Legal situation concerning the new TV series
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In computing, "reboot" or "boot" does indeed refer to what is more properly called IPL (Initial Program Load), a term that goes all the way back to the days of ferrite core memory, that retained information indefinitely, even with the power shut completely off (but had to be refreshed after each read), and that is still used in the IBM mainframe and midrange world. (I'll note that at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, when they demonstrate their restored-to-working-order DEC PDP-1, all they have to do is turn the power on, and all the software that was loaded into memory when the power was off is still there, and I believe the same is true of their IBM 1401.) Because modern RAM is inherently volatile, any computer other than a smartphone or a tablet needs to be IPL'd every time it is powered up from a cold start.
In prose and drama franchises, on the other hand, whether we like it or not, "reboot" has come to specifically mean restarting the franchise in question completely from scratch, with a total disregard for any prior continuity. The closest computer analog (no pun intended) would be deciding that the computer's state has become untenable, either because of memory corruption or a crashed OS, and the state of the game or other application program you are in is not worth saving, and re-IPLing the system to start from scratch.
In the Oz franchise, Baum left it completely ambiguous (whether by design or more likely not) whether he was writing fairy tales (i.e., the events are "real" within their own context) or dream fantasy (i.e., the events are nothing more than the dreams of the protagonist), for the first five books; then, in The Emerald City of Oz, by having Aunt Em and Uncle Henry join Dorothy in Oz, with the three of them becoming permanent residents, he finally came down on the side of "Oz is a series of fairy tales." (In this, I draw heavily upon my memory of having read Tolkien's treatise, On Fairy Stories; suffice it to say that dream fantasy makes a great vehicle for political commentary, as in Lewis Carroll's Alice books, but not for high-stakes storytelling). My understanding (without having read it) is that Philip Jose Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz is a near-total reboot, but one that at least treats Oz as being real within its own context. The same can presumably be said about Maguire's revisionist-Oz works. But the 1939 MGM film completely disregarded Baum's own canon, on the matter of dream vs. reality, and retold the events of the first book in a way that unambiguously declared those events to have been a dream, and is therefore completely incompatible with canonical Oz, even at levels Farmer and Maguire would later refrain from touching. Indeed, it was only because Disney's Return to Oz attempted to re-establish the literary reality of Oz that it was as good as it was, and only because it attempted a hopelessly doomed retcon, attempting to bridge fundamentally irreconcilable differences between MGM and canon, that it was as bad as it was.
Conversely, I argue that the Abramsverse is not a true reboot because it doesn't disregard the Prime Universe, but instead has an in-universe explanation in which Prime Universe events are what ultimately lead to the branching off of the Abramsverse. And it is precisely because it doesn't completely disregard the Prime Universe that I even find it tolerable. (Even so, I'd still like to see it share the fate of, say, the "Biff strikes it rich" timeline from Back to the Future Part II).
In prose and drama franchises, on the other hand, whether we like it or not, "reboot" has come to specifically mean restarting the franchise in question completely from scratch, with a total disregard for any prior continuity. The closest computer analog (no pun intended) would be deciding that the computer's state has become untenable, either because of memory corruption or a crashed OS, and the state of the game or other application program you are in is not worth saving, and re-IPLing the system to start from scratch.
In the Oz franchise, Baum left it completely ambiguous (whether by design or more likely not) whether he was writing fairy tales (i.e., the events are "real" within their own context) or dream fantasy (i.e., the events are nothing more than the dreams of the protagonist), for the first five books; then, in The Emerald City of Oz, by having Aunt Em and Uncle Henry join Dorothy in Oz, with the three of them becoming permanent residents, he finally came down on the side of "Oz is a series of fairy tales." (In this, I draw heavily upon my memory of having read Tolkien's treatise, On Fairy Stories; suffice it to say that dream fantasy makes a great vehicle for political commentary, as in Lewis Carroll's Alice books, but not for high-stakes storytelling). My understanding (without having read it) is that Philip Jose Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz is a near-total reboot, but one that at least treats Oz as being real within its own context. The same can presumably be said about Maguire's revisionist-Oz works. But the 1939 MGM film completely disregarded Baum's own canon, on the matter of dream vs. reality, and retold the events of the first book in a way that unambiguously declared those events to have been a dream, and is therefore completely incompatible with canonical Oz, even at levels Farmer and Maguire would later refrain from touching. Indeed, it was only because Disney's Return to Oz attempted to re-establish the literary reality of Oz that it was as good as it was, and only because it attempted a hopelessly doomed retcon, attempting to bridge fundamentally irreconcilable differences between MGM and canon, that it was as bad as it was.
