MONKEY FOR NOTHING
Apes meet The Twilight Zone in Planet Of The Apes: Visionaries
It’s The Planet Of The Apes, but like you’ve never seen it before.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Planet Of The Apes would have been a very different film if it had been made from Rod Serling’s original screenplay. Now Boom! Studios has turned The Twilight Zone creator’s first draft – which originally envisaged Ape City as a thriving metropolis populated by simian academics rather than the film’s more primitive society – into a graphic novel, written by Dana Gould and drawn by Chad Lewis.
“It was down to budgetary concerns but it changed the tone of the movie drastically, keeping it more of a science fiction adventure and less of a political thriller,” Gould tells Red Alert. “It’s very cloak and dagger, with a lot of political skulduggery.”
Significantly, the main character in this version is an astronaut called Thomas, who is not to be confused with the more misanthropic George Taylor, who was brought memorably to life by Charlton Heston. “Thomas is a prototypical mid-century urban liberal,” explains Gould. “Like many of his protagonists, he was very much a mouthpiece for Serling himself, and to that end, it feels more like a super-sized Twilight Zone.”
“It was a really unique world-building experience,” adds Lewis. “We wanted to explore the idea of a modern bustling city as imagined in a script written in 1968, so for inspiration I watched a pile of Mad Men episodes to look at the architecture of 1960s Brooklyn streets.”
With the 1968 film’s associate producer Mort Abrahams having previously confirmed that it was entirely Serling’s idea, Visionaries preserves the film’s famous twist ending. “It may not be what fans expect,” teases Boom! Studios editor Dafna Pleban. “The way that Dana has structured the scene and Chad has drawn it has brought a new, bittersweet nuance to the moment.” SJ
Planet of the Apes: Visionaries is published on 22 August.