PLANET OF THE APES (1974): WHEN MAN BECOMES THE ANIMAL
Alienation, reversed power, handsome fugitives and one of television’s strangest visions of civilization turned upside down
By the BEAUX HOMMES Film & Culture Desk
Before streaming. Before prestige television. Before science-fiction series routinely received movie-sized budgets, American television attempted something remarkably ambitious:
It tried to put Planet of the Apes on television every week.
The live-action Planet of the Apes series premiered on CBS on September 13, 1974. It starred Ron Harper as astronaut Alan Virdon, James Naughton as astronaut Pete Burke, and Roddy McDowall as Galen, the chimpanzee who becomes their ally. Mark Lenard supplied the principal menace as the militaristic gorilla Urko, with Booth Colman as Zaius. Fourteen episodes were produced before the series disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived.
It deserved longer.
Because beneath its horses, ape masks, ruined civilization and weekly escapes is something still disturbing:
What happens to your understanding of yourself when society no longer considers you fully human?
That is where the 1974 Planet of the Apes becomes more than nostalgic television.
For BEAUX HOMMES Summer of Sci-Fi, we went back to this brief, strange series and found a show filled with alienation, cruelty, masculinity, friendship, social hierarchy—and some surprisingly beautiful visual storytelling.
THE MEN WHO HAVE LOST THEIR WORLD
The premise begins with two astronauts.
Alan Virdon and Pete Burke come from our technological civilization and find themselves thrown into Earth’s distant future—3085—where apes dominate society and humans occupy the subordinate position. Unlike the mute humans of the original 1968 movie, many of the humans in this television version can speak, reason, work and maintain communities. That makes the injustice more explicit: the apes cannot claim these people are merely animals because viewers can plainly see their intelligence.
Virdon and Burke therefore suffer a particularly brutal form of alienation.
They haven’t merely traveled to another country.
They haven’t merely lost their jobs, homes and families.
They have awakened in a civilization where the entire definition of humanity has changed.
Everything that once established their status has vanished.
Their education means little.
Their uniforms mean nothing.
Their nationality is irrelevant.
Their technology is gone.
Their social authority has disappeared.
Even their species has fallen down the social ladder.
They know something the society around them refuses to accept:
They are not inferior.
But knowing your own worth and having society recognize your worth are two very different things.
That may be the most powerful idea in the series.
ALIENATION WITHOUT AN ALIEN PLANET
One of the cleverest things about Planet of the Apes has always been that the astronauts are not really aliens.
They are home.
That realization powered the famous ending of the original film, but television allows the idea to become something slower and more psychological.
Virdon and Burke walk through landscapes that are recognizably Earth.
There are farms.
Roads.
Horses.
Rivers.
Ruins.
Human faces.
The sun still rises.
And yet almost everything familiar has been stripped of its original meaning.
That is true alienation.
The men can recognize the landscape without belonging to the civilization occupying it.
Imagine discovering that your country still exists but has forgotten you.
Imagine finding fragments of your culture treated as mysterious archaeological debris.
Imagine knowing that the civilization surrounding you rests partly upon the destruction of everything you once considered permanent.
The astronauts are not simply lost in space.
They have been erased by history.
THE BRUTAL GENIUS OF THE REVERSED ROLES
Then comes the franchise’s great provocation.
The apes treat human beings in many of the same ways human civilizations have historically treated both animals and other human beings they considered inferior.
Humans are captured.
Ordered around.
Imprisoned.
Used for labor.
Hunted.
Threatened.
Sold or controlled.
Denied authority over their own lives.
In some stories, they become entertainment. One episode, “The Gladiators,” centers on humans forced into combat for an ape audience.
It is uncomfortable because the reversal is deliberate.
Now the cage is on the other side.
Now humans experience being inspected rather than doing the inspecting.
Now another species gets to decide which humans are dangerous, useful, intelligent or disposable.
The broader Apes franchise has long been analyzed as an allegory about racial conflict, domination and the destructive cycle in which one group gains power and subjugates another. Scholar Eric Greene has argued that the shifting power relationship between humans and apes is central to the saga: superiority emerges from social power, not some inherent moral virtue possessed by either species.
That distinction matters.
The message isn’t:
Apes are bad.
The message is much more troubling:
Power can make almost anyone invent reasons why somebody else deserves less humanity.
URKO: BRUTALITY IN UNIFORM
Mark Lenard’s Urko represents the most obvious expression of that philosophy.
He is military power.
Suspicion.
Force.
Order maintained by intimidation.
To Urko, dangerous humans are not people requiring understanding.
