Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.

The popularity of the original 1968 adaptation of Planet of the Apes, written mostly by Rod Serling, and its four sequels cannot be underestimated.  The 1970s were wild and woolly and shotgun, and for most of mainstream America, the syndicated reruns of Star Trek and the Apes theatrical series were their true introductions to science fiction.

Planet of the Apes is the most intelligent and the most witty of the series -- basically proving that the first entry is almost always the best (with some exceptions) -- and is certainly the most ironic.  Its moments of grandeur, along with its moments of ironic introspection, are what turned a dumb little premise into a classic that people quote even today.  Because Serling made it matter.  Serling turned a story about a race of violent simians into a reflection on man and his own violent predilections.  It resonates with us, in our very bones, and in our own fears.

We are a planet of apes, whether we want to face it or not.  Like a man once said, we're just cavemen in blue jeans.

Maybe it's about time we changed.  Maybe it's time we grew up.

The original paperback cover of 'Salem's Lot is what arrested me.  It's grandeur can't really be seen in the photo above, but it was a solid, glossy black, with the face of a girl embossed.  The only spot of color was a drop of crimson at the corner of her lips -- an image at once evocative of a tombstone, the darkness, and the undead.

Later editions were published without the embossing -- it was too expensive -- and instead showed the same face, but with blue, unearthly highlights.

I believe it was the paperback marketing of this novel and Carrie -- along with Brian DePalma's film adaptation in 1976 -- that really turned Stephen King into the known author he is today.  Carrie's first paperback was a double spread -- her face on the cover, and when you opened it up, a second scene of her town in flames.  Back then, books were marked in small dumps not only in bookstores, but at cash registers in department stores.  I bought Carrie at Montgomery Ward's.  That's good marketing, both visually and at point of purchase.  I wonder what would happen if they did that now . . .

I can't remember what came first for me: reading the book or seeing the movie.  No matter -- they were both intense, groundbreaking experiences.
 
The movie was perhaps the first adult-oriented film that I truly appreciated, and I remember watching this with more awe and interest than I had with Kubrick's 2001.  The book -- to be precise, the book's cover -- instantly grabbed me when I saw it on the paperback racks at Woolworth's in downtown Newport News in 1971.  At first, I thought it was a sex book because the naked guy was a steal from a popular sex/sociography book, The Naked Ape, not-so coincidentally published by the same publisher.
 
Instead, it was something better: an adult sf novel that was also mainstream, that told its story not just using narrative text, but with computer illustrations.  It was like a comic book for grown ups, and it blew me away.  It still does.






 

Crichton went on to create Westworld (which I will talk about eventually) and, much later, Jurassic Park.  But Andromeda still lives on for me.  It's one of those movies I have to watch whenever I find it, just switching through the channels.  41 years later, it has lost absolutely none of its dramatic and graphics-intense impact.

After over a decade of sitcom episodes on CBS starting in the early '70s, it is hard, for some, to gauge the impact the original film had on popular culture. M*A*S*H, the show was anti-war.  But the film was clearly anti-Vietnam War.  Even though politics were evident, yet also downplayed, in the movie, the author of the original novel reportedly loved the movie and hated the show.  It was close to what he wrote and experienced.  The show, was a different animal altogether, and the characters, while still uncontrolled and crazy, were whitewashed versions of the originals.
 
The movie remains a rebellious example of '70s filmmaking . . . and also a template for at least one groundbreaking comedy to come: Animal House.  It's a formative film, revelling in the spirit of life and irreverence.

 

Every year, we return to Orlando. Instinct makes us do this. We are like the salmon who must swim upstream to spawn, and die. They are lucky. We must go to theme parks.

A theme park is an amusement park where you pay one blanket admission fee, which is quite steep, but once you're inside, everything is totally free, except all the other stuff you end up buying, which will run you around $11,000 per child. Every few yards you find yourself stopping to buy high-priced theme-park food, theme-park merchandise, theme-park clothing and theme-park photographs of yourself looking theme-park ugly.

Sometimes you stop and just spontaneously throw money into the theme-park air. You can't help yourself! You're theme-park stupid!

Everybody's IQ drops at theme parks. Really smart people, Mensa members, will stand in line for two hours so they can go on a 90-second ride with a name like "The Runaway Turnip." They do this because everybody else is doing it, and because they paid for it, and because they're going to have FUN, dammit!

Orlando, of course, is Fun Central; it's infested with theme parks. Thousands of Orlando residents make their living looking out through the eye holes of giant smiling character heads. At quitting time, they go to the Theme Park Workers' Bar, where you see everybody - Pluto, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Piglet, etc. - pouring martini pitchers directly into their mouth holes, trying to forget about a day that consisted largely of having small, highly excited children run into them at exactly crotch level. Around 2 a.m. everyone staggers out to the parking lot to watch Chip and Dale pound each other senseless. Those two HATE each other.