Charlton Heston, Pierre Boulle, Richard Zanuck, Arthur P. Jacobs, Rod Serling and a host of others came together and both wittingly and unwittingly gave us one of the classics of science fiction film. This film in turn spawned a remarkable cabal of character collectibles from videos and costumes to toy guns and comic books.

Eleven years ago, the 30 Anniversary re-issue of Planet of the Apes and its four sequels fueled the nostalgic fires of collectors and brought new fans into the fold. And, while the Tim Burton remake in 2001 may have done much to quench those fires, the DVD editions of the film series and subsequent TV series continue to sell. The 35th anniversary editions last year again stoked the fire, as did rumors of another new film.

With a strong connection to collecting fandom through the Marvel magazine, later comics and other collectibles, Apes fans have long known that the dictum attributed to DC editor Julie Schwartz is true: “Gorillas always sell.” The explanation of the franchise’s longevity is obviously not that simple, but it’s not a bad place to start an investigation.

When French author Pierre Boulle’s 10th novel was published in 1963, it was widely considered to be one of his lesser works. Certainly, said the pundits, it was neither as important nor as commercial as his previous smash, The Bridge on the River Kwai, which became an Academy Award winning film.

The novel was called Le Planete Des Singes (or Monkey Planet in English), and, like the prognosticators who thought Star Trek would die when the TV show was canceled or those who suggested that comics would disappear after the advent of video games, the pundits were wrong.

Producer Arthur P. Jacobs was an old-fashioned Hollywood executive who had climbed his way up the ladder to a position of recognition among the elite of the movie business. He had most recently finished Dr. Doolittle and latched onto the film rights for Boulle’s novel. He had the rights and the basic idea of what he wanted to do, but he didn’t have a script, a star or a studio. In Hollywood, that puts you on a par with the valet who parks your car. He probably had an option on something, too. Jacobs, though, believed in the property, and he doggedly pitched the concept around town in his unrelenting attempts to get the film made.

Even while he couldn’t get a positive response from the studio heads, Jacobs started building his team. Charlton Heston was already a well-known and highly respected actor when Jacobs approached him. The star of such classics as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments was intrigued.

“The novel was singularly uncinematic; there wasn’t even a treatment outlining an effective script,” Heston wrote in his 1996 autobiography, In The Arena. “Still, I smelled a good film in it. All Arthur had was the rights to the novel and a portfolio of paintings depicting possible scenes. He came up to the house and displayed them, along with what Hollywood calls “The Pitch.” When Frank Schaffner came by, he liked it enough to commit as director, but Arthur was a long way from persuading a studio to put up any actual money to make the movie.”

With Heston and director Franklin J. Schaffner (Oscar winner for Patton in 1970) attached, the film still went nowhere for the next year and a half. If there truly is a “Development Hell” as it’s called in the trade, Arthur Jacobs and his project were in it.

“Star Wars and the still-enduring cycle of space operas that followed came later,” Heston recalled. “Then the project recalled the Saturday serials of the 1930s. ‘No kidding, talking monkeys and rocket ships? Buck Rogers and Ming the Merciless, right? Gedouttahere!’”

During that time, though, Jacobs was able to elicit some interest from Richard Zanuck, the head of 20th Century Fox. He was interested in the concept, but he wondered how audiences would react to the apes? Would they be believable or would moviegoers just laugh?

In the amazing age of special effects wizardry that constitutes Hollywood today, it’s hard to over-estimate the importance of the believability of the apes in the first film in its day. This wasn’t going to be the guy-in-a-gorilla-suit stealing the pretty young woman in some 1930s or ’40s grade “B” adventure. If this film were to be made, it would be a multi-million-dollar undertaking. Neither Zanuck nor his board of directors wanted to be seen as spending their stockholders’ money on this movie if people were just going to laugh at it.

Jacobs, Heston, and Schaffner suggested a test film to show that the ape characters could be taken seriously. The result not only sold Zanuck, who in turn sold the Fox board of directors, it became one of the enduring underpinnings of the franchise’s mythos.

