[With the new Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes prequel reboot on the horizon, this week SuperStuff Co-Editor Nigel Brown takes us back to the 1970s to revisit the original series of "Apes" films and re-evaluate the logic of the original timeline. -
baggsey (Ian Baker)]
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| Characters © Disney. Art by Jean-Daniel Breque, 1975. Comics Unlimited #36, May 1976 |
by Nigel Brown
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
attrib. various
[Warning: ‘Apes’ spoilers ahead!]
It’s been forty-eight years, so I felt it was time to take another look at one of our key interests of the 1970s: The Planet of the Apes.
I missed the first two Apes films on their initial release, so number three, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, in 1971, was all the more intriguing for its backstory. It tantalized with its split-second sepia clips from the first film. They featured when Zira was drugged and recounting the truth about her life as a vivisectionist of humans in the far future.
Eventually I saw the other films. I recall that one of our friends didn’t get into Beneath the Planet of the Apes as it was classified an AA and unfortunately he didn’t pass for being fourteen years old. I’d like to say that group solidarity won out, but it didn’t. Selfish youngsters that we were, we left our hapless friend standing outside as the rest of us went in to watch the film. (Just to set the record straight, we’ve all since been forgiven and remain friends over fifty years later…)
By the time I finally saw Planet of the Apes I was familiar with the story from the UK-printed A&BC versions of the Topps cards, of which I had a set. Nevertheless I sat through that film twice in a row. (You could do that in those days, simply by remaining seated throughout the whole film programme until it rolled around again.)
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| © 20th Century Studios. Topps/A&BC Card #1 |
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| © 20th Century Studios. Topps/A&BC Card #1 reverse |
Compared to today, although we were almost contemporary with the first screenings of those films, there was little information about them at the time. With no internet, we relied on whatever sources we could find. I’ve mentioned the Topps/A&BC cards: a set of just forty-four with colour photos from the film in chronological order, and a small paragraph on the back of each card to summarize the scene it depicted. From those I had learned that Charlton Heston’s astronaut character was named George Taylor and his spacecraft was named ‘Air Force One’. (I thought that was a pretty nifty name, and was somewhat confused years later when I heard the President of the United States flew in an aircraft called ‘Air Force One’. Was he an Apes fan? Who would have guessed?)
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| © 20th Century Studios. Topps/A&BC Card #3 |
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| © 20th Century Studios. Topps/A&BC Card #3 reverse |
When Marvel brought out their ‘Planet of the Apes’ weekly comic in 1974, excitement was spoiled by advertisements in their other B&W magazines for their USA ‘Planet of the Apes’ B&W magazine, which looked superior. Eventually we found copies of this American version in Dark They Were & Golden Eyed in London.
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| © Marvel UK. Planet of the Apes weekly #1 |
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| © Marvel. US Planet of the Apes B&W magazine #1 |
Together with the articles about the films that these magazines carried, and the novelizations that then appeared, we began to fill our boots with background information about the Apes.
The short-lived Planet of the Apes TV series was shown in the UK (I recall on Sunday nights on ITV – a major event of the week in the days before video-recorders). As it featured Roddy McDowall as the chimpanzee Galen, it had a stamp of authenticity that assured us it was part of Apes canon.
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| © 20th Century Studios. Screen photo taken 15th December 1974 by I Baker |
I’d first seen the concept of a fictional chronology in Appendix B of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, then had come across others, such as the timeline of Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space’ stories, and also Robert Heinlein’s ‘Future History’. I therefore read Jim Whitmore’s ‘Outlines of Tomorrow: A Chronology of the Planet of the Apes’ with interest. It was published in the American edition of Marvel’s ‘Planet of the Apes’ B&W # 11 (August 1975), within which Whitmore credited much to Mike Wilber, of Paulsboro, New Jersey, for the Apes chronology Wilber had sent in to Marvel.
But I was disappointed as I didn’t agree with Whitmore’s conclusion. He had ended his chronology with Taylor’s spacecraft returning to the beginning of the timeline, so that the Apes saga was a closed ‘time loop’.
This meant that the efforts of Caesar, the ape leader, were doomed to failure. He’d worked hard to change the future described by his parents, Cornelius and Zira. His new society, where humans and apes were not mutually antagonistic, was intended to save the Earth from destruction.