Conversely, I argue that the Abramsverse is not a true reboot because it doesn't disregard the Prime Universe, but instead has an in-universe explanation in which Prime Universe events are what ultimately lead to the branching off of the Abramsverse. And it is precisely because it doesn't completely disregard the Prime Universe that I even find it tolerable. (Even so, I'd still like to see it share the fate of, say, the "Biff strikes it rich" timeline from Back to the Future Part II).
Another example: Batman Begins is a reboot, because it started the series over from the scratch, ignoring the previous cycle of movies, the Adam West TV series, etc.
Although I've occasionally encountered people who thought that Batman Begins was supposed to be a prequel to the 1989 Tim Burton movie, even though that makes no sense and certainly doesn't hold up to examination.
Although I've occasionally encountered people who thought that Batman Begins was supposed to be a prequel to the 1989 Tim Burton movie, even though that makes no sense and certainly doesn't hold up to examination.
Sorry, but the "dream" element is purely an invention of the Judy Garland movie; there was nothing about it in any of the books. After all, Dorothy isn't even in the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz; it's told entirely from the perspective of Ozite characters who remember the events of Dorothy's visit. The books always treated Oz as merely an undiscovered part of the world, isolated by the Deadly Desert and thus only accessible through extraordinary means.
While I like the Kelvin Timeline (as it's now called) well enough, I'd actually prefer a wholesale reboot. There's a half-century of continuity baggage and outdated ideas loaded into Trek canon, and reinventing it only halfway doesn't really free you from those limits. For instance, most of J.J. Abrams's works are very female-centric (Felicity, Alias, Undercovers, Fringe, The Force Awakens), and yet here we're still saddled with the same old six-men-and-one-woman setup as the old show. With a full reboot unconnected to prior continuity, the cast could've been modernized and diversified more. Plus it would've been free of the problematical need to assume that the Eugenics Wars happened in the 1990s, and so on. It could've been a completely fresh start, and that could've been very exciting and liberating.
Reboots can be wonderful things. It can be exciting to see the different styles and perspectives that different creators can bring to a premise, the ways they can reinvent it in a way that contrasts intriguingly with what came before. I love both Batman '66 and Batman: The Animated Series. I love both Sherlock Holmes canon and Elementary (and Sherlock has its moments). I love it that there are seven different Godzilla universes in Japanese film alone, with an eighth arriving this month. Variations on a theme are a good way of exploring that theme, developing and deepening it. Sure, not every reboot is good, but not every original thing is good.
And, of course, let's never forget several headcases on various Planet of the Apes websites/listservs who keep insisting to this very day that the Roddy McDowall originals, the '70s live-action series, the '70s animated series, the Marvel Comics series, the 2001 Tim Burton remake, and the current Andy Serkis movies are all somehow interconnected, and part of a single continuity.
The Daniel Craig films haven't really been much more of a "reboot" than any other Bond recastings over the years. The films do have a different format, with there being tighter continuity between them than Bond movies typically share, but that's about it. Besides, I have a suspicion that the next movie will be a similar style of "reboot" severing ties to Craig's continuity.
Ever seen this meme featuring Kirk's crew time-traveling to this decade and the locals laughing at their "outdated cellphones"?
http://bizarro.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/172/2014/07/Bizarro-07-06-14-WEB.jpg
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And it's not like the Bond movies were ever overly concerned with continuity until recently.
"Oh, no, the new Bond movie completely ignores the events of the previous movie--just like pretty much every other Bond movie!"
