We’d talked the early, more progressively minded SF of Charlton Heston in a recent show, and the life and career of the ubiquitous Roddy MacDowall not very long ago. One series of films notable for featuring both iconic actors in primary roles remained glossed over, however, despite spurring a personal revisitation of the original 5 film run after the MacDowall chat. Unaddressed, that is, until now.
Marked by a then relevant if somewhat naïve by modern standards allegorical exploration of race relations and nuclear brinksmanship, the series was a true cause celebre in its heyday, resulting in all sorts of spinoff items: MEGOs, action figures, comic magazines, paperback novellas, a popular book and record series, games, jigsaw puzzles and plastic models, even a short lived TV series. Like the later Star Wars, the Apes were inescapable throughout the early to mid 70’s…then, just like that? Utterly forgotten.
Despite a post millennial attempt to revive the series in a disturbingly far lesser CG based trilogy of films, the Apes films seem locked in time, a 70’s concern that left a huge mark only to disappear, seemingly without trace.
What happened? How did such a force of culture defining cinema, rivaled only by the Bond series, smaller scale works like the Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman franchise and the brief popularity of blustery stuntman Evel Knievel for its sheer broad impact, simply drop off the radar, seldom if ever to be referenced again?
And then, seemingly out of the blue, comes that 2011 reboot series…
So join us tonight as we pick some nits off each other, and speak once again of those hoary days before Spielberg and Lucas turned cinema into a wasteland of brainless popcorn fare, and realize that 40 plus years back, this was about as lowbrow and brainless as things were ever likely to get.
My, how things have changed...
Week 85: Go Ape! The first major multimedia craze and how it disappeared into the vaults of time
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Week 111 (11/30/23): Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple - NYC cop/crime films of the 70s
Week 110 (11/16/23): Cary Grant
Week 109 (11/2/23): Crimenaux ala Francais - Crime The French Way
Week 108 (10/19/23): Hide in Plain Sight: the Life and Career of Rock Hudson
Week 107 (10/5/23): Still a Bit of a Lad: The Bumpy Career of Hugh Grant
Week 106 (9/21/23): Who’s Afraid of Liz and Dick? The Tempestuous Career of Richard Burton
Week 105 (9/7/23): Ride the rollercoaster - the life and career of Jennifer Lopez
Week 104 (8/24/23): Hail to the Queen: the rise, fall and resurrection of America’s Sweetheart Sandra Bullock
Weird Scenes Week 103 (8/10/23): Sex Italian Style: The Life and Films of Sophia Loren
Weird Scenes Week 102 (7/27/23): A Man of Unusual Talent: The Life and Career of Tony Perkins
Weird Scenes Week 101 (7/13/23): Brian DePalma
Weird Scenes Week 100 (6/29/23): Jamie Lee Curtis
Weird Scenes Week 99 (6/15/23): Richard Benjamin, Class(y) Clown
Weird Scenes Week 98 (6/1/23): High Voltage and Wired: The Life and Career of John Belushi
Weird Scenes Week 97 (5/18/23): In The Court of Chaos: Up (and Down) with Wesley Snipes
Weird Scenes Week 96 (5/4/23): Sometimes You’ve Just Got To Let One Go: The Atypical Career of Whoopi Goldberg
Weird Scenes Week 95 (4/20/23): From Horse Laughs to Hollywood to Fat Suit Hell: The Rapid Rise and Precipitous Fall of Eddie Murphy
Weird Scenes Week 94 (4/6/23): Class and Style: The Unusual Career of Jacqueline Bissett
Weird Scenes Week 93 (3/23/23): Come Fly With The Chairman of the Bored - The Films of Frank Sinatra
Weird Scenes Week 92 (3/9/23): George Segal
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