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| © 20th Century Studios. Topps/A&BC Card #41. Cornelius & Zira |
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| © 20th Century Studios. Topps/A&BC Card #41. |
Perhaps it was the optimism of a teenager, but I preferred to think that Caesar would succeed. This belief was encouraged as, at the end of the film, with their enemies defeated, Caesar says to the human MacDonald: “Tell me something, MacDonald. Can we make the future what we wish?”, and MacDonald replies: “I’ve heard that it’s possible, Caesar.”
Also, the scene at the end of Battle for the Planet of the Apes, set in 2670, appeared to promise this. The children of apes and men sit before a benevolent orangutan they call the Lawgiver, beneath a statue of Caesar. Sure, a young chimpanzee tugs on a girl’s braid, who then pushes him over; sure, this last scene shows a tear in the statue’s eye, but I was prepared to overlook this as a warning of a dread possibility, rather than an inevitability.
As I wrote back in 1976:
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The first film, Planet of the Apes, begins two thousand years in the future, then the series goes back in time to 1973. Taken at face value, the chronology appears to be curved into a loop, not linear. When one tries to put the chronology on a linear scale, the many contradictions are exposed.
The greatest contradiction is the two different accounts of how the apes rebelled against their human masters. When Cornelius and Zira are asked about this in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, they say that after two centuries of being pets, the apes became slaves, and three centuries after that, they rebelled. But in the events of the rebellion in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the apes have done all this in a mere nine years!
Another contradiction connected with this is that at the end of Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the Lawgiver says that there is world peace in 2670. But in the first film, Dr Zaius states that by that time, humans were definitely inferior to the apes.
So what is the truth?
The best explanation I can come up with is that they are BOTH true. What has happened in the last three films is different to the historical events mentioned in the first film. It follows that something must have changed that past, something that happened between films two and three. This something is Taylor’s spacecraft. It had gone back in time between these films, back from 3955 to 1973. The events it caused in the past altered the consequent timeline. This altered timeline is shown in the last three films.
Now; where does the TV series fit in? The answer to this is simple. In the first episode, “Escape From Tomorrow”, Burke and Virdon discover a book with the date 2503. In the altered timeline (as can be seen from the chronology below), no skyscrapers such as the one shown in the book could exist. This means that the TV series must take place in the unchanged timeline.
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| © 20th Century Studios. "Escape From Tomorrow" |
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Whitmore himself had posited this later termed ‘linear-chronology’ as an alternative chronology at the end of his article. Although he’d chosen to go with the ‘time loop’ chronology, he did appear open-minded as to which was the ‘correct’ version.
That summer of 1975, as well as my involvement with SuperStuff, I decided to strike out on my own with a fanzine I named ‘Fantastic Voyages’ (still with the micro-circulation of three!). Issue 1 was a slim affair, but I filled most of issue 2 with my own ‘linear’ version of the Planet of the Apes chronology, something I’d have been happier to see in the Marvel B&W magazine. I began it with:
As all fans who have seen the “Ape” films, TV Series etc. are all aware, the chronology is confusing. And so to shine the light of knowledge through the murky mists of ignorance and confusion, here is the Chronology of The Planet of the Apes. – Fantastic Voyages #2, Autumn 1975.
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| © Nigel Brown and Marvel. The little-seen Fantastic Voyages #2 |
The following year, after producing my ‘Superman Special’ with SuperStuff (#7, May 1976), I sent a copy to Alan Austin (editor/publisher of fanzine Comics Unlimited). He wrote back: ‘Do you think there would be any material in back issues of SuperStuff I could use? CU is using up articles quite a rate being monthly, and good articles are becoming harder to find.’
I tidied up my Apes chronology, and it appeared as the cover article in Comics Unlimited # 36, May 1976.
Subsequent letter columns in CU followed up with readers’ responses asking how I fitted in the new cartoon series, Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975), and a number of other points that I did my best to answer.
In the end, Alan Austin commented (CU # 38 August 1976): ‘I like the way a TV company produces a series, doesn’t pay too much attention to details, so that there are plenty of inconsistencies, and along comes a devoted fan like Nigel to cover up all those mistakes. Maybe you ought to approach the scriptwriters with your explanations and work out some kind of fee?’
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Forty-eight years later, I was browsing the internet when I was astonished to find my Apes chronology unforgotten and referenced on planetoftheapes.fandom.com (search for ‘Circular vs Linear Timelines’) as a ‘linear chronology’, and available to read on pota.goatley.com under ‘Movies & TV Series’, and then ‘Magazine articles’.
In nearly five decades, Apes fandom had grown, with a number of websites now devoted to the subject. The two websites referenced above both contain an enormous amount of material.
