MOVIE REVIEW: Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes
MOVIE REVIEW: Planet of the Apes (TV)
Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes (Roddy McDowall, Ron Harper)
The pain of enduring Beneath the Planet of the Apes had prepared me for whatever else I was going to see. By this point, my expectations were low. Very low. I knew that Escape from the Planet of the Apes was the third entry in the series, but for some reason when I set my VCR to tape the Apes marathon a long time ago, I didn't record it. To my surprise, what I got instead was an old episode of the original TV series. It's actually comprised of two separate episodes, but they flow together without interruption (no obvious fade to black for commercial breaks) and, storywise, they flow into each other quite well. The "movie" is Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes and it's not half bad. Then again, a tracheotomy wouldn't be half bad compared to my previous Apes viewing.
The first episode originally aired in October of 1974 and was entitled "the Horse Race", although no titles actually appear at the start. Roddy McDowall is back, but this time as the ape Galen, not the Cornelius character he was in the films. Galen has befriended a pair of humans (Ron Harper as Virdon and James Naughton as Birke), even though such a relationship is outlawed by the apes who govern the planet. In the TV series, the humans are subservient slaves but the twist is that they can now talk. This makes the episodes a little less biting than the ironic concept introduced in the first two feature films, but there are other aspects that work quite well.
"The Horse Race" is about a blacksmith (Wesley Fuller) and his son Greger (Meegan King). After Cornelius has been stung by a scorpion, the son takes a horse to fetch the antidote. He is spotted by the ape authorities, who have outlawed horseriding for humans, and they imprison him. Meanwhile, Virdon enters a race to help a Prefect bounce back after hard times.
The second episode is entitled "the Tyrant" and it originally aired in November of 1974. It's a little bit slower, but a nevertheless interesting look at the back door politics of the ape hierarchy. McDowall and Mark Lenard (Star Trek's Sarek as General Urko) are great in a match of wits that brings to mind a sci-fi version of the Sting. It also features a rather abrupt killing early on, which I normally wouldn't expect from a weekly serial.
Having only seen a couple of episodes of the series, I think I'd like to see more. The production values aren't too bad, and the make-up and masks are about as fair as the ones used in the movies. I like the way it tries to keep things exciting and entertaining without going for really obvious "meaningful" dialogue. I guess the show itself only lasted thirteen episodes, but, as the world has learned over time, you can never truly keep an ape franchise down.
