When I was 9 years-old, I looked forward to nothing on television as much as I looked forward to the weekly,
all-new, adventures on the
Planet Of The Apes. (Well, maybe
Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings...) I was a huge fan of fugitive chimpanzee Galen (Roddy McDowell), and 20th century astronauts Virdon (Ron Harper) and Burke (James Naughton). I doubt that my parents and my younger sister were quite as enthused when I commandeered the television set on September 13, 1974 for the premiere episode...
One of my favorites too. Second only to The Time Tunnel in order of DVDs I've purposefully set out to acquire from those times. The third was Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Since I've started following this blog there have been quite a few more..
ReplyDeleteI loved the show too as a kid, my dad used to rant almost every episode "why don't they keep any of the guns they take away from the soldier apes?"
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you were, like me, also a fan of the action figures that came out at the time as well. I had a whole host of gorillas to use as soldiers. Of course, in my blissful youth, nothing seemed odd at all about having Urko and Ursus trying to track down the humans side-by-side...
ReplyDeleteI am only a couple years older than you and I loved this show. My wife bought for me when I was recovering from surgery a few years ago. I only wish they had included the wrap around scenes for when they packaged the series as TV movies. They had an aged Galen talking about the events shown. The openings and closings revealed Virdon and Burke's final fates: "They found their computer in another city and disappeared into space as suddenly as they’d arrived."
ReplyDeletedicecipher: I ran a couple of those Galen TV-movie wraparounds here on the site a few months back; most of them are up on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteI just ordered the DVD of this series from Amazon last week. I can't wait to get it.
ReplyDeleteI was only four when the show aired, but I remembered quite a bit of the premier episode. I also recall how disappointed I was when it and the animated show were cancelled. Years later, I was able to see the series on TBS (as well as the original movies). The film quality didn't hold up as well on the TV show, but it still holds a special place in my DVD collection.
ReplyDeleteI was only four when it was on and just barely remember it. Caught a few episodes on the sci-fi channel in the mid-90's. When it finally came out on DVD I bought and enjoyed it. It's a shame it was cancelled so soon as I think it got better as it went along.
ReplyDeleteLike several others who already commented, I was too young to see the show when it originally aired on CBS in 1974. (I was 4.) But just a couple of years later I became a huge fan of these episodes when they were re-packaged as a series of TV movies and syndicated for airing on local TV.
ReplyDeleteIn particular, I liked the 'organizing principal' of the series: that Virdon and Burke were trying to find a way home. Though I also remember being confused as a kid by the fact that the same actor (Roddy McDowall) seemed to play a number of different characters in each of the movies and this TV show.
That being said, I bought the DVD collection of this show the first day it was available. (Maybe 10 years ago or so?) I liked the show a lot less as a 30-something married man than I had as a 6 year old boy. I suspect that experience may explain, in part, why the show was cancelled mid-season.
I was a bit too young for the Apes franchise during the '70s and had to wait until the '80s to really get caught up with it. I remember watching a couple of those telefilms compiled from the TV series as a kid but they didn't make much of an impression on me. It wasn't until after I'd come to regard the 1968 original as a really great movie that I decided to "Go Ape" and get the TV series on DVD and was actually suprised by how good it was. (Okay, the two guys looked a lot like Starsky and Hutch and the basic formula was straight from The Fugitive, but I still liked it.)
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