Reading the excellent article ‘Circular vs Linear Timelines’ has changed my view of the chronology. Back in 1975, taking into account the information we then had access to, it was reasonable to infer different possibilities in the Apes timeline, given the ambiguity found in the films and the TV series.
But the article ‘Circular vs Linear Timelines’ quotes Paul Dehn, the writer of the sequels to Planet of the Apes, and establishes that his intention was to write the films within a ‘time circle’ chronology.
I would always respect the writer’s intention as canon (no matter how many discrepancies may creep into the work due to mistakes or sloppy production), and so I have rewritten my chronology to fit this view.
But not quite…
I have tied the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes to the beginning of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, creating the loop.
Where I have still differed, however, is that I have retained the original (linear) timeline just once, before the loop begins.
It’s what I call the ‘Linear-Loop’ model, or the ‘have your cake and eat it’ timeline!
When Taylor’s spacecraft races away from Earth, approaching light speed and time dilation, it hasn’t yet affected the Earth’s history so the unaltered timeline proceeds up until the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Once the craft has gone back in time, it changes subsequent events so that the altered timeline now loops back into itself.
This updated Apes chronology satisfies three criteria:
- 1. It contains the time loop, which was the original intention of Paul Dehn.
- 2. It still allows for two different versions of the future, incorporating the conflicting accounts, yet still converging on the same events as portrayed in Planet of the Apes.
- 3. These two separate futures, both leading to ‘civilized’ apes and ‘bestial’ humans imply that there’s an inevitability to this outcome, which accommodates the theme of Pierre Boule’s original novel La Planète des Singes. In this novel, the ‘planet of the apes’ is a once-human dominated planet in the Betelgeuse star system, but when Ulysse Mérou (the novel’s ‘Taylor’) returns to Earth he discovers that apes have taken over there, too.
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The ‘apes’, in truth, are the ‘other’ that we can relate to, and well imagine in our place. But for me, the appeal has never been about the story of the apes, but the fate of the humans. It’s a well-worn science fiction trope – the future evolution of the human species – but it remains fascinating, none-the-less. It’s been around since the very beginning of the genre, with the Eloi and Morlocks of H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895, just thirty-six years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. Since then, many notable works describing the devolution of humankind have seen print, including Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) and especially Stephen Baxter’s Evolution (2002).
(Note: The apes saga has been set in another, almost parallel, universe. All the astronauts have worn the emblem A.N.S.A. instead of N.A.S.A.)
So, to revisit the Chronology of The Planet of the Apes:
1972
A spacecraft crewed by Taylor, Dodge, Landon, and Stewart, is launched. Contact with Earth is lost as it approaches the speed of light.
Six months after this first launch, a second spacecraft is sent into space, with Brent as a crewmember. This spacecraft also loses contact with Earth.
And now the unaltered history of Earth, the linear timeline:
1972 to 1980
Living standards increase due to technological advances. The fate of the two spacecraft lost in 1972 is never known.
After 1973
A third spacecraft is launched, crewed by Burke, Virdon and Jones, on a less ambitious mission to the close-by star Alpha Centauri.
(Taylor’s spacecraft is devoid of insignia, Burke’s has US flags on the front fins, and Brent’s has only the ‘UNITED STATES’ painted down the front.)
1980
The third spacecraft reaches the nearby star Alpha Centauri on August 19th 1980, but disaster strikes. Astronaut Pete Burke hits the emergency homing button just before he passes out. Although the engines of their craft are damaged beyond repair, their momentum still carries them towards Earth, but at a significantly slower speed. The unconscious astronauts are automatically placed in suspended animation for the long trip home.
1980 to an undisclosed date early in 3rd millennium:
Human civilization has continued to advance technologically, and machines are being used for many purposes as leisure time increases. Many space explorations take place, although some never return to Earth.
Undisclosed date early in 3rd millennium
A plague strikes that kills all the cats and dogs. Luckily, it does not affect other species, including all primates. Due to their higher intelligence, apes become the most popular pets. They are trained easily, and can perform tricks for their human masters. In time, most homes have a chimpanzee, orangutan or gorilla as a pet, although at first they are quartered in cages.
Two centuries later:
The apes are being used in service to the humans. Their intelligence is being increased through selected breeding and artificial stimulation.
Three centuries later to 3073:
The humans are being served both by their machines and their ape slaves. They no longer have to struggle in their lives. Their civilization weakens and they begin to lose interest in space travel.
