I have, at various times, been told that I belong to The Me Generation, The Pepsi Generation, The Video Generation, The MTV Generation, Generation X, Generation Y, and, briefly in the nineties, Generation Next. While this short list cannot exhaust all of the varied appelations used to designate those among us who had the great fortune (and good timing) to have been born within the first few years of the last quarter of the twentieth century, it does contain the single title for us which I am happiest to employ myself.

You see, I am a proud member of The Video Generation.

And what is The Video Generation, you ask. Well, for starters, I consider that title to have less to do with music videos than it has to do with the means by which most of us gained our information during our formative years. Members of The Video Generation must give a special nod to video because, during our misspent youths, we far more prefered to Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures” than to read a newspaper, listen to the radio, divine messages from tea leaves, or stare into crystal balls.

As evidence, an anecdote: Long after a member of The Video Generation had seen Heston’s Moses part the red sea, he was presented with a copy of The Oxford Study Bible (New Revised Standard Version, including Apocrypha). Incredulous, he asked, “You mean they made a book of that?”

I can trace backwards to the day upon which my father brought home our first VHS player from Sears. A remarkable day, it was the day that I was shocked and awed to realize that I could not only rent movies, bring them home, and watch them rather than waiting for them to be re-released on the big screen, but I could also tape episodes of Dungeons & Dragons off of TV and watch them again. And again. And again. And again.

It was also on that day that I began to discover the possibilities that this new and exciting medium held. And it is with pride, joy, and gratitude that I sit to type the premier installment of “Video Funhouse”, my little corner of this website, where I hope to revisit the films that provide me with my fondest memories of a childhood spent in the ranks of the Video Generation.

I shall begin by revisiting my childhood love of all things ape by traveling deep, deep, deep, Beneath the Planet of the Apes….

Certainly I recall the day that I returned home from school to discover that my father had purchased a VHS player at Sears. It was only a matter of time until the four of us (that being my mother, father, older brother, and me) piled into the station wagon and paid a visit to Now Showing Video for our first-ever video rental. I chose Star Wars (what else?) and my brother chose Let’s Break!, an instructional video that taught us all the various breakdancing maneuvers yet to make their way to the suburban hamlet of Bloomington, MN. The videos came home in massive plastic shells, complete with faux leather cover and hand-printed label. My brother and I eagerly tore open the cases and I began what was to become a lifelong affinity for Sci-Fi cinema, particularly of the home rental variety.

However, a few years before my family purchased their first VHS player, we made a more modest purchase — that being a circular UHF antenna I attached to my 13″ black-and-white Zenith portable that sat on a folding chair next to my bed. Purchasing the UHF antenna allowed me to watch what was then called KITN, the local UHF channel that would one day rise to such heights as being Minnesota’s first FOX affiliate and home of Minnesota Twins baseball. Of course, its status as FOX affiliate has now come and gone, as have its right to broadcast Twins games, but back then it was home to Star Trek reruns (note that there is no need for me to add the words ‘The Original Series’ following Star Trek where these reruns are concerned, as there was no Next Generation or Deep Space Nine to be found back then… Star Trek was Star Trek, the way I’ve always loved it… but that’s a topic for another entry) as well as late-night horror films, Ultra-Man, NWA Wrestling, Voltron, and Gumby. In short, it was a window on paradise.

KITN was then called “The Kitten that roars!” In fact, during the hourly station identifications, viewers could watch as a tiny pussy cat meowed from within a mock-up of the Metro Goldwyn Mayer logo while the announcer said, “You’re watching KITN, the kitten that roars!” Along with daily reruns of Star Trek, Ultra-Man, et. al. KITN ran an annual marathon of the first five Planet of the Apes films. The films were shown in order, one every night for five days, and I looked forward to it every year. They’d begin running promotional spots for it a few weeks before it would begin. These featured clips from the five movies with the theme song from The Monkees playing in the background. Here we come, duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh, walkin’ down the stu-reet, duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh… Very quickly I realized that Beneath the Planet of the Apes was my favorite of all five, and it still is to this day. So, for both its enduring appeal and the place it holds as catalyst for my love of Sci-Fi films, I have chosen it as the first film to feature on Video Funhouse.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes begins shortly after the end of its predecessor, Planet of the Apes. We soon discover that Astronaut Brent has crash-landed on the future Earth after following the original trajectory of the first craft to crash-land on future Earth, the one piloted by Astronaut Taylor. Brent surmises that his crash is the result of “an s-line curve, a bend in time,” and that Taylor likely found the same fate. Little is explained in the way of possible scientific explanations for the surprising landing, and the audience is left wondering at the mind-boggling possibilities of faster-than-light space travel.