For many years this film was unknown to fans, but once revealed there was much speculation as to whether or not it still existed. It was, if not the Holy Grail, than certainly a close second to Apes fans. Until the documentary Behind the Planet of Apes, only snippets of this film had ever been seen by the public. Even with the extended cut in the documentary, few have ever seen the entire test.

Starring Heston as astronaut Colonel Thomas (which, of course, became Col. Taylor) and Edward G. Robinson as the orangutan Dr. Zaius, this five-minute test film featured an early, much less detailed version of the ape faces which would later win acclaim for creative make-up supervisor John Chambers.

From the test one can see that Robinson would have made an interesting Dr. Zauis, but it would have been an almost entirely disparate version of the one portrayed by Maurice Evans (a fine Shakespearean actor known to American audiences chiefly as Samantha’s father on the sitcom Bewitched).

Although this script was more talky and differed dramatically from the finished version, there are some elements that survived in the feature film, particularly toward the end in the cave scene between Taylor and Zaius at the archeological dig. Regardless of the differences and similarities, the test film enabled Zanuck to get the money to give the go ahead to Jacobs.

Next stop, The Twilight Zone.

Jacobs had been in regular contact with writer-producer Rod Serling, known to fans of science fiction (and great television) as the man behind The Twilight Zone and later, Night Gallery. Serling’s connection with Planet of the Apes pre-dated Jacobs’ by several years.

The film rights had first been optioned by the King Brothers, “…who did mostly Indian elephant pictures shot for about $1.80 – because elephants weren’t even scale then,” Serling told Marvel’s Planet of the Apes magazine in 1974. He was convinced a movie could be made inexpensively, so he wrote a treatment with a scene-by-scene breakdown for the company.

The rights next were acquired by Blake Edwards, known then for Peter Gunn, but later famous for the Pink Panther film series. Serling said Edwards told him not to worry about the budget. The resulting screenplay, he speculated, would have cost $100 million to produce (in 1974!) and was very similar to the original novel in that there was an ape civilization on a par with our own.

When Jacobs acquired the rights and a more modest budget ($5.8 million was the final reported figure) was arranged, Serling again went back to the typewriter. He wrote three drafts of the screenplay before the duties were handled over to Michael Wilson, who had previously worked on The Bridge on the River Kwai, among many other projects.

Among the many contributions to the mythos which stem for Sterling’s drafts were the structure of the film itself and the final scene in which Taylor realizes that he isn’t on some distant planet after all.

Wilson, even according to Serling, was the one who added the inverted humor to the screenplay. Lines like “The dearly departed once said to me, ‘I never met an ape I didn’t like,’” or “You know what they say. ‘Human see, human do,’” clearly helped inject the audience with the world-turned-upside-down feeling the character Taylor was supposed to be experiencing, though they did so in a humorous fashion.

With Charlton Heston as Taylor, Roddy McDowall as Cornelius, Kim Hunter as Zira, Maurice Evans as Dr. Zaius and Linda Harrison as Nova, Planet of the Apes was ready to roll, and roll it did.

In addition to the average pitfalls that face a film crew, Apes had at least two which were somewhat unique. The actors playing the lead apes spent four hours at the beginning of each day getting into make-up and two hours each night getting out of it, and if that wasn’t enough, Heston caught the flu and almost couldn’t work.

Like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones just shoots the mammoth, menacing swordsman (which came about because Harrison Ford had dysentery and could barely stand), the timing of Heston’s illness lead to a great moment.

When he returned, his voice was weak. It was a struggle to get the dialogue out, but that effort paid off with one of the most famous movie lines in a science fiction film: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape.” If he had been healthy, the line would have been the same, but would it have had that same raw quality? One can only speculate.

The film was released February 8, 1968, and a small dynasty was born. It was hailed on many levels. Though it is obviously a discourse on racism, it stirred up none of the reaction that a movie with a then-modern setting dealing with similar issues would have raised. To be sure, many of the viewers were children and they didn’t care about messages. To them, it was just a great movie.

According to all reports, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and the other sequels were afterthoughts, reactions to the boffo box office reports for Planet of the Apes.

