence is a rhetorical question that assumes an incorrect answer. It assumes that not only is there a limit to the number of stories you can tell in the Planet of the Apes universe, but that that limit is decidedly less than six. That’s ridiculous.



The five movies all have their individual flaws, but none of those flaws have anything to do with repeating earlier films. In fact, one of the biggest strengths of the series is that each installment presents a snapshot of a different period of the planet’s history. That allows for different tones and themes from film to film.

In response to my Battle post, Mitchell Craig commented that “the series should have stopped after Conquest, but this last film just spins its wheels.” I don’t disagree. As I wrote in reply, there’s no demanding need for the story that Battle tells. It’s possible to watch only the first four films and get a satisfying, complete story about the history of this world. But on the other hand, I enjoyed Battle. Even if it’s ultimately unnecessary, I’m glad they made it, because I love the PotA world and love watching stories set in it, so long as they’re good stories. For all it’s flaws and inconsistencies (and there are lots), Battle has a good story at its heart.

That’s where I’m at with the TV show too, although it’s a much better creation than Battle. In fact, I enjoyed it more than any of the individual films. It’s exactly what I wanted from a Planet of the Apes series: humans being chased by talking apes every episode with some social commentary drizzled on top. It’s an entertaining adventure show immersed in the best parts of the PotA world, but without the self-importance of the first two films.



The premise is simple, two more astronauts (three actually, but the third dies in the crash) go through a time warp and arrive in the ape-dominated future. Alan Virdon (Ron Harper, who also played Uncle Jack in the third season of Land of the Lost) and Pete Burke (James Naughton, who’s currently on Gossip Girl) are discovered by the ape council. The apes' leaders know that humans once dominated the planet, but they're keeping that information secret from the general population. Afraid that the astronauts’ presence will subvert ape domination by proving that humans can be intelligent and valuable, the council decides to kill the two men before anyone finds out about them. Fortunately, Virdon and Burke are helped to escape by a sympathetic chimpanzee named Galen (the pleasantly ubiquitous Roddy McDowell).

Like most adventure shows from the ’70s and ‘80s, Planet of the Apes has an overarching plot that drives the series without dominating it. Other examples are David Banner’s searching for a cure while being pursued by Jack McGee in The Incredible Hulk or the A-Team’s constantly being hounded by the military for a crime they didn’t commit. In the first episode of Planet of the Apes, Virdon retrieves the flight recorder from his spaceship before the apes blow the vessel up, hoping that one day he'll find a functioning computer with which to analyze the data and reverse-engineer a way home. It’s a long shot, but he’s got a family back in his time and the hope of returning to them keeps him going. Burke – a ladies’ man with no family – isn’t any happier about being stuck in the future, but is fatalistic about their chances of returning home. Galen, now a fugitive from his own people, just wants to be supportive of his new friends.

Virdon’s quest keeps the trio moving from place to place, but there are only one or two episodes that even mention the recorder disc. Most of them simply feature the three characters’ encountering a new village and having to deal with whatever situation’s going on there. Usually, the ape council’s gorilla squad – led by General Urko (Mark Lenard, who’s even better in this than he is in Star Trek as Spock’s dad, and that’s saying something) – shows up in hot pursuit of the trio, increasing the stakes and the tension.



I’m so fond of the show that I’d be inclined to ignore its inconsistencies with the films. I would be, that is, if there weren’t explanations that make it easy to reconcile the show with the movies. I can’t take credit for all of these – Timeline of the Planet of the Apes was very helpful – but most of it’s easy to figure out.

The only glaring contradictions are all established in the first episode and I mentioned a couple of them in the post on Battle. There are dogs present when – according to Conquest – dogs are supposed to be extinct. Also, Virdon and Burke find a book that has a photo of a thriving New York City from a couple of centuries after it was supposedly destroyed.

There’s another apparent problem, and a glaring one, but a closer look at the series reveals that it’s explained right there in the show. That’s all the talking humans. Humans are treated by apes the way African slaves were treated in the United States during the nineteenth century, with no rights and barely any acknowledgment that they’re even sentient, but they’re not the speechless brutes we see in the first PotA film and Beneath. However, the title sequence to the show reveals that it takes place almost a century before the first movie, plenty of time for humanity to degenerate into Nova and her pals.



