Weird Scenes Week 85 (12/9/21): Go Ape! The first major multimedia craze and how it disappeared into the vaults of time

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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