Return to the Planet of the Apes

Let's talk about the good. Very little. A few interesting ideas, but this takes place in an alternate reality Planet of the Apes. The producers went the cheap route, giving the apes vehicles and human artillery. The color palate was limited, as were characters expressions. I'll add in having them land in a mercury looking space capsule was really cheap. Wouldn't it have been as cheap to draw the Taylor ship from the movies? This really doesn't fit in with the existing timeline at all. As I said, since IMDB won't give a zero rating, but insists on 600 characters, this wasn't a good show in any sense, but, in some ways it was better than the live action show. It lifts a few ideas from the movies, "Bright eyes", being one, and friendly chimps being another, but again, some of the ideas are straight out of the 1950's. Barely worth a watch.

i just sat through all 13 episodes. what wasted potential. i love the apes movies, and it IS good for a Saturday morning cartoon show. it seems to have been written for a more adult audience, and actually came on after the live-action show was cancelled. on a positive note, it runs as one continuous storyline, rather than each episode being self-contained. it's the adventures of 3 astronauts (bill, jeff and judy) who crash land on future earth, apparently after the events of "beneath the planet of the apes". "brent" is even mentioned when they come across nova, who is still wearing brent's dogtags. but the future is different now. the apes suddenly have a complete technological civilization, including a huge built-up city, automobiles and radio & TV stations (i loved the scene with the ape farmer driving his hay truck through the country listening to "i'm going humanoid over you" on the radio).judy is nabbed and held by the psychic human "underdwellers", while jeff and bill try to rescue her and help the primitive humanoids living aboveground escape from the gorilla armies. but, it just drags so painfully in places, and the animation is just dreadful. in most scenes, all that moves is the mouth of the character speaking. there are also only 4 or 5 people doing all of the voices, which gets tiresome fast. hearing henry corden (the 2nd voice of fred flintstone) doing all of the gorilla voices is kind of funny, however.

I saw this back in the '70s myself. The animation, as one reviewer said, sucks. That's because it was hand-drawn in the '70s and not computer generated. That didn't come about until seven years later with the Disney science fiction movie Tron. Jeff's last name is Allen, and not Carter. I think that's Bill's last name. I've never read the Pierre Boulle novel Monkey Planet, which was what the French title Planet of the Apes translates to in English. Three astronauts, Bill, Jeff, and Judy, are on a top secret mission when their spaceship is sent through a time vortex to the year 3979. The apes have a high degree of civilization. They have cars and trucks. They even have their own culture. In one episode, Urko finds an old World War II era P-40 and repairs it to use against the "humanoids." The language is simplistic and un-PC in 2007. The cartoon, like the movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes, is very much maligned. The Underdwellers are from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Another reviewer said that it was a worthy sequel. I agree. It's a worthy sequel. I never saw it on video so I hope there's a DVD release soon. I'd buy it.

Planet of the Apes turned into a cartoon series.

Instead of watching all 13 episodes I would just watch the opening episode and leave it at that. I am no expert on animation, but I personally thought the show looked and sounded (good music cues) rather professional.

In the second episode we get more involved in the new premise of this cartoon world (the apes are driving cars, etc) and I found myself out of my comfort zone.

But perhaps the bigger problem is that the show is flogging a dead horse. By 1975 we had seen both a Apes film series and live action TV series - we had seen enough!

I remember seeing this as a kid, and I finally got myself a copy of the complete series on video. The cartoons series is a laugh to watch now, especially since some of the language used may not be politically correct according to year 2000 standards. Nether the less, the series was fun to watch. The whole cartoon tv-series focuses on a "cat and mouse chase", whereby three stranded astronauts are chased across the four corners of the earth by superior intelligent apes.