How then to explain the presence of an orangutan councilman named Zaius? That’s also easy. Like Galen – a name that Staz Johnson reminded me also appears in the first movie – it must be a common ape name. Like John or Michael. If the extreme time difference wasn’t enough to differentiate the characters, the TV show also makes it clear that it takes place on the West Coast, complete with maps and specific mention of San Francisco. The Planet of the Apes move (and – I assert – the rest of the film series) clearly takes place on the East Coast.

Which reminds me of the answer to something I wondered about at the end of Conquest: how widespread Caesar’s rebellion was. If all you’re watching is the movies, you have no clue what’s going on in the rest of the world outside of the New York area. According to Timeline, the various comic book series fill in those gaps (even explaining that the worldwide nuclear war was in response to the ape rebellion instead of human vs. human), but the TV show also helps explain things. It shows a culture very similar to those we saw in the films, but very removed from the movies’ events. There are no references made to Caesar or any other elements from that series and perhaps the apes in the TV show aren’t even aware of them.

Back to the contradictions that need explaining: the dogs aren’t that hard to explain either. Obviously the world-wide plague that supposedly wiped out all canine (and feline) life wasn’t as universal as everyone thought. It’s not a radical thought that some animals may have survived. And as for 22nd century New York, Timeline suggests that perhaps what's depicted in the book we see is an artist’s interpretation of a future New York rather than an historical depiction of the real place.



All said and done, there ain’t a thing wrong with this show. The three leads are extremely likable and pleasant to watch. Virdon’s the level-headed, capable, and inspirational leader. Thanks to his growing up on a farm (and still living on one as an adult in Texas) he knows a lot about agriculture and handling animals, subjects that come in very handy in his ape-planet travels. Burke starts the series off as something of a complaining hothead, but he mellows out after a couple of episodes into someone who’s still interesting and vibrant, but not negative. He’s totally the guy you want watching your back and he and Virdon make a great team. It also helps that there’s a ton of chemistry between the actors.

That’s something that can also be said of them and Roddy McDowell. There’s a reason that McDowell’s the king of Planet of the Apes. Even though he’s instantly recognizable in his chimp make-up thanks to his distinctive voice and some recurring mannerisms, he played three entirely different characters in the Planet of the Apes world and played them as entirely different characters. Caesar is not interchangeable with Cornelius, who is also not interchangeable with Galen. Cornelius and Galen are close (even to their both working for orangutan council members named Zaius), but Galen’s much more adventurous and loyal to his human friends than Cornelius. And in spite of his fugitive status, Galen’s got a greater sense of humor too. He’s absolutely charming.

Unfortunately, there were only fourteen episodes of the show. Wikipedia blames its being scheduled against Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man for its low ratings and quick cancellation and that sounds reasonable to me. Those were crazy popular shows.



It did return later though in the form of a series of five TV movies in 1981. Each film was actually two episodes from the original show, but presented with a framing sequence in which Galen told the stories to an unseen human, another time-traveling astronaut who had arrived in Galen’s era. In these scenes, Galen explains that Virdon and Burke eventually did find a working computer and were able to get home. That opens up a whole other can of worms about why they didn’t warn the people of their time, but we can close it up again without too much trouble. After all, if humanity didn’t learn its lesson after Cornelius’ story in Escape (I mean seriously, the pet plague he described occurs and the government does nothing to stop people from bringing apes into their homes as replacement pets?!), why would people in the ‘80s change anything based on Virdon and Burke’s stories? I love the idea that Virdon and Burke eventually made it back, so I’m accepting it, but obviously no one believed their tale.

Friday, July 22, 2011

The Drawings of Steranko



It's no secret that we love Jim Steranko around here, so I really appreciated getting an email from John Gandour who designed the Drawings of Steranko website. John pointed out several cool features on the site including a screensaver/wallpaper gallery, sections on Red Tide, and a gallery of other artists' Steranko homages. It's a cool, beautiful site to kick around on, so go visit.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Mysta vs. Cargo X25



In Planet Comics #61, the Safety Council quarantines suspicious cargo and learns that its concerns are justified. When their scans accidentally activate the regrowth of miniaturized demon-birds and uncover a faux terrorist plot, Mysta leaps into action.

There are a few interesting things in this story. First of all, Mysta's secret identity finally gets a name, sort of. It's Technician 106. That's all the identification that Garro seems to know her by, which makes me wonder if he's really just that disinterested (or pretending to be) or if that's all the identification that the Safety Council allows. Also interesting is Garro's attitude toward her at the end. Though Mysta/Technician 106 has proved herself over and over again on missions she's undertaken with Garro, he dismisses her contributions to this one and says, "Leave such things to men, who can handle them."