That's the thing about continuity -- it can't always be reduced to a clear-cut "same continuity" or "different continuity." After all, it's fiction, so you can do just about anything in between. Sometimes a work can be approximately in the same continuity as an earlier work, keeping large parts of it and treating it as though it happened, but altering a lot of the details. Like the way the Starman TV series acknowledged and followed up on the events of the movie, but retconned them from 1984 to 1971 so that the title character could have a teenaged son in 1986 (even though the triggering event of the movie was Starman's encounter with Voyager 2, which wasn't even launched until 1977). Really, most TV adaptations of movies are the same way -- pretending to be continuations, but altering as many details as they need to in order to serve the series's needs. Sometimes it's subtle, like how Stargate SG-1 effectively continued and expanded on the movie while retconning a few of its details, or how Alien Nation just simplified the aliens' prosthetic makeup a bit and ignored one of the movie's main plot points without overtly contradicting it. But sometimes it's more wholesale, like with Planet of the Apes -- borrowing a number of elements but not enough for it to really be the same story. Like most things in life, it's a continuum, and "revival" and "reboot" are just the extremes. There's plenty of stuff that's a mix of both.
A fact that I discovered recently when re-watching my Batman movie DVD's. This time around I watched Bale's trilogy first, then the 1989-1997 set, just for fun. I didn't expect they would match up, and wasn't surprised when they didn't.
Continuity was never the series strong suit. The writers couldn't even keep the story straight from one movie to the next. The first film established that Taylor's crew was traveling at relativistic speeds and didn't expect to return to Earth until centuries after they left (though perhaps not quite so far in the future as they actually did), but in the second film NASA sends a rescue mission after Taylor just a few years later. Then in the third movie, we learn that Zira and Cornelius somehow salvaged Taylor's ship off-screen during the second film, fixed it up, gassed it up, learned to fly it, and somehow traveled through a timewarp back to the 20th Century ...
Given the mental gymnastics it takes to get the first five films to fit together, connecting the modern series isn't that difficult. The account of the Ape uprising we get in the first three films is very different from what actually happens in Conquest and Battle. The only possible explanation is that the time travel changed history. Then you can just slot the modern films in as prequels showing the unaltered timeline.
The TV shows, comics and Burton abomination ... well, it's best to treat them like Star Trek V and pretend they never happened.
Which is because none of the first four films was made with any expectation of a sequel, so they all needed to be retconned to make a sequel possible. Ironically, the only one that consciously left an opening for a sequel was the last one (of the original series).
I suppose you could easily enough draw a throughline from the fifth movie to the TV series, since they both portray a world where humans can still speak, so you could see the later films as creating a new timeline that leads to the series, rather than portraying a closed, predestined loop. But you'd still have to gloss over various inconsistencies of detail.
Except that Taylor's ship was launched in the '70s. And of course the new movies' apes are very different anatomically and behaviorally. The original movies basically got all three ape species' psychology backward. They portrayed chimpanzees, the most aggressive and belligerent great apes besides maybe humans, as gentle pacifists; gorillas, normally the gentlest of the great apes unless provoked, as brutal warmongers; and orangutans, the least social of the great apes, as the leaders of social institutions. The new movies have done better research and portray ape behavior more authentically.
I'm perfectly happy to see the new movies as a reboot, an updated and improved take on the original premise. They may incorporate similar events -- indeed, the second movie was basically a remake of Battle for the Planet of the Apes -- but in a new way, and that's the way I like it.
I used to do that with ST V, but now I've realized that if I just ignore or rationalize a few details, it's not so bad. The three brief lines about Sha Ka Ree being at the center of the galaxy can easily be ignored, as can the impossibly high turboshaft; and for the bit where the characters survive a photon torpedo going off just a few dozen meters behind them, I just assume it sank a fair distance underground before detonating. It's still not the greatest story, but there are a lot of mediocre or dumb episodes we still count.
As for the alternate POTA continuities in the animated show and the comics, I don't understand the logic of rejecting their value just because they're not in continuity with the movies. After all, the movies are imaginary too. None of them "happened." So it's the height of nonsense to say that one unreal story is less real than another unreal story. They're just different variations on the idea, and that's perfectly fine. Different isn't bad. Bad is bad, like the Burton movie. Different can be good, like the new movies.
