2nd place! Gonna finish the cartoon and newer apes soon, to get those bonus points.

Looks like it's neck and neck between you and Smerd for 2nd.

I'm looking forward to getting into the cartoon apes but I want to finish the live action show first. I'm planning on seeing War For the POTA on Monday and that will finish the POTA films for me.

smerd might win it, because after I finish the Apes series, I might lose the will to live and cut out on the challenge. King Kong is alright, but he's just not as cool as this series. I'm glad it's taken me over half a month to see all the Planet of the Apes franchise, but even after all this, there just ain't enough of 'em!

There's lots of other movies with monkeys you can watch.

Monkey Shines
Link
Babe: Pig in the City
Every Which Way But Loose

Tanya's Island

Don't forget the gazillion spooky house comedies from the 60's and earlier that always feature a gorilla!

nice work beats, gonna take a big effort from Smerd or Box to trouble you, maybe India if the volume of classics keeps coming.

this challenge didnt really enthuse at first, but i've been pleasantly suprised by the 70s pota sequels and mainstream monkiness in general. esp so the cannibal holocaust death in kid friendly Kong Skull Island! (poor image, but best i could find)

I can't tell what is happening in that picture (though I can kinda guess due to your mention of Cannibal Holocaust, but it's still a cool image. I like those colors that way. I mean to watch this film. I also like the old-school-looking poster for it.

was suprised there wasn't a btter still, in the movie you get a frame or two glimpse of the spider leg impaling a soldier mouth through ass, like the iconic kebab native woman in CH bit gruesome for kids, but so fast they may not notice, cool of the filmmaker to throw in a video nasty nod in a family film tho

That's actually a cool image. I'm not sure I caught the CH reference when I saw this at the movies but now that you mention it I'll be on the lookout for it when I eventually rewatch this. There were several bits that were surprisingly graphic for a PG-13. It had some cool moments but overall I felt let-down. They did a better job with the recent Godzilla reboot - apparently the plan is to get the two big guys together for a rematch soon.

see my spoiler above for clarification on the CH ref, you would def know if you saw! it's the same dude who directed Godzila i think (could easy look it up in the time it takes me to type this procrastination but i can't be bothered) so a face off isn't improbable.

Agree that it was graphic for a fairly young audience (12A over here, which basically means 8 year olds could watch with a 12 yo) but i enjoyed the whole Heart of Darkness thing, even if John C hammed up his channeling Hopper a bit too much. The monster battles were really well done too. I saw KSI just a coupla days after DOTPOTA and aside from both having dodgy scripts the Kong film was far superior. The mo-cap stuff in Dawn was fantastic, esp Serkis, but that was about it for me. On the positive ape side, this challenge led me to the joys of Escape & the other original sequels which were suprisingly good fun, so thanks for that!

I'm excited that this challenge has led to some people exploring the ape universe for the first time. As I said somewhere else it was my Star Wars as a kid and I spent a lot of time there in my imagination and watching the films. I even built POTA models, had action figures and a board game and read comics.

I applauded the originality of the Rise screenplay but although I still really enjoy them - the screenplays of Dawn and War are starting to feel a bit forced in the way they incorporate the original mythos. The motion capture is still superb but Matt Reeves, the director of Dawn and War, doesn't do a great job with "human" actors.

I just came here to update my progress but it looks like I was 4 hours too late to get included in this Midway thread. But I'm actually doing pretty good in 4th place with 1,732 points!

I racked up a bunch of minutes watching the old serial, King of the Jungle (1931). It was quite awful but a great way to earn points. Though I've got in mind watching several others (The Lost Jungle and Darkest Africa), I don't know their ape quotient, so I'm not certain they'll qualify. I downloaded all of them shortly before discovering this challenge and while I'm eager to check 'em out, I'd be disappointed if they didn't have a primate and I was wasting so many challenge minutes. Anyone familiar with 'em enough to let me know?

I'm also well on my way through the Planet of the Apes TV series and might even go for the animated one as well. I'll probably attempt the 5 Kong movies since I had about 5 of them in my personal line-up anyway.

I was also going to watch a shit-ton of the old Tarzan movies (and plenty of the sleazier later ones. Pretty sure they'd mostly count. He is the Ape-Man, after all; he's bound to have some monkeys about him. But the first one I watched -- it really actually kinda troubled me. Watching the "explorers" or whatever felt almost as sleazy to me as watching the "Westerners" in Cannibal Holocaust.

One guy asks a young woman something like "Can you shoot?"
She replies, "Like an angel."
So then they just ride their boat through a bunch of hippos and start shooting and killing the dickens out of all of them. That incident could have been avoided-- the characters just seemed to revel in disrupting a native habitat to stamp their dominion. Then Tarzan gets in a fist fight with a lion or something-- that was weird for me-- I was supposed to root for the human to kick the shit out of a big cat, I think. Now, I'm not usually super-sensitive to dated mores and dated behavior in old films, but this was so crass. While I do believe humans are a sophisticated species who can and probably should manipulate environments to their advantage (such as building cities and civilizations), that doesn't mean they should be dicks about it. But in Tarzan, the Ape Man they all treated the wildlife like such shit so giddily, it's apt that I'm watching it for a Trash Epics challenge because it just felt trashy. I don't suppose the remainder of the original Tarzan films will be so insensitive to animal abuse/wanton murder/anthropocentric hubris but if they are then I probably won't be able to finish them.