Here's my theory: Garro's falling for her and is trying to cover it by refusing to use her real name (I bet he knows it; whatever her cover name is, I mean). He's started worrying about her on these missions, which explains - though doesn't excuse - his sexist remark.

Meanwhile, Bron's still holding things together solo on the Moon. He seems to have gotten over his resentment of that situation though and appears to be resigned to his new role. However, he's obviously in love with Mysta and wishes she reciprocated his feelings.

I'll come out and admit to being a Brysta 'shipper. Though Garro and Mysta are clearly interested in each other and we've got kind of a Moonlighting/Castle dynamic going on with them, they'd make a horrible, dysfunctional couple. I'm crossing my fingers that Mysta realizes what a faithful friend she has in Bron. (Sleestak has an equally valid take on Bron's isolation on the Moon that recalls his previous career as a criminal, but I'm hoping it's romance, not force, that's keeping him there.)

Another interesting thing is that Mysta calls her machine-man Robot II in this adventure. The robot's changed a lot since his first appearance in the series, but I think this is the first time Mysta's acknowledged that it's actually a completely new model.

The Thing and the Challengers of the Unknown ALL Hate Cephalopods



[Marvel Two-in-One: The Lost Issues]

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Western Wednesday: Comics in August

Western Wednesday is a weekly tribute to six-guns, steampunk, and sasquatch. Here are some comics coming out next month that celebrate one or more of those themes.



Jonah Hex #70 (DC)
Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti; Art by Ryan Sook and Mick Gray
August 3; $2.99

For a man like Jonah Hex, death is a constant presence – always looming, always ready to strike. But how and when will it come for Hex?



Moriarty #4 (Image)
Written by Daniel Corey; Art by Anthony Diecidue
August 3; $2.99

"The Dark Chamber" story comes to a climax in this installment, which sees Professor Moriarty finally confronting Tartarus in an epic battle that will change his destiny and decide the fate of London and the world.



Reed Gunther #3 (Image)
Written by Shane Houghton; Art by Chris Houghton
August 10; $2.99

Reed and his best bear buddy Sterling are separated when the legendary steel-driving man, John Henry, returns from the dead while the sneaky Mr. Picks escapes to the East Coast with the mysterious monster-creating Idol.



Deadlands: Death Was Silent (Image)
Written by Ron Marz; Art by Bart Sears
August 17; $2.99

Visionary Comics and Pinnacle Entertainment present the third one-shot of the weird Western world of Deadlands. A silent bounty hunter rides into a remote town, but the town holds dark secrets that may turn the hunter into the hunted.



Alpha Flight #3 (Marvel)
Written by Fred Van Lente and Greg Pak; Art by Dale Eaglesham
$2.99

Heroes on the lam! Having escaped imprisonment at the hands of the corrupt Unity Party, Alpha Flight find themselves hunted by the government they’d sworn to protect. Outmanned and outgunned, the Flight decide to go guerilla, but what will they do once the government raises the stakes by revealing their leverage against the team, including Northstar’s boyfriend and the child of Guardian and Vindicator held hostage?

[What? It's got Sasquatch in it. - mm]

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)



When I first started this marathon, I anticipated thinking mostly about the social themes in the Planet of the Apes films. That’s because I was most familiar with the first two films, in which the social themes are so important that they often overshadow the adventurous plots. As the series progressed though, those themes became…well, not less important exactly, but simplified.

The first two films addressed several issues in order to explore the complex variety of problems in how people treat each other. They talk about war and prejudice and overpopulation and technology and other issues that I’m not remembering right now. But starting with Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the intricacy of these issues began to be eroded by familiarity. As the series kept going, it ran out of ways to talk about so many specific things at once and instead began to focus on a general message of tolerance.

Not that I think that was a bad move. It was absolutely the right thing to do. It didn’t contradict the first two films, but by jettisoning the biting commentary in favor of a broader message the series gained some flexibility that served it very well.



Now, I’m also not saying that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes are better movies than the original film or Beneath the Planet of the Apes. They’re not (though some will disagree with me about Beneath). Any five-film series is going to start experiencing some diminishing returns and PotA is no exception. But I was surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed the movies, right up to – and including – this last one.