Except that two cycles of films provide completely different origins for Caesar and explanations for how the Apes took over. In the first series, Caesar is the child of talking, time-traveling chimps from the future; in the new movies, he's the product of James Franco's experiments on an ordinary chimp. In the old movies, civilization is wiped out by a nuclear war; in the new movies, civilization is wiped out by a super-bug that evolves apes and but kills humans by the millions.
Kinda hard to reconcile those two narratives, despite the occasional Easter Egg.
But, yes, you don't want to think too hard about the continuity in the old movies, in which Zira and Cornelius go from being flabbergasted by a paper airplane to piloting a spaceship in the space of a few weeks!
(Doctor Milo was obviously a super-genius comparable to Reed Richards.)
Doctor Milo? Wasn't he that obscure Batman villain with the Moe Howard haircut?
Officially, 20th Century-Fox has endorsed the "split-timeline" theory, as shown by the massive gatefold chronology found in the 2008 Blu-Ray boxed set:
Interestingly, the timeline assigns actual calendar-months to all the various events in the first five movies, including placing Taylor's crashlanding and capture by the apes in November 3954 A.D., his trial in the first film two months later (in February 3955 A.D.), with Dr. Milo first venturing out to examine Taylor's ship between these events (his first expedition occurring in December 3954).
The Blu-Ray timeline has Zira and Cornelius departing pretty much immediately for Dr. Milo's encampment in February, right after Brent leaves them (after searching for him and Nova), taking part in Milo's test-flight, the Alpha/Omega bomb detonating, etc., during the same month.
Although it doesn't seem like a very long period of time elapses in the second movie (due to narrative time-compression), this chronology at least attempts to give Dr. Milo a few months of study-time of Taylor's crashed spaceship, even though Milo would still have to basically be the universe's greatest genius in history to have gotten it up and running the way he did.
Officially, 20th Century-Fox has endorsed the "split-timeline" theory, as shown by the massive gatefold chronology found in the 2008 Blu-Ray boxed set:
Err, is there a legibly sized version of that image? It doesn't seem to be enlargeable.
The Star Trek/PotA crossover from IDW does a neat job of attributing some of the events of the sequel to the intervention of the Klingons and Kirk's crew after the original movie, including a bit where Scotty tells Cornelius and Zira about the slingshot effect as a means of time travel. But it offers no explanation for how the apes got the space capsule launched, which is a strange oversight. And its timeline implies that the events of the second movie covered mere days.
Here's the original image-link (which is embiggenable) -- the other linked version blows up fine on my browser, but it's possible that it doesn't do it quite as well on others:
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net...imeline.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110201231752
And yeah, the ST/POTA miniseries had some nice continuity-fixes in there, too -- like you mention, there's still the time-compression and no explanation for how Dr. Milo got everything ready in so brief a period of time.
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net...imeline.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110201231752
And yeah, the ST/POTA miniseries had some nice continuity-fixes in there, too -- like you mention, there's still the time-compression and no explanation for how Dr. Milo got everything ready in so brief a period of time.
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^For some reason, that link still shows up as a thumbnail in Firefox, but is full-size in Chrome.
Man... That drives home how much the later movies compressed the timeline. The original assumption about the speed of the apes' evolution was already preposterous -- 500 years is hardly any time at all in evolutionary terms -- but it was pretty ridiculous how the later movies had the change in the apes happen in a single generation.
Man... That drives home how much the later movies compressed the timeline. The original assumption about the speed of the apes' evolution was already preposterous -- 500 years is hardly any time at all in evolutionary terms -- but it was pretty ridiculous how the later movies had the change in the apes happen in a single generation.
Agreed, and I like how the Blu-Ray timeline also gives us some interesting new official details about what transpired between the events of Conquest and Battle -- namely, confirming that it was a desperate U.S. government who launched/provoked a global thermonuclear war in a last-ditch attempt to halt Caesar's ape-revolution (which the Revolution on the Planet of the Apes comic book series went into greater detail on).
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