They are a security problem.
And Virdon and Burke are especially dangerous because they possess knowledge.
They remember technology.
They understand machinery.
They know civilization existed before ape rule.
A physically powerless man who knows the truth can be more threatening to authoritarian systems than an army.
That is why the astronauts cannot simply surrender and explain themselves.
Their very existence contradicts the hierarchy.
Urko needs the social order to be true.
Virdon and Burke prove that it isn’t.
AND THEN THERE IS GALEN
Fortunately, the series does not make every ape cruel.
That would destroy its own argument.
Roddy McDowall’s Galen becomes the bridge between worlds.
McDowall had already played Cornelius and Caesar in the film series; for television he returned under another layer of chimpanzee prosthetics to create Galen, who ultimately accompanies the two astronauts.
And McDowall does something wonderful.
You stop watching the makeup.
The eyebrows rise.
The eyes react.
The mouth curls.
A small pause becomes a joke.
A worried glance communicates affection.
Galen becomes a character rather than an effect.
That performance is central to the show’s moral argument because Galen demonstrates that identity is individual.
He does not behave a certain way because he is an ape.
Urko’s cruelty is not biological destiny.
Nor is Galen’s compassion.
Each makes choices.
That is an important distinction in any story dealing with race, species, class or political power.
THREE MEN ON THE RUN
And this brings us to something BEAUX HOMMES readers are certainly allowed to notice:
This is a very handsome television show.
Ron Harper and James Naughton make an unusually attractive pair of science-fiction fugitives.
Harper’s Alan Virdon possesses the mature, square-jawed, traditional leading-man masculinity popular in American television of the period. He looks like the man you would expect to command the spacecraft.
There is solidity to him.
Shoulders.
Presence.
Authority.
The physical confidence of a man accustomed to being listened to.
And that makes Virdon’s predicament more interesting.
A traditionally powerful-looking man has entered a society where his appearance gives him no automatic authority whatsoever.
Then there is James Naughton’s Pete Burke.
Younger-looking, leaner and looser, Naughton brings a different masculine energy.
Burke can be skeptical.
Quick.
Restless.
Occasionally mischievous.
Where Virdon often carries the gravity of command, Burke feels more like the adventurous partner who might question the plan before helping execute it anyway.
The contrast works visually as well as dramatically.
You remember them as a pair.
THE HANDSOME HERO ISN’T AUTOMATICALLY THE POWERFUL HERO
There is an interesting visual contradiction here.
American television had conditioned audiences to recognize men like Harper and Naughton as heroes.
Handsome.
Fit.
Capable.
White male astronauts.
Representatives of technologically advanced America.
In another program, the surrounding world would organize itself around them.
Here?
They are fugitives.
Their handsome faces don’t matter to ape authority.
Their astronaut status doesn’t matter.
Their masculinity doesn’t grant privilege.
They can be captured.
Humiliated.
Threatened.
Put to work.
Chased through the countryside.
That is part of the show’s reversal.
The men still possess strength and intelligence.
But the civilization around them doesn’t assign those qualities the same social value.
It is a useful reminder:
Masculinity is partly something a man carries inside himself—and partly something society chooses to recognize.
Take away the recognition and the man must discover what remains.
VIRDON: THE MAN WHO WANTS TO GO HOME
Virdon’s emotional situation is particularly painful because he comes from a life that mattered to him.
The future isn’t an exciting frontier.
It is exile.
That changes the heroic equation.
The classic adventurer often has very little tying him down.
Virdon has something to lose.
His journey therefore contains a melancholy beneath the action.
Every ancient fragment could contain information.
Every ruined machine might offer a clue.
Every discovery raises the possibility of returning to the people he loved.
He is surrounded by Earth and separated from home by centuries.
Science fiction has produced few forms of loneliness crueler than that.
BURKE: THE OTHER HALF OF THE MASCULINE EQUATION
Burke prevents that melancholy from swallowing the series.
He provides another emotional temperature.
Virdon and Burke are appealing partly because neither has to become less masculine for the other man to matter.
They depend on one another.
They rescue one another.
They argue.
They strategize.
They experience fear.
They trust Galen.
It is male friendship without endless speeches about male friendship.
That is often the best kind.
Watch what the men do for each other.
That’s the relationship.
For BEAUX HOMMES, which frequently discusses masculinity as something larger than muscles and wardrobe, the pairing is worth studying.
Strength isn’t merely standing alone.
Sometimes strength is knowing which man you want standing beside you when the gorillas arrive.
THE ART DIRECTION: A WORLD BUILT FROM EARTH, STONE AND DECAY
The 1974 series does not possess a modern streaming budget.