After the apes’ status has moved from service to slavery, they understand their situation as slaves and unify against it. At first they refuse to serve their masters with grunts, until an ape, Aldo, learns to articulate and says: “No.” He leads an ape rebellion. The degenerated humans are defeated by the apes.
In the chaos that follows, nuclear warheads are exploded. Advanced civilization is lost and the world is devastated by radioactive fallout, blast craters and consequent geological upheaval.
The ape and human populations move away from the radiation-soaked cities, and the surviving humans sink into a slave mentality under the more vigorous apes, tolerated but despised by their new masters.
The apes become divided into social classes by species. The pompous, authoritative orangutans become the governing class. The strongest apes, the gorillas, become the soldiers and policemen of the ape states. The chimpanzees’ greater intelligence leads them to become mainly scientists, although their work is hampered by the reactionary orangutans.
Radioactive desolation persists in too many areas for increased commerce between isolated groups.
One group, situated in the California area, consists of a ‘Central City’ surrounded by farmlands and villages. Each village is governed by a ‘Prefect’, who is always a chimpanzee.
Technology, apart from the military capacity to manufacture guns, is now discredited. The apes have experienced the ruination that human technology has caused. They begin to think that Man is capable of nothing but destruction. From that position, it’s now a small step to believe that Man is inherently evil.
Finally, a respected orangutan documents ape beliefs in what later becomes known as the ‘Sacred Scrolls’. The prime reason to write the scrolls is to codify ape law, but this orangutan, who in later centuries is named the ‘Lawgiver’, feels that his fellow apes must be warned against Man’s evils, as some of the apes are beginning to take humans into their houses as pets.
Not all the humans have left the irradiated cities. Amongst the ruins of New York, a group of humans have set up an underground civilization. The long-term radiation mutates them: their outer skin layers shed and they develop telepathic powers. They find an intact nuclear missile, and worship the nuclear force within it as their creator.
3073:
A spacecraft lands in Southern California. The human crew are all killed by the apes. Zaius, the orangutan leader of the Council in that area, begins to fear the threat of returning human astronauts from outer space. (This is related in the first episode of the TV series.)
3085 June 14th:
Zaius’s fears are realized as Jones, Alan Virdon and Peter Burke crash-land in his region after more than a millennium in space. Jones does not survive, as seen in “THE PLANET OF THE APES” TV SERIES.
The human astronauts find a five-hundred year-old book containing a photograph, dated 2503, that shows a future-developed New York. This confirms they’re back on Earth.
(It also confirms that they’re situated within the first – linear – timeline. By 2503, within the loop timeline, New York had suffered a nuclear attack hundreds of years before that date.)
A dog is seen in the first TV episode, but this can be accounted for. That dog is seen in the unaltered timeline, and what we know of the plague is only Cornelius’s knowledge of it, many centuries after it happened. It is perfectly feasible that not all the dogs died; some still lived in Southern California to at least 3085. It is plausible that Cornelius would have little knowledge of a few surviving dogs nearly a thousand years later and living on the other side of a continent strewn with impassable radioactive deserts.
3085 to 3954:
Over the next 800 years, the humans continue to degenerate as a species. The speech centres in their brains atrophy and they move into the forests. They have regressed to a state that resembles hominid life before the discovery of fire.
Knowledge that humans once had a major civilization is either lost or concealed by the conservative orangutans.
3954 November 25th:
Taylor’s spacecraft returns to Earth, as shown in “PLANET OF THE APES”.
There is one date specified in the first film that must be disregarded completely in the chronology. When Taylor’s spacecraft crashes in the lake, the chronometer aboard reads 3978. But in the second film, Brent says the date is 3955. Again, in the third film, Dr Hasslein says that analysis of Taylor’s returned spacecraft confirms it came from the year 3955 (not the 3978 date Taylor read). This is explained if the chronometer aboard Taylor’s spacecraft had been broken in the crash, and had thus shown the wrong date. When Dr Milo repaired the salvaged spacecraft, the chronometer had then displayed the correct date: 3955.
(A geographical aside –
In Planet of the Apes, Cornelius shows us a map of the terrain near New York. When you compare it to a present-day map, Ape City could be said to be situated in New Jersey somewhere along the Raritan River. The lake into where Taylor’s spacecraft first crashed must be opposite New York, but farther inland. At the end of this first film, Taylor comes across the Statue of Liberty, and it is on the seashore. This means that somewhere along the timeline the Hudson River must have dried up.
