Original PLANET OF THE APES

Watching the Heston version yesterday, it dawned on me, based on the final shot, the whole damned thing took place in NEW JERSEY!!

• Or worse, Staten Island. Actually in the sequel it turns out they are in Manhattan.

• And in the TV show version (They follow the film setting by a few decades, supposedly), hottie Jim Naughton and ape Urko get trapped in a subway, the Oakland 12th St. BART station!

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• Staten Island would breed a totally different kind of ape.

• Op, you mean the apes evolved from the cast of "The Jersey Shore"?

• And, to add to the inconsistency, the recent prequel has them originating in Marin County, CA.

• If the Statue of Liberty survived how come nothing taller than it did?

• You're asking for reality from a movie about talking monkeys.

• R6 A ruined Statue of Liberty shows up in a lot of post apocalyptic films, I guess because its so iconic. The thing is, in a nuke blast, or earthquake or giant tsunami, it would be destroyed in seconds. The outer skin is about as thick as a penny.

• No, R7, only asking the movie to obey its own reality. There are many dozen structures near the Statue of Liberty that are taller and more solidly built. But what circumstance could these have all been leveled while the statue remained in recognizable form? It's a fair question.

• rolls eyes at r7.

• R10, don't be such a Mary monkey. I've watched all the films and the TV show. It's all marvelously inconsistent, including the multiple time loops of the 5-part films. Beneath has NYC underground, while Lady Liberty's half submerged.

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• R9 We are dealing with a story with the premise that three men, all scientists, land on a planet with the same atmosphere, the same gravitational pull and the same mass as Earth. It has the same atmosphere as Earth, orbits a sun the same size and distance as Earth's. It also has a moon that is the same size, same distance and IDENTICAL to Earth's moon. Plus, the planet is inhabited by beings that speak English. And yet, knowing all of this, these very very smart men never once figure out they are on Earth. If you can accept that, then certainly you can accept the Statue of Liberty being the only thing left standing.

• James Franciscus in a loincloth. That's all I needed to know about the sequel.

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• Victor Buono as a mutant removing his own face is all you need to know about the sequel. My fave sequel is Beneath the Planet of the Apes. So funny and sad. I think Katharine Hepburn would have been a great addition to the series as a crotchety old bag of an ape.

• Planet of the Apes is a very entertaining movie but you do have to suspend disbelief, such as the astronauts never commenting on why the apes are all speaking English.

• "why the apes are all speaking English." And why the fuck some of them are British, but live in New Jersey.

• Maybe the British ones are from Fort Lee.

• Get your hands off me you dirty ape or I will blow you away with my shotgun.

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• Love the the first five minutes where Heston is giving a big monologue in the space capsule before it crashes while smoking a Cigar.

• The other disbelief you have to suspend is that they don't notice this planet just happens to have the same identical gravity, atmosphere, climate, sun, length of day, etc. And they mentioned that the night sky is always overcast so they can't see the moon overhead (the movie did cover that base, but in a facile, convenient way).

• They were in survival mode R20, they didn't have time to sit and stare at the moon.

• The Mandarin monkeys come from Edgewater.

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• My favorite was Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Though the first movie came in at a close second. As a little boy I loved the third movie because Zira and Cornelius had a little shopping/fashion montage.

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• [quote]Maybe the British ones are from Fort Lee. No. The ones from Ft Lee are Korean.

• Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the shopping montage. I love that film.

• "mmmm....grape juice PLUS!"

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• It's a tossup, R13. Yes, the sequel had Franciscus in a loincloth, but original Planet of the Apes had all 3 astronauts' bareass naked, and a bareass Charlton Heston bound and interrogated by the evil apes.

• Who the fuck wanted to see NRA Heston's ass?

• Once other pedantic, anal, fussy problem with the "Apes" franchise: the human astronauts mentioned they were cryogenically frozen for 2000 years and they didn't notice the ape's flawless English (much better even than today's Jerry Springer/Jeremy Kyle incoherent, inbred filth) was identical to ours? And not even heavily accented? All languages always change and evolve over the centuries so I guarantee you that even if humankind lasts another 2000 years (let alone rapidly-evolved chimps), their English offshoot languages would be pure gibberish to anyone alive nowadays.

• While the English language has evolved over the centuries, I bet with the vast records we now have and maintain -- movies, tv, books, plays, the bible -- language evolution will be much slower in the future.

• One last fussy nitpick: it is genetically impossible for any higher mammal species to evolve into a sentient, complex, humanoid civilization in the mere 2000 years Heston & co. were frozen away from earth. Maybe if they had been frozen for a few hundred thousand years (at least) that whole ape thing would have been more believable.

• Yet another logic problem with the plot: these astronauts knew that they had been cryogenically frozen for 2000 years in their ship and somehow the apes speak and write the same, identical English the world uses today. Languages are always evolving and changing so I guarantee you that if English still exists in 2000 years, it will be complete gibberish to anyone today. And they STILL thought they were on another planet even though the language and all environmental conditions were absolutely identical to earth. Even after seeing ancient, human artifacts in the caves the apes discovered. The only way for this plot to work is if these human astrononauts were the dumbest human beings ever launched into space (well, in real life Heston had Alzheimer's for many years).

• R29 and r32, see r30 about the future evolution of language.