And strangely, that is part of its charm.
CBS ordered fourteen episodes, reportedly budgeted at about $250,000 each, and the production filmed extensively around what is now Malibu Creek State Park. The production also reused existing visual material and worked within tight television schedules and limited sets. Art director Archie J. Bacon is credited across the series, with Stuart A. Reiss as set decorator.
What emerges is a future that feels remarkably physical.
Wood.
Mud.
Stone.
Leather.
Dust.
Iron.
Fire.
Horses.
Rough fabric.
Ancient-looking settlements.
The production does not constantly shout:
FUTURE!
And that is exactly why it works.
THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE THE PAST
The central visual joke of Planet of the Apes remains brilliant.
Human civilization advanced.
Human civilization destroyed itself.
And what followed looks ancient.
This is not the polished future of Star Trek.
There are no gleaming corridors stretching endlessly toward technological perfection.
Instead we get something closer to a medieval or frontier society occupying the remains of a civilization it does not completely understand.
Technology becomes archaeology.
That gives the art direction enormous thematic importance.
A broken machine is not merely dressing.
It is history.
A ruined structure becomes evidence.
A discarded human object may contain revolutionary information because the society encountering it no longer understands what it once meant.
For artists, that concept is gold.
DESIGNERS: NOTICE HOW LITTLE YOU ACTUALLY NEED
Modern science fiction often equates world-building with quantity.
More screens.
More aircraft.
More holograms.
More architecture.
More visual effects.
Planet of the Apes demonstrates another approach.
Take a recognizable landscape.
Alter the social hierarchy.
Change the costumes.
Introduce one extraordinary makeup language.
Scatter fragments of lost civilization throughout the environment.
Suddenly Earth becomes alien.
That is extremely sophisticated design thinking.
Good science-fiction art direction does not always require inventing everything.
Sometimes it requires changing the meaning of what already exists.
THE APE MAKEUP IS THE SET
We also have to acknowledge one of the franchise’s greatest visual inventions.
The ape face.
The makeup tradition developed for the films gives television an instantly recognizable civilization. By 1974, viewers needed only to see an orangutan robe, a gorilla soldier or Galen’s chimpanzee face and an entire social hierarchy was implied.
The masks function almost architecturally.
They tell you where you are.
They tell you who has status.
They immediately establish that this world belongs to somebody else.
Roddy McDowall’s skill is especially important because the prosthetics could easily have swallowed a television performance; instead, critics looking back at the series have continued to single out his ability to act through the makeup.
For portrait artists, makeup artists and photographers, that is a lesson:
Transformation should reveal character, not bury it.
COSTUME AS SOCIAL ORDER
Look at the silhouettes.
The apes are dressed.
Structured.
Organized.
Institutional.
The humans frequently appear simpler and less socially protected.
Costume therefore communicates power before dialogue explains anything.
You understand who controls the world because one group has uniforms, authority, weapons and social position.
That is costume design functioning politically.
Fashion always tells stories about status.
We do the same thing today.
A judge’s robe.
A police uniform.
A military jacket.
A business suit.
A designer gown.
A gym stringer.
Clothes announce which tribe we believe we belong to.
Planet of the Apes simply makes the mechanism impossible to ignore.
A WORLD WHERE BEAUTY CANNOT SAVE YOU
There is another reason this series belongs in BEAUX HOMMES.
We celebrate beauty.
We photograph beautiful people.
We admire strong bodies.
We enjoy handsome men.
But Planet of the Apes imagines a civilization where the standards determining worth have changed completely.
Virdon and Burke can be intelligent, fit, attractive and courageous.
The ape hierarchy can still classify them as dangerous animals.
That creates a provocative question:
How much of beauty is power—and how much power comes from living in a society that agrees with your definition of beauty?
Change the society and the answer changes.
The body remains.
Its social meaning does not.
BRUTALITY BECOMES MORE DISTURBING WHEN WE RECOGNIZE IT
The ape violence is effective because it rarely feels completely alien.
We’ve seen versions of these behaviors before.
Different uniforms.
Different centuries.
Different victims.
The powerful define another population as inferior.
They restrict movement.
They justify violence.
They decide who may possess knowledge.
They determine whose testimony counts.
They punish people who challenge accepted history.
That is why the reversal remains effective fifty years later.
The apes do not invent oppression.
They inherit the logic.
They merely change who stands at the top.
THE SERIES ISN’T PERFECT
No.
It can become formulaic.
The fugitives arrive somewhere.
A local problem appears.
Urko or another authority threatens them.
