13 Planet Of The Apes Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

9. There Was An Entire Subspecies Of Mutant Humans

For all Pierre Boulle's satirical observations, his Planete Des Singes is not a product of the Cold War. But the American pulp SF tradition was already dealing with the theme of nuclear annihilation in the 1950s, albeit in the metaphorical shape of prehistoric beasties awakened from centuries-long slumber by the atom bomb, or radioactive mutated animals; by the next decade, movies like Fail Safe and Dr Strangelove (both 1964) posited that if mankind stockpiles those world-destructive weapons, we're eventually going to use them. The same shadow fell over Colonel Taylor (Heston) in the first movie: "You maniacs! You blew it up!" he hollers despairingly at the ruin of the Statue of Liberty. "Damn you all to hell!" It all becomes suddenly clear: it was The Bomb that put the evolutionary process into reverse. This is taken further in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) by the irradiated, scarred, human mutants who worship The Bomb and sing 'All Things Bright And Beautiful' to it. Their god is the doomsday weapon that a dying Taylor activates, destroying the planet - but political conservative Chuck Heston wasn't making an antiwar statement by insisting on the scene, he just wanted out of the series.