Rod Serling wrote a proposal for the sequel, as did Pierre Boulle (some of Boulle’s Planet of the Men proposals made it into the third film, Escape from the Planet of the Apes) and others.

Although Heston did not want to participate in Beneath, he agreed to reprise his role as Taylor in the early scenes and again at the end of the film, donating his agreed-upon Guild-minimum fee to his son Fraser’s school.

Roddy McDowall was tied to another project, making this the only live-action Apes film or show he didn’t act in. He was, however, in the film, as it begins where the first one left off.

Since his character, Cornelius, was an ape, McDowall could at least visually be replaced. Heston’s Taylor, though, was the character the audience was supposed to identify with, so replacing him was trickier.

James Franciscus was cast as Brent, an astronaut sent out after Taylor’s original crew. He follows a different route, but basically ends up going through the same sort of things Taylor did, even finding out that he’s back home on Earth, not some weird way-off world.

While the story lacks originality (it was, after all, the sequel), it is still a gripping adventure and serves as a further exploration into the world the apes have built.

In the story by associate producer Mort Abrahams and writer Paul Dehn (Goldfinger), viewers discover that mute humans hunted by apes are not our only inheritors. Below the surface of a nuked New York lives a race of radiation-scarred mutants with amazing telepathic powers. These mutants, lead by a man called Mendez XXVI, fear Brent (although it’s not said why with their powers they couldn’t tell he was telling the truth), but they fear the approaching ape army even more. Brent and Taylor are reunited and as the apes attack, they set off a bomb, a last reminder of our civilization.

Short on the subtle social commentary of the first film, Beneath goes for its legacy in one big action. Taylor, dying, presses the button that destroys the world.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes was released in 1970, and that should have been that. Except it did well enough that Fox wanted a sequel. Again.

Since Colonel Taylor had just blown up the Earth in the year 3955, it didn’t seem like there would be much ground on which to base a third film. To the financial types at Fox, that was just an annoying detail, a detail Arthur Jacobs was only too happy to confront and turn into another film.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) was written by Paul Dehn, who would then go on to write the screenplay for the fourth film and the story for the fifth.

In Escape, Cornelius (once again played by Roddy McDowall), Zira (still portrayed by Kim Hunter), and the previously unmentioned Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo) escaped the destruction of the Earth only to be sent back in time to the then current 1970s. Milo is killed right away before he can explain to their new human friends exactly how he figured out how to work Col. Taylor’s spacecraft (which sank in a lake the last time the viewers saw it).

Many of the racial and societal themes addressed in the first film were confronted again from the reverse angle as the apes are made first into oddities, then celebrities, and then fugitives. Finally, they are killed in an attempt to prevent the downfall of man and the society they had come from.

Yes, the films had killed their leading characters. Now no one from the first film was left alive. That could have been that if Escape hadn’t preformed at the box office, but it did. This time, though, Arthur Jacobs and his staff were prepared. During the story, Zira gave birth to a baby she named Milo. At the end of the film, we see that the humans have killed a baby chimp, but not the right one. Milo lives on with circus owner Sr. Armando (Ricardo Montalban).

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) is set in what was the near future, 1991. The dogs and cats have been killed by a plague, and apes have replaced them. First they were pets, but now they are slaves.

It is a bleak, brutal and dark future explored in a fairly unflinching fashion by writer Dehn and director J. Lee Thompson. It is, as one would suspect, a further and perhaps more direct attack on racial issues.

Roddy McDowall was the only remaining cast member, this time playing the grown-up version of baby Milo – now going by the name Cesar. In short order, he escalated the level of ape discontent into a full-blown insurrection. Man, in this city, was overthrown.

“Tonight, we have seen the birth… of the planet of the apes!” Cesar told the cheering throng of rebel apes. Only that dialogue and their other words in that scene were “looped,” or dubbed in later. The original speech, perhaps lost to time, featured a call to genocide as well as the call to arms. Fox insisted that it be cut rather than be perceived as encouraging such behavior (the Watts Riots of the ’60s were still fresh in everyone’s minds).