Galen helps.
They escape.
Repeat.
Even the historical summaries of the franchise note that repetitive storytelling was viewed as one of the show’s weaknesses, alongside its expense and ratings problems. CBS canceled it after its short 1974 run.
And yes, viewers accustomed to the cinematic grandeur of the original movie will sometimes feel television’s financial limitations.
But imperfection is not the same thing as irrelevance.
In fact, we find the limitations fascinating.
Because the production constantly has to ask:
What is the smallest image that still communicates the world?
Artists should ask themselves that question more often.
WHAT BEAUX HOMMES ARTISTS CAN LEARN FROM IT
Don’t begin with spectacle.
Begin with an idea.
Planet of the Apes begins with one extraordinary reversal:
What if humans weren’t in charge anymore?
Then everything grows from it.
Costume.
Makeup.
Architecture.
Politics.
Body language.
Weaponry.
Dialogue.
Religion.
Law.
Social class.
The way one character looks at another.
That is how serious world-building works.
A design decision should not merely look attractive.
It should tell us something about the civilization that created it.
WHAT WRITERS CAN LEARN
Take away your hero’s assumptions.
Virdon and Burke do not simply lose their equipment.
They lose their social identity.
That is much more interesting.
Ask:
Who is a powerful man when nobody acknowledges his rank?
Who is an educated man when his knowledge makes him dangerous?
Who is a handsome man in a culture where human beauty has no social authority?
Who is a civilized man when civilization calls him an animal?
Now you have drama.
WHAT MEN CAN LEARN
There is also something unexpectedly moving about watching these two men survive.
They do not possess unlimited power.
They frequently need help.
They depend on a friend who isn’t even human.
Their muscles cannot solve every problem.
Their knowledge cannot solve every problem.
Their courage cannot solve every problem.
But together?
They keep moving.
Masculinity doesn’t disappear when a man becomes vulnerable.
Sometimes vulnerability is where you discover whether the masculinity was real in the first place.
AND GALEN MAY BE THE MOST HUMAN OF THEM ALL
That is perhaps the franchise’s final joke.
The character teaching us the most about humanity is wearing an ape face.
Galen risks his safety for men society tells him are inferior.
He questions what he has been taught.
He develops loyalty across an enormous social divide.
He becomes curious instead of frightened.
That is civilization.
Not buildings.
Not technology.
Not uniforms.
Not species.
The ability to recognize another being’s humanity when your culture tells you not to.
WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT TODAY
Watch Planet of the Apes (1974) for Ron Harper and James Naughton.
Yes, we’re perfectly comfortable saying that.
They’re handsome.
They wear rugged 1970s adventure clothing well.
They spend considerable time running, riding horses, fighting, escaping and looking appropriately heroic while doing it.
BEAUX HOMMES readers deserve some aesthetic pleasure with their philosophy.
But stay for Roddy McDowall.
Stay for Galen.
Stay for the ruined-world imagery.
Stay for Mark Lenard’s menacing Urko.
Stay for the odd combination of western, road movie, dystopia and science fiction.
Stay for the uncomfortable reversal.
And watch what happens when two men who believed themselves representatives of the world’s most advanced civilization discover that history has reduced their entire species to second-class status.
That is science fiction doing what science fiction does best.
It takes something familiar.
Turns it upside down.
And hands it back to us.
BEAUX HOMMES VERDICT
★★★★ out of five
The 1974 Planet of the Apes is not as profound or as visually monumental as the 1968 film that inspired it.
It doesn’t need to be.
Television changes the scale.
Instead of one enormous revelation, we live inside the aftermath week after week.
That creates something the movie cannot:
the everyday experience of being the outsider.
Ron Harper brings classic masculine authority.
James Naughton brings youthful charm and energy.
Roddy McDowall brings intelligence and heart.
Mark Lenard brings menace.
And the art department turns California landscapes, earth-colored settlements, ape makeup, period-looking materials and fragments of ruined civilization into a future that somehow feels both ancient and strangely believable. The production’s location-heavy approach and limited resources are visible, but they also give the show its rough, tactile character.
Most importantly, the series leaves us with a question worth carrying beyond television:
If the roles were reversed, would we recognize cruelty more clearly?
Perhaps.
But the harder question is:
Can we recognize it before the roles reverse?
That is why Planet of the Apes survives.
Not because men in ape makeup are strange.
Because underneath the makeup—
the behavior is terribly familiar.
BEAUX HOMMES — SUMMER OF SCI-FI
Alien worlds. Human questions. Beautiful possibilities.
www.beauxhommes.com