Brent sets out in search of food, water, and life much in the way of Taylor and his companions in the original film. He almost immediately stumbles upon Taylor’s beautiful future Earth girlfriend, the lovely Nova played by the knee-tremblingly sexy Linda Harrison who, horseback and wearing an almost illegal calfskin two-piece number complete with underwire, has to be one of the most memorable sci-fi babes in the history of cinema.

Having made the acquaintance of Nova, Brent sets out to discover what has happened to Taylor, and Nova, doe-eyed and mute, condemned to a lifetime of a look of confusion and mild concern, takes him to Ape City where she believes that Cornelius (not played by Roddy MacDowell as in the original film or following sequels) and Zera will be able to help.

Brent finds the apes on the cusp of fundamental cultural change — they are planning to venture into the Forbidden Zone in search of the mysterious life that resides beyond their known world. Of course, Brent and Nova are captured, manage to escape (sans the “Take your dirty paws off me!” from the first film) and find their way into the Forbidden Zone with an army of gorillas on their tail.

The two seek refuge in a cave only to discover the remains of the NYC subway system deep beneath the rocks, and Astronaut Brent learns the horrible truth — he has traveled no farther than his own home planet, and, as a consequence of faster-than-light travel, he has been propelled far into a nightmare future following the destruction of human civilization. Humankind has lived for two thousand years following civilization’s destruction deep beneath the Planet of the Apes, and has evolved into a race of pizza faced telepaths, huddled together and observing the tenets of a bizarre religion that is a hybrid of Christianity and bomb-worship. Brent discoveres that they are in possession of the deadly Doomsday Bomb, the most powerful bomb ever created, and have captured Astronaut Taylor and are holding him, dreading the eventual attack from the ape outsiders.

Once in the custody of the future humans, known only as the Keepers of the Divine Bomb, Brent, Taylor, and Nova manage to escape. As the apes descend upon the Keeper’s stronghold inside of the abandoned subway system, the film erupts as ape and future man meet in what is to become their only battle for dominance of future Earth.

Nova and Brent are killed, Taylor is shot and lives long enough to curse the apes a final time before detonating the Doomsday Bomb, and future Earth, complete with the Keepers and the apes, is destroyed by, given Heston’s credentials, an explosion that can only be described as having Biblical proportions.

Certainly the film blazes little new territory, and most of the characters are holdovers from the original film. The film will, for most people, seem a cheap continuation of the first film. However, if we take a closer look we see that it is in this second film that the ape mythology is more deeply explored, and the grim dystopia gestured at by the first film is horribly realized.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes brings us a vision of an earth cursed by mankind. Future history bears the strange and hideous fruit of this curse as mankind destroys itself; the apes ascend, and mankind returns again to finally and completely destroy the earth. Abstracting the physics of this curse forces us to reckon with the the universe of the film’s bleakest truth — Earth bears a scar, and it is man.

The imagery haunts us in ways beyond the horrors of the first film. The shattered and twisted crown of the Statue of Liberty brought the first film to an end, but the realities of the cataclysmic upheavel (buried within the unrealized future history that rests elsewhere on the continuum of ape space and time) are laid bare by this film: the vestiges of human civilization, the god of mankind mimicked and transmogrified by ape civilization bleeding from its eyes, ape crucified and burned alive, and man reduced to a nightmare walking dead cowering beneath the rubble of the planet it destroyed.

Astronaut Brent – James Franciscus
Dr. Zaius – Maurice Evans
Nova – Linda Harrison
Fat Man – Victor Buono
Ursus – James Gregory
Taylor – Charlton Heston

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Features, Movies, Video Funhouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.