One season shows-The Planet of the apes

1974

One hour long

Lasted 14 episodes

A spaceship crashes and astronauts Verdon and Burke are the only survivors. They end up finding out they are on a planet dominated by talking apes. Their ship is destroyed and they are on the run. They soon meet up with a chimp named Galen who grudgingly goes off with the humans and becomes a fugitive as well. Together the three try to stay ahead of Dr. Zaius and General Urko while trying to get along with each other and dealing with the problems they run upon.

After five films this series came to the small screen in the fall of 1974, but it didn’t make into 1975. I was four when this came on and I remember it a little. My brother is six years older than me and he got me into Star Trek and was a big Six Million Dollar Man fan back in the 70’s so it’s no wonder he watched the POTA show as well. Yes, I saw this show before I viewed any of the films so it made an impact on me. I saw a few episodes in the 90’s when it was on the Sci-fi channel and I enjoyed it. When it came out on DVD in the early 2000’s I grabbed it. I thought the acting from the two human leads was rough at first, but got better as the show went along. The relationship between the three leads got stronger as the show went along too. Although it could be argued that while the show began with the humans trying to find out what happened in this society that in that became just like the fugitive with the leads running from the law every week. The show was canceled for low ratings. There is often much discussion amongst fans as to how the events of the series do or even could fit in with the timeline established by the previous films. In the first film the astronauts crash on the east coast yet here the astronauts crash on the west coast, but Dr. Zauis is in both places. Roddy McDowell plays characters of different names, but with similar personalities yet he is also on both coasts. Ultimately I always think of the series as an alternate earth’s version of the apes taking over events. I am a big POTA fan so yeah I liked the series and really wished that it had gotten at least a whole year to try and establish itself. If I’d been a teenager watching this when it was first on I would have been hooked. Ultimately it’s a show that tried to put the ideas from the films into a series and put in enough action and story to attract people, but ultimately they just couldn’t pull in enough people.