Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes

Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes is one of five TV movies made in the early 1980's by editing together episodes of the canceled Planet of the Apes TV series. This one is made from two of my favorite episodes: The Gladiators and The Legacy. Some consider the editing of two episodes together to be a flaw of these TV movies, but I found all five TV movies to be quite entertaining. I especially enjoyed them when they were first shown on TV because they gave me a much wanted glimpse of the long canceled TV show which wasn't being re-run in the years long before the Planet of the Apes television series was made available on DVD. Roddy McDowall as Galen is my favorite character of the entire Apes franchise, but the entire cast of this version of the Apes series does a wonderful job. Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes stands out in my mind as one of my absolute favorites due to Ron Harper's sensitive portrayal as astronaut Alan Virdon who longs for the wife and child he left behind when he blasted off into space. Virdon's longing to return to his family is a highpoint of this series, and it really comes into play in The Legacy segment of Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes. Harper as Virdon really shines in this one, and he helped to make Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes a very enjoyable part of my youth. I still have warm feelings for it.

FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE PLANET OF THE APES has a cool title but that's about this. This is yet another case where two episodes of the '70s TV show have been joined together to stand as a TV movie. The problem is that the two episodes are almost entirely unrelated so the cut and pasting is really noticeable, plus the television values don't really lend themselves to a feature length format.

The first half of this film is the more interesting because the episode focuses on gladiator bouts between the various humans who have been captured or enslaved by the apes. There are a few good fight scenes here, with not bad choreography and a general momentum which keeps it all going. The second half/episode has a bigger budget as it depicts the ruins of an ancient human city and its technology, but the storyline is weaker and doesn't really go anywhere.

Other than the usual cast members, viewers may spot youthful roles for both Marc Singer (THE BEASTMASTER) and, in particular, WATCHMEN's Jackie Earle Haley, who's still a kid here but still instantly recognisable from his role in the later film.

As a boy I saw and loved the original Planet of the Apes at a movie house. This weekend FMC featured all movies in the franchise, this included. This so-called movie is the product of cobbling together episodes from the 1974 Planet of the Apes series (deservedly canceled halfway through its first season). The so-called movie is so bad; no real plot, lame dialog, cheesy vinyl costumes, cheap stock sound effects, completely unbelievable talking and clean-shaven humans with 70's style big disco hair, and to top it off, a laughable absence of APES! The only rational conclusion one can draw is that the rating of 10 from 33% voting can only be a attempt to stuff the ballot box. So be warned... or better, watch for 10 minutes and come back here and set the rating right.

The Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes is the second TV film made from editing episodes of the ill-fated 1974 TV series, The Planet of the Apes, together to make a feature length movie. This one was constructed using the second episode entitled 'The Gladiators' and the fifth entry, 'The Legacy'. The basic problem with these films – and this one's no exception – is that they really seem like what they are, i.e. two episodes joined together. Consequently, they don't work very well as a 90 minute movie and have a split focus. In this one, the first half was the stronger, where the protagonists are captured by the ape inhabitants of a village that organises gladiatorial battles between their human underlings; the second half involves, you guessed it, one of them being captured again but is additionally set in a ruined city where they discover old technologies from their destroyed civilisation. As I say, it begins well enough but gets progressively more tedious in the second half. If you really want to see this stuff, you'd be a lot better just watching the old unedited episodes from the TV series on DVD.