When I reviewed Boom’s current Planet of the Apes comic for Robot 6, I explained that I hadn’t at that time seen the last two movies “partly because they’re not generally regarded as any good.” A commenter took me to task for that, saying that my statement “doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, given that Conquest is widely regarded among fans as being one of the best films in the series. For many people, it’s the best of the sequels. Very few people, in fact, would say that film wasn’t any good.” He went on to suggest, “It would be a good idea for CBR’s writers to at least do a little research before posting articles.”

I admit to feeling a bit defensive about that last bit, so in response to him, I let Rotten Tomatoes defend my assertion. They give Conquest a 44% fresh rating from critics and a 49% rating from audiences. That supports my statement that audiences in general didn’t like the film; an entirely different statement from saying that it’s the worst of the bunch. For the record, the freshness rating for the movies suggest that critics liked them in this order (from best to worst):

The original Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
The 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Battle for the Planet of the Apes



Audiences rated them differently:

The original Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (tie)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
The 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes

Clearly, the commenter was correct in saying that Conquest is regarded as one of the best in the series. That isn’t the same thing as saying that a lot of people liked it, so I stand by my original statement. The irony is that now that I’ve seen it – and Battle – I’m in the 38-49% that liked those movies. And like I suggested at the beginning of this post, that isn’t the only surprise.

As you can tell from reading the posts on Escape and Conquest, my attention became much less concerned about the films’ themes and much more about their continuity. As the series streamlined its social message, its timeline got more and more clunky. I struggled to keep it straight, resisting the theory that the films depict different timelines, but Battle challenges that approach even more.



If Battle reveals how much time has passed between it and Conquest, I missed it. The only date I remember being mentioned in the film is in the framing sequence in which John Huston plays the legendary Lawgiver and relates the events of the film to his students. At first look, it doesn’t appear that much time has passed between Conquest and the main events of Battle. Caesar (still played by Roddy McDowell) and his wife Lisa look to be the same ages they were during the ape rebellion, but they do have a pre-teen son, so clearly a little time has passed. There’s a scene in Conquest where Caesar and Lisa are clearly about to mate, so my first assumption was that their son, Cornelius II, was conceived then, placing Battle 10-12 years later. That’s impossible though. Too much has changed. Which is the major continuity problem with the film.

The biggest change is that all of the apes have now learned to talk. That’s a huge difference from Conquest and isn’t easily explained by a ten-year time lapse. On top of that, one of the main characters, an orangutan named Virgil (Paul Williams) claims that he studied under another, older orangutan named Mandemus (Lew Ayres). Virgil’s not a kid (Paul Williams was in his 30s when the film was made), so ten years isn’t enough time for Mandemus to have learned to talk and then taught other students. Much more time has to have elapsed.

I’ve been reading Rich Handley’s Timeline of the Planet of the Apes and he suggests a thirty-year difference between Conquest and Battle to account for some of this stuff. That puts Caesar in his 50s, meaning that Cornelius II was born when Caesar was in his 40s. But it also creates new problems, like the age of Caesar’s human aide, MacDonald (Austin Stoker).



Battle’s MacDonald is the brother of Hari Rhodes’ MacDonald from Conquest who was the aide of the evil governor in that film before switching allegiance to the apes’ cause. The problem is that Stoker was only thirty years old when he made Battle, meaning that his character would have to have been born around the same time as the events of Conquest. And since Rhodes was 40 when he made that film, it makes a 40-year difference between the brothers’ ages. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely.

Regardless of whether Handley’s got the timeline right, you see the problem. Too much history has passed to allow for a short time frame, but MacDonald’s age (and possibly Cornelius II’s) don’t allow for a long one.

Sidebar: I do like Snell’s theory that the US government took genetic samples from Zira and the original Cornelius and used them to enhance primates and create the apes we saw in Conquest. That would explain why those apes look nothing like real ones. It might even explain how the new apes learned to talk so quickly. It doesn’t explain Mandemus though. A significant amount of time has to have passed for him to learn to speak.



According to Handley, Ty Templeton (who wrote Mr. Comics’ Revolution on the Planet of the Apes mini-series) had a theory that Mandemus had actually been part of Armando’s circus and had learned to talk by being around Caesar, making Mandemus – not Lisa – the first primitive ape to speak. That’s a stretch, because it doesn’t explain how Mandemus gained the ability unless Caesar had some kind of supernatural powers that gave it to him.