This theory is confirmed in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Brent and Nova ride from what was New Jersey to Manhattan without coming across any water. They enter Queensborough Plaza subway station on East 51st Street/5th Avenue. They then pass the remains of the New York Public Library, the Stock Exchange and Radio City to end up near Lexington Avenue beside St. Patrick’s Cathedral.)
3955:
As told in “BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES”, the second spacecraft – following Taylor’s trajectory and ending up close to New York – crashes in the Forbidden Zone, near Ape City.
Soon after, the ape army marches to war in the Forbidden Zone, Milo sends Cornelius and Zira a message telling them that Taylor’s salvaged craft is ready for flight.
The ‘doomsday bomb’, the ‘Alpha-Omega Nuclear Device’, is detonated and sets fire to the Earth’s atmosphere, scorching the planet to a cinder.
Taylor’s craft, with its chimpanzee crew, is hurled back into the past.
Taylor’s spacecraft has been thrown back to 1973, and so has altered the past by its very presence of being there.
What follows now is the altered history of Earth. At this point, the time-loop begins.
Here are the significant altered events of this new timeline –
1973:
Taylor’s spacecraft reappears near Earth and splashes down on the coast of California at the beginning of “ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES”.
The son of Cornelius and Zira is first named ‘Milo’, but this is changed to ‘Caesar’ by Armando to hide the child from the authorities.
1974 to 1981:
The fear of human subjugation by apes, driven by knowledge of the future, leads to more totalitarian government.
In view of the return of Taylor’s spacecraft, the third spacecraft mission to the close-by star Alpha Centauri may have been cancelled or postponed. If it does take place, then the Virdon and Burke of this time-loop timeline will arrive at a very different Earth in 3085, when nuclear war has happened much earlier and the humans of that altered time would have already degenerated towards a more bestial nature than the humans of the linear timeline seen in the TV series.
1982:
A plague strikes that kills all the cats and dogs. As this plague has struck centuries earlier than in the linear timeline, the root cause of this difference must be the arrival of Taylor’s spacecraft in 1973. Perhaps genetic investigation of enhanced ape intelligence causes a deadly virus to escape from a lab?
1982 to 1991:
Apes become the most popular pets, but within about six years, they have become slaves. Once again, the fear of human subjugation by apes, driven by knowledge of the future, has accelerated processes that took hundreds of years in the linear timeline.
1991
Armando and Caesar visit Los Angeles at the start of “CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES”.
(In Battle for the Planet of the Apes the city is said to be south of a rural area where Caesar’s later settlement is established. The large city best suited to those specifications is Los Angeles, as it is south of a relatively rural area, the San Joaquin Valley.)
Caesar defeats the human forces in the city. Only this son of chimpanzees from 3955 is intelligent enough to lead a successful ape rebellion as early as 1991. In the linear history it took the apes three centuries to rebel from slavery.
1992:
Caesar founds a new settlement in the San Joaquin Valley, where they survive the nuclear war caused by the ape rebellions.
This significantly earlier nuclear war means that many centuries of human technical development in the linear timeline do not take place.
Human survivors of the nuclear war have not had time to evolve into telepathic mutants at this point.
2004:
“BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES” takes place.
Caesar appears to have established equality between apes and humans.
2004 to 2670:
The idea of peaceful co-existence between apes and humans has spread around the globe. Both apes and humans realise that they must live in peace to prevent the detonation of the Alpha-Omega bomb in 3955.
2670 to 3954:
After hundreds of years, despite previous hope of peace between apes and humans, consensus breaks down and fears about the destruction of the Earth in the future are dismissed. Many apes and humans, hungry for power on each side of their divide, are now emphatic that this is a lie concocted by their enemies to keep them in check and prevent apes (or humans, if argued from their point-of-view) from fighting for their rights. As these attitudes gain currency amongst each species, even talk of a ‘doomsday bomb’ is banned as propaganda from the opposing side, then expressly denied, as religious heresy.
Eventually the warnings of Caesar are either forgotten, or kept secret from the populations of apes and humans.
As in the linear timeline, the human species degenerates back to pre-fire-wielding hominids.
3954 November 25th:
“PLANET OF THE APES”.
3955:
“BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES”.
The ‘doomsday bomb’ detonates and Taylor’s spacecraft, with its chimpanzee crew, is hurled back to 1973.
The time-loop is complete, and reruns ad infinitum…
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© Nigel Brown
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| © Geoff Cousins. Unpublished POTA artwork from May 1976 |
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| © Geoff Cousins. Unpublished POTA artwork from May 1976 |
