Or ABAAWEPOTA for short…but I’m not sure that really saved any time
I absolutely love the Planet of the Apes series…but dear god was it confusing to watch them in a coherent manner before the internet came into its own. What follows is a story about how I utterly failed to watch these films when I was younger…
Growing up, my dad had this habit of gushing about an older movie at the dinner table, which got me excited about a new film (or new to me). Sometimes, he might gush about Jaws (1975) earlier in the week, and sure enough, on his way home from work, he’d order a pizza and have a DVD copy ready to go for my brothers and me.
Other times, he would be talking about the special effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) but it could be months or years before I could ever watch it. Not because of the graphic content or language mind you, which may be funny if you knew how strictly religious my parents are. No, this is the same dad that showed me Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) well before I sniffed 13 because he saw them as great sci-fi, blood and guts be damned. For other reasons, like limited copies at the library or rental store or my own family’s finances, we were limited in what we could watch each week. And that’s before we get into attending a screening in-person, which my family definitely preferred, but also limited our rental store budget.
So, I did the next best thing, I tried to record every movie that I could when it aired.
My family, especially my younger brother, could attest to how good my recordings became. I got very good at timing when commercials would happen so we could maximize how many films would possibly squeeze on one VHS tape. Honestly, the only issue that ever ruined my perfect recordings was whether I was recording manually or used the dreaded scheduling function (if you ever had a movie cut-off because you either ran out of tape, the program ran late, or some other wild issue, you know this pain).
I digress, after my dad hinted and later spoiled the major cinema moment in Apes, I desperately wanted to watch the Apes films (my dad’s excitement for movies and subsequent inability to avoid spoilers built up my tolerance at a young age…but more on that another time). I also had seen the first Apes film regarded highly in many of my favorite cinema books so the seeds for my interest were firmly planted.
Credit: 20th Century Studios
So, recording was my best option…or so I thought…
As it turns out, the airing of the Apes series on TV was an absolute shitshow.
Without looking it up on your phone, can you guess how many original Apes movies there are?
Before the Tim Burton remake, there were 5 actual movies that had a theatrical release:
- Planet of the Apes (1968)
- Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
- Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
- Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
- Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
Well, okay, so that should be easy enough to record, right?
I mean, have you been on this site before? Of course it wasn’t that easy.
TV studios and stations back in the 1970s and 80s had this fascination with TV movies, many of which you likely don’t remember or don’t have access to because they never made it to VHS or made the DVD / digital transition. When making a TV series in this era, however, instead of making a brand new movie, it wasn’t uncommon to craft a 2 or 3-episode arc with the explicit knowledge that the station may air them week after week or package the arc into its own TV movie (the 90s had plenty of TV movies too, but many of them were additional, not repackaged episodes created for a season).
One of my favorite TV series, Battlestar Galactica, did this in the original 1978 series. They packaged the first three episodes into a TV movie titled “Saga of a Star World”, and would later compile other episodes into two-episode arcs like “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero”. Today, we’d probably just call it a mini-series or a tight story arc, but this marketing strategy was really effective. The idea you were watching a movie on your TV set was a bigger draw or more likely to draw new fans into the series who weren’t regular watchers.
Thus, the 1974 Planet of the Apes TV series used a similar model, with Fox re-airing the theatrical movies to build interest in the show before the two-part pilot episode was set to be released on CBS. While the planned pilot was never filmed, the show eventually released without it, and the ratings faltered heavily (largely due to timeslot, several studio interventions, and a whole host of issues that should be their own article). Though 14 episodes were aired, the series was eventually cancelled and wouldn’t be thought about again until the 1980s, when ABC stepped in.
They decided to remix 10 of the episodes into 5 separate TV movies, under the banner New Planet of the Apes with the following titles…
- Back to the Planet of the Apes
- A third movie starting with the letter B?!@?! Are you effing kidding me? The miniature librarian inside of me just died a little bit.
- You may be asking, why not call it Return to the Planet of the Apes? Well my friends, that title was already used in a TV animated series, I shit you not.
- The Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes
- Honestly, if you shortened this to Forgotten City of the Apes, it would be fantastic. As it stands, it’s a mouthful.
- Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes
- Welp, this title said hold my beer, I can be mouthier
- Also, Scum and Villainy was right there…wait a minute…
- Life, Liberty, and Pursuit on the Planet of the Apes
- I’m not gonna lie, this one feels like it was marketing copy that accidentally made it into the title and they were just too lazy to fix it.
- Farewell to the Planet of the Apes
- Honestly, after the assault my grammatical senses just took, this looks like heaven.
There were two episodes associated with each movie (go check them out here), but it’s honestly not worth trying to understand the titles with the episodes because they are nonsensical. ABC edited these episodes shorter than their original runtimes, further weakening narratives that had already been harmed by studio intervention when they were originally created.
Fast-forward to the 90s, without the internet or the various wikis that could help you understand these programming differences today, and you could see why this could be frustrating for a 9-year-old who wants to record every Ape movie. However, we haven’t even discussed the worse problem…
Remember TV Guide?
This nifty, but cram-packed guide was the only way to figure out what was coming on during the week. Some of you may already see where I’m going with this…
How the hell was anyone supposed to see a Planet of the Apes title or, better yet, an abbreviated title of the movie or show within those tiny boxes? The answer is you didn’t, or you had to hope everyone really liked Planet of the Apes that week and wrote descriptions in the accompanying pages so you could figure out which abbreviation meant which movie. At some point, someone at TV Guide must have realized this was an issue, because the squares would at least start with the first word like Conquest or Battle. I don’t know if they coined the abbreviation “Battle for the POTA” as an example, but it is the first time I remember seeing it. For the five new titles or remixed TV titles as it were, this became more confusing, and you had to really pay attention to whether the small box gave a TV or movie parental warning (it was sometimes the only way to figure out whether it was one of the actual movies or TV movies, episode re-airing).
After trying and failing many times, my efforts would cool for a while until Tim Burton’s Apes remake came out in 2001. I absolutely loved it, making it one of my very first DVD purchases, along with a few others I’ll talk about someday. But the renewed interest was great for me since it meant everyone was excited about the Apes film again, and Fox eventually re-released the original 5 movies on DVD, finally giving me my best chance to watch them all fully.
Credit: 20th Century Studios
I wish I could hear you say, “and then what happened?” and respond with yet another obstacle that prevented me from watching all of them, but the truth is that my waning interest proved to be too strong. I had seen the original film and first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, enough that reports from friends and critics saying the final three films were bad had seeped in too much. I would occasionally catch parts of the films on various stations through the years, giving me a general gist of what happened. Instead of committing to a marathon or doing it for posterity, I’ve yet to give them a completely fair shot. Considering all the love I showered on the recent Andy Serkis reboot trilogy, you’d think I would have found energy then, but I’ve started to worry that the quality difference would be even more noticeable.
I was becoming content with never seeing them, but let’s be honest, I am a massive nerd (not sure how you hadn’t figured that out already if you made it this far). The idea that I’ve watched every James Bond or Star Trek film, which has definitely had some duds but can’t complete a few more simian films about the apocalypse, seems silly in hindsight. Not to mention, I’ve seen it reported a few times that 20th Century Studios actually thinks all of these movies are connected, which is so ludicrous that it almost warrants my watching of the oldies…almost.
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