Although... supernatural powers would help account for Mandemus’ being around early enough to teach a young Virgil. And actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s exactly the scenario that Templeton suggests in Revolution and it’s based apparently on some early production notes from Conquest that suggest that Caesar does in fact have otherworldly abilities (gained perhaps by going through the time-field while in the womb). Handley even suggests that there’s a way of watching Conquest so that Caesar’s communicating telepathically with the apes he’s inspiring to revolt.

All of which has probably given you a headache by now, because it has me. By the time we get to the Planet of the Apes TV series with its dogs (aren’t they supposed to be extinct?) and photos of 22nd century New York (shown completely destroyed in Battle), I begin to wonder if it’s worth trying to make this all fit.

That makes me want to reconsider Mike DeStasio’s take about the alternate timelines. Again, not only does his theory allow for infinite inconsistencies, it has the advantage of being advocated for not only by Hasslein in Escape, but also by Virgil in Battle.



In his Introduction to Timeline Handley describes Mike and my theories as a very old debate amongst PotA fans. “Do the films form a circular chronology, with three through five leading to one and two, then back to the last three…or does the final trilogy creat an alternate, more optimistic future, canceling out the dismal world seen in the first two?” I don’t know that that second view perfectly describes Mike’s theory, but the circular one does express the way I’ve been trying to see the series. Complicating the discussion – as it always does with popular, long-running series – is the question of which stories count. If I can make all five movies fit into a circular timeline, do I also need to make the TV shows fit? Or can they be an alternate timeline a la Mike’s theory?

The answer of course is, “Sure. Why not?” I can do whatever I want and so can you. Handley explains this too. Based on Hasslein’s theory, “every time someone crosses the time barrier – the Hasslein Curve – in either direction, it’s possible for history to become modified. If so, given the astounding number of time-trips in this mythos[…]this renders the whole 'circular vs. changing' debate a far more complex question, for instead of two or three histories, we now have the potential for many more – infinitely more in fact…

Planet of the Apes history could very well be neither a circular loop nor an 'A or B' set of divergent highway lanes, but rather a Möbius strip embedded in an Escher landscape twisted up in a pretzel and tied in a sailor’s knot, continuously looping back upon itself, readjusting with each successive time-trip and enabling all of the various contradictory incarnations to occur on the same continuous, ever-changing loop. Sorting out one timeline from the next thus becomes virtually impossible.”



While that’s not at all satisfying for the me who digs neat, clean, organized stories, it’s extremely liberating for the me who – 1800 words into this post – hasn’t been able yet to say one word about the plot of the film because I’ve been focusing on continuity. I appreciate the permission to shut up about it and enjoy the stories.

As I said above, I liked the story in Battle. Following the ape uprising in Conquest, Caesar has started a new society in which apes and humans are supposed to be able to get along. But they’re not equal. Apes still don’t trust humans and have developed strict rules to prevent humanity’s taking over again. The humans are of course chaffing from the restrictions.

Complicating the situation, Caesar mounts an expedition with MacDonald and Virgil to go into the old city and look for archives that may have records of Caesar’s parents. He finds what he’s looking for, but that ends up being inconsequential. What’s important is that there are still humans living in the city, mutated by radiation fallout (the forbearers of the mutants in Beneath) and resentful of the ape uprising. They follow Caesar and the others back to Ape City and mount an attack, determined to wipe out the apes before the apes can (they assume) return with their own forces to destroy what’s left of the mutant population.



To make matters worse, Ape City’s chief military officer is a gorilla named Aldo (Claude Akins in a sad bit of miscasting; he doesn’t have the presence to play an intimidating villain) who hates humans and wants them all killed. There’s a whole subplot about Aldo’s trying to wrest control of the city from Caesar and he sees the mutant attack as an opportunity to declare martial law and seize power. Aldo of course is the name of the ape who first said “no” in Cornelius’ version of history in Escape. His role is very different here, but he certainly is an advocate for ape supremacy and an important historical figure. Perhaps by Cornelius’ time the details of his exact actions were lost. Cornelius might have invented a connection between Aldo and the story of Lisa’s “no.”

And here I am again, explaining contradictions. As I said when I wrote about Escape, it’s too fun not to. The difference now, thanks to Mike DeStasio and Rich Handley, is that I don’t feel pressured to explain everything. As we’ll see next week when we look at the live-action TV show.

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