Hello and welcome to my small page dedicated to one of my all time favourite science fiction adventure series of films, the Planet of the Apes.

I have always been a fan of the Planet films since I was a young boy. My grandmother always used to get me the Apes comics and I was an avid fan of the follow up TV series.

The Apes films represent a pseudo-Fascistic society of barbarism and is itself a satire on white imperialism and the views of 19th ( and indeed 20th! ) century sectarian dogma.

In the Apes films, the roles of man and apes are reversed. Man is the savage, reduced to living in tribes in forests and caves, and it is the apes that now rule the Earth in their small but cultured city states. Yet with the civilisation of the ape, there is the still the savagery of the beast, the cruel nature of the jungle. One wonders how close the ape is to man, judging by the level of cruelly man has done to animals, I think man is far more cruel than any ape.

The scenes where humans are hunted and killed for trophies appears to be a mixture of genocide and sport. The militaristic gorillas attempting to destroy the human race in possibly the same way that the Serb para-military groups are doing in Kosova and have done in Bosnia. The apes films are like looking into a dark mirror into the minds of humanity. Their society seems to be unified in one cause, the preservation of the ape race, but within the structure of the ape race there lies discord and difference. The Chimpanzees are the intellectuals who seek only truth and knowledge, it is three of these beings that first befriend the human astronaut, Tailor, in the first film and the characters played by the late Roddy McDowel appear to be the central character in the later films.

A bigot has two great allies, religion and science, and the apes cause is backed by the orang-utans who appear to be the priestly caste. They have twisted truth and turned it into a neo-Biblical explanation of why man is inferior to ape. This process is no stranger to man as he has been employing religion and science to explain many things such as why one race is superior to another. This technique was utilised quite dramatically by the nazis and later by such groups as the Ku Klux Klan in contemporary America.

Based on the novel by the French author Piere Boulle, who also incidently wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai, another film based on oppression and racial tension, ( caucasian allied POWs against Japanese captors ). The script was co-written by the Twilight Zone's Rod Sterling

The Planet of the Apes series consisted of five films. There was also a follow up TV series and an animated series too. I can not recall much about the animated show as I was too young to remember anything but here is a brief synopsis of each film:

	Planet of the Apes A group of astronauts travel through time and crash land on a desolate wasteland of a planet only to discover that apes rule and humans are little more than animals. The classic climax reveals that this is no alien world but in reality Earth many years in the future.
	Beneath the Planet of the Apes A second group of astronauts attempt a rescue mission and go through the same time warp. They land on the future Earth and find a bizarre civilisation of mutants living in the remains of New York and worshipping a vast nuclear missile.
	Escape from the Planet of the Apes When the missile exploded causing the destruction of humanity, three chimpanzees travel through the time warp and arrive in modern day Los Angeles. The dreadful legacy of what is to face humanity is unfolded and the apes are sentenced to death, but one of them is pregnant.
	Conquest of the Planet of the Apes The son of the ape astronauts is brought up by a kind circus owner but is brought into one of the main cities. The cities are a mixture of Rome, Nazi Germany and pro-slavery 19th century bigotry as apes are used as slaves and a desperate governor tries to stop revolution on two sides, disgruntled humans and rioting apes.
	Battle for the Planet of the Apes After the victory of the apes over their human enslaves, a new order of peace is governed by Caesar where apes and humans work together. However, the racist gorillas think that humans are inferior to apes and should be exterminated. Interesting plots in this tale as Caesar is very sympathetic to the needs of both apes and humans, one could say as an ape, he is very humane!

Click Charlton to read more about the main characters that appeared in the Planet films.