K17-Time of the Apes

Film Year:  1987 (edited from a 1974 TV series)

Genre:  Science Fiction, Fantasy

Director:  Atsuo Okunaka, Kiyo Sumi Fukazawa

Starring:  Reiko Tokunaga, Hiroko Saito, Masaaki Kaji, Tetsuya Ushio, Badu Hatakeyama, Kazue Takita 

MST Season:  KTMA

The Movie

A Japanese TV series evolved from the Planet of the Apes franchise?  You did it.  You finally really did it!

Of course this had to happen.  Why wouldn't it?  In the mid-70's, Planet of the Apes was so hot that other countries were bound to want their own versions, and Japan went to their most popular company for Tokusatsu shows at the time, Tsuburaya Productions, best known for their Ultraman franchise and also the effects house that created the original Godzilla.  They create their own little lore for a future conquered by simians, though it's a rather childish and mostly complete nonsense.

Aired in Japan under the title of Army of the Apes, this series was about a pair of children named Johnny (originally Jiro) and Caroline (originally Yurika) who visit their uncle's science lab.  During an earthquake they and a lady scientist named Catherine (originally Kazuko) accidentally get frozen in cryogenic tubes and covered in rubble, which left them lost for generations.  They awaken in a future where apes have taken over society and aren't exactly friendly to humans (though oddly more accepting than those in the Planet of the Apes franchise).  They meet a human in the wild named Godo and a child ape named Pepe and the quintet live on the run from ape soldiers.

Around the time Army of the Apes was airing, Planet of the Apes also made a move to television with its own TV series in America (starring the series mainstay Roddy McDowall).  That series was an episodic "heroic misunderstood vagrant" series like The Fugitive, where the characters went from town to town, sometimes got into some mischief, but mostly fixed some local problem.  It wasn't a great show, but it was what TV at the time expected it to be even if it was too expensive to produce for the ratings it gathered.  Army of the Apes seems to be more serialized, as from what I can tell each episode led into the next and the whole series told one giant story.

This particular version is an import edit called Time of the Apes, where American producer Sandy Frank took all 26 episodes of Army of the Apes and whittled it down to an endless supply of chase scenes that barely make sense.  Humans wake up and there are apes!  Why are there apes?  Doesn't matter.  Just run!  They meet a guy named Godo.  Who is he?  Nobody cares.  He helps them.  Ape soldier wants Godo dead.  For what reason?  He doesn't really have one (not until the conclusion anyway).  He's a threat, so more running!  The apes are rebelling!  Why?  Who's to say?  But the ape in charge is like "Stop, please" and they're like "Okay."  There is a UFO in the sky!  Is it relevant to anything?  Not really.  But it will help write us out of a corner at the end.  It won't do it well, but it's something.

I have no idea if any of this is fleshed out more in the original Japanese series, but grinding away eleven hours into a lean ninety minutes is bound to lose something.  Time of the Apes is all action and no context.

Tokusatsu fans will likely look to this production just to see what a Tsuburaya version of Planet of the Apes might look like.  The apes in this movie aren't as expressive as John Chambers' impressive make-up from the original Planet of the Apes films as Army of the Apes looked more like slightly mobile gorilla masks.  The one thing I will give the ape design here is that the main apes all look distinct from each other.  Planet of the Apes usually relied on the actors to make each ape distinguishable from the next, but here there is more effort to make each ape look different than the previous, which does wonders for character distinction.  Less effort is put into ape extras (which was true for Planet of the Apes as well), but there is a clear effort here.  Both the series and the resulting film re-edit are silly as hell, but there are a few things worth praising here.

The Episode

Joel?  Hey Joel!  Where you at Joel?  It's Movie Sign, Joel!

The KTMA version of Time of the Apes is the only episode of the series that does not have a human host on board the Satellite of Love.  It makes the experiment a little redundant when you think about it, because according to the premise the movies are supposed to be subjected to a human test subject and not a couple of wisecracking robots.  But alas, Joel was out of town and the show must go on.  What can we do?  The Mads don't seem to care, so why should we?

Theoretically this episode seems like a counter to Gamera, which featured Joel alone riffing a movie.  This one is just his companions, but at least there are two people in the theater to bounce off of each other.  That being said, Time of the Apes isn't really that much funnier.  The movie is nutso but it's so rapid paced that I think Josh and Trace have a hard time latching onto it for something memorable.  They seem to fall back on ape puns a lot and are more or less lost for the entire duration of the movie.  They digress a few times into unrelated bits like talking about Joel's predicament and Servo even asks Crow if he watched the Oscars, which is a weird conversation to have in the theater though topical to the time the episode was aired.  It doesn't feel like anybody was feeling the energy in the theater for this episode, though I doubt it would have been much better if Joel had showed up this week.  He probably would have been confounded by the film too.

The host segments are a little more playful than the theaterwork.  There is a bit more effort to flesh out what happened to Joel into an episode-long bit.  There is mystery over the opening as the Bots try to cover for his absence, while they deduce it out a bit later on that he got blown out of the airlock completely naked.  Luckily this is a puppet show in Minneapolis and not actually outer space, so Joel is not dead.  It's funny that they talk about him behind his back while hearing pounding on the hull, which most assuredly is supposed to be Joel trying to get in.  There is also a cute segment where they use the greenscreen behind the theater doors to play mind games on the audience.  Ultimately it's the lore behind Joel's disappearance that assures Time of the Apes is an episode to remember and not the movie portion itself.

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