I haven't been updating my thoughts like this on the main thread because I've been too busy watching stuff for the challenge. And doing other life-type stuff.

Oh, and although I do have a lot of other movies ready to watch, I'm hoping I can also squeeze in a rewatch of some Werner Herzog classics (for the monkey crucifixion in Even Dwarfs Started Small and the climactic scene in Aguirre-- you guys know what I'm talking about. Yeah!).

I also want to say that I am strangely enjoying participating in this challenge even though most of what I've watched so far hasn't been really enjoyable.

Do you like reading my ramblings?

Definitely monekys in Aguirre!

Monkey Research 101:
One of the chapter titles for The Lost Jungle is Gorilla Warfare and another is The Gorilla so I would say it's a go-rilla for monkey content. Also, according to IMDb there's an uncredite Charles Gamorra playing a gorilla in the cast. (first I searched for key word on IMDb but the only one that came up was serial. Found the chapter list on wikipedia)

For Darkest Africa - the chapter titles provide no clues but I found these two images when I did a google image sort:























That's some of the tools I've been using to verify ape content when I wasn't sure.

I started the film Nabonga today and it led me to thinking about potential serials I could watch but I probably don't have enough time. I really enjoyed the first 20 minutes of Nabonga (with serial star Buster Crabbe)

Tarzan - If you can find Tarzan's Greatest Adventure - it lives up to the title. Very little Cheeta the chimp action but enough to count, and it has a great cast: Sean Connery and Anthony Quale are the villains. Animal treatment in Tarzan movies (and all of Hollywood for that matter) was very suspect for most of the classic period - on screen and off. I love the Tarzan movies - I was always palying castaway or Tarzan as a kid and they appeal to that side of me - but I have to turn off my love of animals sometimes when I watch them. Usually Tarzan is against the great white hunters slaughtering, but then he kills a lion or crocodile with his knife. Of course the lions and crocs are depicted as predators - and I routinely kill rattlesnakes on my own property so I understand where he's coming from. The Tarzan books are great too - much more savage than the films ever were.

So, most Tarzan films have apes or monkeys but not all. I wanted to watch Tarzan goes to India (directed by guillermin who also did the 70's King Kong, it's sequel and Tarzan's Greatest Adv. - but form everywhere i checked it looks like no monkeys.

For a similar kind of tale I recommend The Jungle Book with Sabu. It looks like it would be a beautiful film if ever restored. Sabu is awesome. He also protects and relates to many animals - even snakes - but his goal in life is to kill the tiger.

Congrats on hitting 4th place!

Rambling? Who's rambling?

Thanks for all of the information!
I do hope to eventually get to an Edgar Burrough's Tarzan book someday. You telling me they're more intense than the movies makes me curious, even though the films' content itself is hard to watch-- I even kinda felt a little queasy when Tarzan instigated a battle between big cats and elephants (or something) in the climax of Tarzan and His Mate. I guess I'm a lot more sensitive to animal violence than I'd realized. Now that I think of it, when I was a little boy growing up in the country I would go out spearing frogs, shooting snakes and rabbits and stuff. Nowadays I don't even like to hook/kill/cut/gut/scale/clean a fish.

I did just watch The Jungle Book, too! I was struck by how gorgeous it was. I had to look up who directed it because it was so well composed with striking color designs, I thought maybe it was a Michael Powell movie. I watched the version released by Criterion and it looked sparkling, so I'm guessing that's pretty much the ideal restoration you desire.

I didn't realize that Criterion had released it. I'd like to get ahold of that. Powell is one of the directors for another Korda / Sabu film, The Thief of Bagdad, which also has gorgeous color cinematography.

The Tarzan in Burroughs is intelligent and savage. So his interior monologues are terrific and sometimes he gets very angry - he would definitely Hulk out a lot. The violence in the books isn't extreme - but the films definitely tone down the savagery of Tarzan's actions. He attempts to become more civilized but it never takes. His wild nature always calls him back to the jungle.

Burroughs is a pulpy writer but he keeps things exciting. He does suffer from a lot of outdated ideas about race and animal treatment, but he is equally forward thinking at times too.

If you do read them - read them in order.

I'm enjoying the Marvel POTA magazines. The comic parts are entertaining, the original story that is set after Battle, though the lead human look a lot like Tarzan. The comic adaptation of the movies are also pretty good. But it's really the articles and interviews I'm really enjoying.

I *cough*downloaded*cough* the shole collection and am reading them on my Kindle Fire.

I still have my copies of the Marvel comics in a box. A bit old and musty but still very readable. I'm hoping to find time to get to them. I just finished the Battle novelization and started reading a collection of POTA short stories but I am likely to read a couple of POTA comic collections from Dark Horse first:



https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/planetoftheapes/images/1/18/Old_Gods.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100216155858

I really need to get these.

It's funny, that Tarzan on the Planet Of The Apes. In the continuing comic in the Marvel Magazine POTA, the lead looks and even wears a loincloth like Tarzan.

I'm sure they were borrowing ideas - and Tarzan did time at both Marvel and DC as well as a bunch of other comic book houses.

Remember Kamandi? Jack Kirby's epic version of Planet of the Apes, more or less, with all sorts of talking animals in a future earth.

I do. I have a few issues, should read them again, been decades. And yeah, that cover is kinda obvious in its POTA influence.