RockingDoggy Retro

There are references to the previous humans who have crashed through the time barrier, but it is still the simians who rule the planet.

So the scene is set for dramatic action as the astronauts fight to keep alive and to get back to their own time.

The astronauts are played by James Naughton, a medical student turned actor, and Ron Harper, a Princeton graduate who also turned his back on learning for the perilous game of acting.

Roddy McDowall is the star of the series, playing the same role as he did in the movies.

He appeared in all five movies, as the friendly ape Galen, and carries on in the same fashion in the series.

For the countless fans of those Ape movies, the main characters in the simian fold will be familiar.

The same masks were used for the various ape characters, and the actors beneath them had to go through the same arduous make-up procedures.

This meant a 5 am start for make-up and a gruelling three hour session in the chair before starting.

Another problem the actors faced was eating. Once those masks were on there was no taking them off again until the end of the day.

Which meant the only way to eat was by poking small pieces of food skewered on the end of a stick through the mask and into the mouth.

"Our television series will be based on the original movie," executive producer Herb Hirschman explained.

"We’re now casting the three regular roles — two astronauts and a friendly ape along the lines of the anthropologist Roddy McDowall created in the movie.

"There will also be a gorilla as chief of police and a wise old orang-outang, and these are tough roles. Many actors cannot take the three-and-a-half-hour make-up job and the claustrophobia of wearing those suits."

The five Planet Of The Apes films, drawn from French novelist Pierre Boulle’s saga of astronauts escaping a time warp and returning to a world now ruled by a simian civilisation in which humans are subservient, won a surprisingly diverse following.

A large ape cult has grown up around the films, and its ranks include every type of person ranging from scientists and lawyers to salesmen and mechanics, which critics trace to an ability to please almost every taste.

On one level the movies are parodies of human behavior, rich in allegory and symbolism, while on another, they are pure escapist entertainment, abounding in spectacle and action.

"In the series we won't preach, but by no means will it be a kids’ show," Herb Hirschman promised. "We’re aiming it at the entire family and while we will concentrate on entertainment there will be ample opportunity to make comment on the world today."

Planet Of The Apes is being tipped as the potential big hit of the new season, but ironically when it was first proposed two years ago it was flatly rejected by network executives whose interest was finally aroused after two ape movies attracted huge audiences.

But this would have been no surprise to the late Arthur Jacobs, the producer of the movie series, who died after completing the recent Battle For The Planet Of The Apes. Jacobs spent some four years trying to get the original film made.

"I took it to every major production company in America and Europe, and everyone of them turned me down at least once," he once recalled.

"They insisted that even if I licked the technical problems, no one was going to see a picture about talking apes."

The realistic ape mask was the biggest, but hardly the only problem the producer confronted when pre-production work on Planet Of The Apes finally began in late 1966.

In creating a believable simian civilisation and technology, he had to have everything specially designed even down to walls and chairs.

It took more than six months laboratory work by John Chambers, drawing on his extensive work in prosthetics for mutilated military veterans, to create his Oscar-winning ape make-up.

For the first ape movie more than a million dollars, a fifth of its budget, was allocated for make-up and still shorthanded after employing every available make-up man in Hollywood, the producer had to specially train others.

"Experience with the ape faces—and they're not masks in the usual sense of the word — has allowed us to effect some economies," Arthur explained on the set of his final movie.

"But it still takes three and a half hours to apply full make-up. On the first picture it was much longer and we had as many as 150 make-up men at one time."

Playing one of the apes is one of the toughest assignments in Hollywood and Herb Hirschman, in fact, has taken the unusual step of warning actors through trade papers just how tortuous it is.

But according to Roddy McDowall, even that is understating it. He found playing major ape roles in four of the Apes movies not only physically but mentally debilitating at times.

"Once I became so depressed Arthur ordered me off the set for a couple of days to get back to normal," he said.

"The monkey-suits got to me because I’m slightly claustrophobic and you're completely encased.

"It’s hot and uncomfortable and you’re in it all day. If you itch, you can’t scratch. You can't eat. You can only take liquid through surgical straws."

Yet the former child-star only once turned down an Apes movie and then because he was already committed to direct another film and there has never been a shortage of top names eager to play apes.

Battle Of The Planet Of The Apes lured Claude Akins as the gorilla leader of an insurrection, veteran actor and Oscar-winning director John Huston played the orang-outang lawgiver and Lew Ayres the custodian of the ape city arsenal.

The films, as undoubtedly the television series will, had sporting and social celebrities and such non-acting stars as singer Paul Williams flocking to play cameo roles.

Into this living hell, master criminal Snake Plissken is sent alone on a mission as dangerous as the inmates within its walls. He must rescue the President of the United States, whose plane has crashed inside the City on its way to a world summit conference. The President is carrying papers that are crucial to the survival of world peace and it's up to Snake to safely return both the President and a tape cassette within 24 hours. In order for the authorities to "trust" Snake and to prevent him from abandoning his rescue mission, they have supplied him with a deadly incentive—two microscopic explosives have been planted in his main arteries and he must return to the doctor in time to have these detonating devices neutralised. Hardly a case of "no sweat".

John Carpenter, the director of Halloween, Dark Star, Elvis, Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, is here involved with his most ambitious project. For the plum part of Snake he chose Kurt Russell (astonishingly good as Elvis, and a natural athlete). He's a sight to behold as he is pitted against New York's roving street gangs and crazies who live in subway systems and pour out at night like rats going for the kill.

So, you have been warned. A strong cast is backing up the very talented Russell—Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau. Come into this world of the damned at your own risk and pray it could never happen.