When Battle for the Planet of the Apes began production, Arthur Jacobs knew it would be the last in the series. Budgets had dwindled from each picture to the next, dropping from $5.8 million for the first film to $1.8 million for Battle, and Jacobs wanted to move onto other projects (he had produced Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam for director Herbert Ross in 1972).

With Cesar (McDowall) now the leader of an agrarian ape-human city, the former slave masters (the humans) must now struggle for equality with their former slaves and current masters. The situation for the humans is by and large much better than it was for the apes in Conquest, but it is not freedom. This subtle point was not as powerfully carried out as it could have been with a larger budget, but that was not to be the case.

While of interest to Apes fans, there is little to recommend the last feature to outsiders. There is, though, one interesting point in this film that even many die-hard fans aren’t aware of. There are two distinctly different prints of Battle for the Planet of the Apes. In the second, more rare version (which follows the final draft of the screenplay), the viewer sees a few key scenes regarding the Alpha Omega bomb. The viewer also sees Mendez, the Governor’s aide, decide not to use it. In this version it is clear that he is the forefather of Mendez XXVI from Beneath.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes was released in 1973, and Arthur P. Jacobs died suddenly in 1974. At the time, Ape-mania was in full swing. The Marvel Comics magazine Planet of the Apes was launched. For some reason it was made clear that Marvel could not adapt the upcoming television show, but they could adapt the films and create original stories. While the royalties generated by the magazine and other products were not even a blip on the radar by today’s Star Wars-inspired standards, Apes merchandise still sold big.

That same year, Twentieth Century Fox and CBS teamed up to create the television series Planet of the Apes.

Set in a different time (3085), earlier than the first film but later than Battle, the series followed the exploits of two human astronauts, Alan Virdon (Ron Harper) and Pete Burke (James Naughton), who enlist the companionship of a chimpanzee, Galen (Roddy McDowall) as they avoid capture by the ape authorities.

As was the case in most dramas of the time, Virdon, Burke and Galen spent their time fighting social injustices (it was, after all, the ’70s). The condition of humans in this period is substantially below what it was in Battle, but still above what is was in the first film.

The Dr. Zaius of this period (Booth Colman) definitely knows that man once ruled the planet and fears Virdon and Burke for that reason. His military counterpart, General Urko (Star Trek’s Mark Lenard) just knows they represent a threat to their way of life.

The show was up against ABC’s The Night Stalker and didn’t do well at all in the ratings. It was canceled after just 14 episodes were filmed. For reasons lost to the murkiness of time, one episode did not air in the U.S. while the show was on network television (it did air overseas with the original broadcasts). The thirteenth episode, “The Liberator,” got its first U.S. broadcast during the Sci-Fi Channel’s Planet of the Apes re-runs.

Even that, though, wasn’t enough to kill the apes off. The next year, NBC unveiled Return to the Planet of the Apes.

Return was yet another take on the same song. Three astronauts (Bill Hudson, Judy Franklin and Jeff Carter), crash land on the planet, meet the humans, meet the apes, find out it’s Earth and so on. This time it’s 3979.

The interesting twist was the Underdwellers, who were somewhat like the mutants in Beneath, but who worshipped a statue of Judy which read “Lost USA,” so they called her “Usa.” It was clearly in contradiction to some elements of the films, but by and large the stories were very inventive.

The series was produced by David DePatie and the legendary Friz Freleng (without digressing too far into the realm of editorializing, it is safe to say that that Freleng didn’t get “legendary” with this show). As with many animated programs of its era, the most discernable feature of the program was the obvious cost-cutting approach taken in the re-use of standard scenes, action and backgrounds.

The above complaints not withstanding, it is definitely possible to detect the influence of director-associate producer Doug Wildey in the production. Return was canceled after one season, though, and the Marvel magazine soon followed it. For many years, there were no new Apes stories.

The Tim Burton-directed Planet of the Apes remake, or “re-imagining” as it was called, hasn’t faired so well with the fans. Originally conceived as a way to kick-start the franchise, it’s mostly ignored.

With the rumors abounding of another new take, fans will no doubt wait and see.