Going Ape

The following is an excerpt from my future book, Movies with My Dad and Other Tales from a Sci Fi Life.
The Margate Twin was only open during the summer and, in a tourist town, they always had to have something playing. The $1 kid’s matinee price was priceless and what they showed were well worth the buck. My father would give my brother and me $2 each and send us to the movies. This worked well on a rainy day or a day that was just not a “beach day.” I also don't think all the movies were for him. The Margate Twin would show second run, third run and the occasional older movies like the Planet of the Apes (1968). Ah, the Planet of the Apes. About now, gentle reader, you are either saying, "ugh," "right on," or an emotion somewhere in-between. At around 7 or 8 years old the Apes movies were more than other worldly. They were amazing!

This was the early 70s and to imagine space travel like that seemed reachable. The frightening world the astronauts landed on was surreal. You knew, watching it that something was going to happen to them and it wasn’t going to be good. The landscape was absolutely desolate and creepy. The posters had the Apes on them, not so scary, but when they first appear on horseback to round the humans up, totally scary. The film angle from the point of view of the humans - seeing the net, hearing the horses, hearing the guns and seeing the hooves of the horses as the humans hid in the brush – gives me chills today. Then captured and rounded up – I was practically under my seat. Charlton Heston was already known to me as Moses, from watching the Ten Commandments on TV, but this was no Moses. His character, Taylor, was certainly tough enough and I could feel his frustration of not being able to speak. Maybe it was being a child and not being understood by adults, hard to say but I could completely understand Taylor and his need to escape. When he does finally take off out of the prison and runs through the museum, of what appears to be natural history, there is a human on display, one of his fellow astronauts. This ads to the further freakiness of the movie and my fear of being captured. When Heston speaks, the now eternal line, "Take your paws off me, you damn dirty ape," it certainly makes one take pause. The end was, of course, the big shocker - The entire time he was on Earth (sorry if I just ruined it for anyone). There were subsequent follow up movies that I enjoyed, every last bit - Beneath, Escape, Conquest and Battle For The Planet of the Apes. All of them fun for the endless pretend to play of a child.

Besides climbing from roof to roof or running through the side yards of our neighbors, the beach seemed to be the best fitting place to play Planet of the Apes. Since most of the movie is set in some kind of desert locale it was perfect. It didn't matter the time of year, the beach was fun to run on and, like in the movie, very few places to hide. There was a large concrete structure on the beach leftover from a pier, a foundation, the old boardwalk...we were never sure and we found it fun to hide behind and jump off of. We would pretend to be running from the apes or planning how to take back the Earth. Often, we would just recreate the entire movie, as much as we could, at least the outside scenes. My cousins would sometimes, once again, be sucked in. This lead to more characters like some being Cornelius or some random gorilla that was out to get us.

When I was much older and living with my father and brother, there was much excitement if there was a Planet of the Apes marathon on TV. I remember one time there was a different one on each night! We had the popcorn popping! My father would, begrudgingly, watch it with us. Since we would hold the TV hostage for the week, he had no choice. When the new movie came out in 2001, my husband and I went to see it. We were amazed by the sell-out crowd and had to see a later show. There were guys dressed in ape costumes - it was very cool. I had no idea the fervor it would bring! The movie was enjoyable. The humans were frightened, the apes were suitably scary and the plot was acceptable but it’s hard to have a Planet of the Apes movie without Roddy McDowell. No worries because there was Charlton Heston.

The Apes franchise continues and although the movies are fun and entertaining, my mind still takes me back to the Margate Twin and the days on the beach of being an astronaut.