Heck, they could've used Linda Harrison again. If Roddy McDowall could play an all-new chimpanzee . . . ..
Or maybe Yvonne Craig, or Caroline Munro, or Mariette Hartley, or Cathy Lee Crosby, or . . . .?
MeTV's SuperSci-Fi Saturday Night
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Heck, they could've used Linda Harrison again. If Roddy McDowall could play an all-new chimpanzee . . . ..
Or maybe Yvonne Craig, or Caroline Munro, or Mariette Hartley, or Cathy Lee Crosby, or . . . .?
Hmmm...there's so much review business going on here now with the new Me lineup, and the Batman reviews in this thread are such old news, maybe I'll move mine to The Classic/Retro TV Thread. OTOH, I guess I'll post my observations of the four Time Tunnel episodes that I recorded off of Decades (episodes 2 through 5) here when the time comes.
That explains a whole lot, I thought things felt off. Thanks!
Come to think of it, I do vaguely remember feeling that the regular version of the Land of the Giants pilot seemed to have an abrupt start. I guess that's because a lot of the early character-building moments from the unaired version were cut in favor of more action later on. And that would explain why so much about this version felt unfamiliar to me. (Or too familiar, in the case of the LiS music.)
That's true, but easy to rationalize. There were a handful of dogs and cats that were immune to the virus and they repopulated after a few decades or centuries.
There was some interesting expository dialogue concerning this that was probably just written off the cuff and doesn't mean anything. It was implied that this was not an exploratory mission and that Alpha Centauri was already settled, and that the astronauts were on a two-way trip. Pete mentions how they might have been on "any one of a thousand worlds," which implies that humans have gotten around a bit. They also were not surprised that everyone was speaking English, although that is par for the course in TV Sci Fi.
Yes, although dates are always questionable. What exactly does a chronometer measure and how? Times and dates aren't exactly built into the fabric of the universe like the value of pi. Clocks can break or be affected by time dilation or whatever, so I just think in terms of present, future, and far future. The TV show (and the magazine that came out the next year) take place some centuries after the final Apes movie, but centuries before humans had devolved into mute animals.
Definitely a different Zaius and a different batch of astronauts. If the show had survived, that could have been developed as a plot point.
It is kind of a pity that they didn't. That's definitely one beat from the movies that they missed-- no companion for Galen, either. Maybe they figured too many characters on the run would have been unwieldy. Or too expensive.
I doubt it, but I wish they had anyway.Maybe the show would've run longer if they had?
It was my theory too, but Armando in Conquest was quite explicit:
But perhaps some specimens survived in an isolated laboratory and Armando didn't know anything about them?
By the way, I have always thought that it was a quite bizarre plot device to justify the domestication of the Apes. I mean, a virus that targets only domestic dogs and cats? Not other canids or wild felids/felines?
I don't know what exactly happened during the flight, but I think the computer can calculate the "earth date" from the relative stars position?
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In a comics series they said that humanity tried with lizards and birds too, but the primates were the most useful and easiest to train.
https://books.google.it/books?id=p9...est of the Planet of the Apes" plague&f=false
And PotA's Virdon and Burke were on an interstellar flight to Alpha Centauri in 1980. That's beating the Robinsons by a good 17 years.
Boy, Rod Serling got doubly screwed with POTA, didn't he?
No wonder he was so bitter by the 70s.
"Screwed" implies he was cheated out of something he was entitled to, and that isn't the case. Serling didn't own the property; he was just a writer hired by other producers to do script drafts for them. In Serling's own words regarding the original film, "I owned no piece of the project at all, and they had every right to choose another writer. It was a pretty damn good film, I thought Schaffner did a corker of a job directing it." And the original film's storyline was essentially Serling's; Michael Wilson's final draft just altered the dialogue and added a more satirical tone. (Which surprises me, because the film's dialogue and satirical elements seem Serlingesque to me.) As for Beneath, Serling was consulted early on but had to drop out because his own schedule wouldn't let him do the screenplay. As for the show, it was the same deal; he wasn't a producer, just a freelance writer they brought in, and they decided to go in a different direction than the script draft he did for them. As long as he got paid for his work, he wasn't "screwed."
That is, if you consider Rod just another writer.
The whole reason they hired him is because he wasn't "just another writer." But still, they hired him. It was their property and their decision. Hiring him to do a first draft for them doesn't mean they were required to make his version, because a first draft is just something you try out to see if it works.
But, again, even great writers and filmmakers get rejected sometimes, or have projects that fall through, or enter into discussions that don't pan out. That's not getting "screwed." That's just how it works, especially when you're adapting another author's works.
Now if Rod Serling had been the driving force behind getting the first APES movie filmed in the first place, instead of Arthur P. Jacobs, who was the guy who actually bought the rights to Pierre Boulle's novel and pitched a movie version to every studio in town before finally convincing Richard Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox to green-light the movie, and then Serling got squeezed out of working on the sequels and TV show, then, okay, maybe you could say he got "screwed," but that's not what happened. Serling co-wrote the first movie, based on somebody's else book, and he did a great job.
But that didn't mean that Fox was obliged to let him write all the subsequent movies and TV shows. And I doubt that Serling ever figured that he was entitled to do so.
He wasn't the guy who first conceived of making PLANET OF THE APES into a movie. He was just an important part of the team who created the first film.
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Yeah, it's a big world-- Armando didn't necessarily know about isolated populations. Or maybe those astronauts ten years ago were transporting dogs and cats to Alpha Centauri.
That could be, I suppose, but things could still go wrong. The computer would still need to know the ship's position and sudden changes could throw it off-- and the farther in the future, the less accurate the extrapolation.
Now I don't remember the details, but did they travel into the future via relativistic speed or through your generic sci-fi time warp? I suppose the latter, because my understanding is they hope to go back to their era.
ETA: From Planet Of The Apes wikia
Perhaps in their universe time warp is a so well known phenomenon that they know how to calculate exactly how much time has passed.
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Here I agree with you, Christopher. Allen was a master of the sale (to networks) and the initial set up. I've met too many IA fans who believe the arc of Allen's career--returning to the big screen--should have started with his sci-fi work for TV, as Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants would have made strong, single movies based on their pilots.
As you will see, LOTG has solid stories over the course of its two season run, but it would have been better off as one, perhaps two films. As it stands, "The Weird World"--a very solid story similar to the pilot--was the next episode shot immediately after the "The Crash." Viewed back to back, one can see a cohesive, dramatic tone of the story and purpose for the characters, but ABC aired it out of production order, so there's a noticeable change in characterization and overall feeling in the episodes aired right after "The Crash," such as "Ghost Town"--the 14th story shot.
Yep, and that's why some fans could see that in Allen's 60's TV--the shows could have worked as stand alone movies.
Inexplicably, ME-TV aired the previously unaired promotional version for ABC with that temp score, when (I believe from observation) all other syndication packages since the 1970's used the aired version with the full Williams main theme and episode score. I caught this the other night and though I've watched the promotional version in the past, airing it is jarring, as it feels so out of place. By the way, if any of you LOTG fans have not purchased the original score (still in circulation since The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen CD box set from 1996), you would do well to get it. Williams proved his musical genius there long before his movie scores from the 70s.
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