Line #49 Headscratchers/PlanetOfTheApes


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3	[[folder:Pierre Boulle's novel]]
4	* The book. The story of Ulysse, our human hero and narrator, is one found transcribed onto paper and found as a literal message in a bottle by the spacefaring characters of Jinn and Phyllis. Allowing for how Ulysse's transcript ends, how does he get the message back into space?
5	** And why? Probably intended as a SequelHook.
6	** Is the novel different to the Hungarian comic? In the comic Ulysse takes off with Nova and their child again after they learn that Earth has been taken over by apes, and his intention is to look for some third planet to live in (WritersCannotDoMath coupled with AllPlanetsAreEarthlike and SpaceIsAnOcean, as is typical of stories at the time this came out). The bottle implies that Ulysse never found a suitable planet.
7	** Ulysse'a narrative in the book just ends with them landing on Earth and are approached by a police officer he realizes is a gorilla. It then goes to the Frame Story of Jinn and Phyliis. It sounds like that comic added that part to explain the unanswered question that brought this headscratcher in the first place.
8	** At the beginning of his manuscript, Ulysse talks about living on a ship which is providing all their needs, and hoping to find another human planet out in space, and casts out the message in hopes some pre-Ape-takeover human society will read it and be forewarned (the novel seems to imply the evolution of apes, humans, then intelligent apes supplanting humanity is destined to occur on all life-bearing worlds. . . it ''is'' French satire). One can assume that, once he got over the shock and despair at seeing Earth conquered by Apes, he ran right back into the launch and took off for his spaceship, then started looking for somewhere else to call home.
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12	* Apes make ''terrible'' pets: dangerous, destructive, unmanageable and expensive. Yet the original films had them as replacements for dogs and cats. Does that mean that rabbits, ferrets, parakeets, hamsters, and all the other animals that were vastly more suited to be pets also died out? Bloody selective plague, if so, considering that horses and humans both survived.
13	** The only explanation that might have explained this, and I stress might, is if the movie would have suggested the apes in ''Conquest...'' had been genetically altered to be a slave race as opposed to just being normal apes that had been trained. This too would have explained why all the apes were now humanoid in appearance.
14	** The novelization does in fact state that the apes were genetically modified to make them more pliable as pets (and more intelligent to handle menial work).
15	* Why do the humans start taking apes as pets? ''Escape From the Planet of the Apes'' had Cornelius tell humanity how the apes would rise starting with pets. Humanity clearly believed this because instead of treating talking apes as the incredible wonder that we would it's seen as a huge problem and they spend a lot of Conquest trying to kill Caesar because they know what he represents. So given they had warnings, warnings that were apparently taken seriously by the majority of humanity, (It would be different if the talking space apes were treated as some kind of hoax) why do they still take ape pets and on top of that start training them to do things as complicated as shopping and cutting hair? If I were in that scenario I'd be going circus to to circus exterminating organ grinding monkeys and no amount of dead pets would make me allow you to have ape pets. Pigs, iguanas, spiders, snakes, gerbils, possums, kangaroos. . .there has to be something. Hell we know horses survived the plague everybody could rock ''Franchise/MyLittlePony'' as long as it wasn't an ape. It's like a case of an entire planet being TooDumbToLive.
16	** In general people tend to be fickle and have short memories. And more importantly, Caesar was seen as TheAntichrist ape-child who would've brought about an ape apocalypse so much effort was expended in ''Escape'' to kill Caesar's parents and Caesar himself. And because it was believed that Caesar was killed, the rest of the world likely breathed a sigh of relief and probably just grew complacent over time eventually because they viewed Caesar as an ape equivalent to Spartacus, believing that without him there would be no ape uprising to supplant humanity.
17	* As there didn't seem to be any sentient gibbons or siamangs running around in this franchise, shouldn't it be called Planet of the ''Great'' Apes?
18	** WE only get to see a small part of North America. If it makes you feel better, write a fanfic called 'Southern Hemisphere of the Gibbons'.
19	* How did the English language remain so fully unchanged through ape revolution, nuclear war, and centuries of primitive culture? And how did the small ape community shown in the original movie maintain such a wide range of twentieth-century accents?
20	** An extremely conservative culture steeped in religious ritual might keep 'the First Speech' alive in the same way we still use Latin.
21	*** The original novel supports this in concept as it flat out stated the ape society hadn't advanced technologically at all since overthrowing the humans. They were stuck in at 1960's level tech, but there were implications they were on the verge of a leap forward. Since in the novel, it actually was another planet, there was a language barrier that had to be overcome, but since the movies are mostly set on Earth, stagnation is a possibility.

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