Hey guys I’m Kya and time travel really gives me a headache.
Not, like, actually doing it.
I’m talking more about how messy it can make stories, especially when you have reboots and sequels and a whole bunch of other crap thrown in there.
There’s a whole lot of time travel in the ‘Planet of the Apes’ saga, and it’s... It’s confusing.
Are all the films connected?
What’s canon and what’s not?
Shouldn’t Charlton Heston be a little suspicious that all these apes speak English?
I don’t have every answer for you, but don’t go ape on me yet.
...Guess we're going with ape puns...
Okay first things first, we’re not gonna go in chronological order, because that kinda doesn’t exist when time travel is involved.
Time is just a social construct, anyway.
Nothing scientific... It's purely personal.
We’ll use the first ‘Planet of the Apes’ movie as our starting point and tell you how things branch out from there.
Heston plays Colonel Taylor, an astronaut on the spaceship Icarus.
It leaves Earth in 1972, travelling at approximately the speed of light.
The journey lasts over two thousand years, even though only a few months pass on board thanks to the theory of relativity.
Taylor and his crew crash on a desolate planet in the year 3978, and they get captured by a civilization of talking apes who rule over primitive humans.
Y’know, normal time travel stuff.
With the help of his ape friends Cornelius and Zira, Taylor discovers the truth about this madhouse world he’s trapped in.
It's a madhouse!
And it is pretty f---ed up.
It’s not some alien planet.
Taylor was wrong.
It was Earth, all along.
Guess they finally made a monkey out him.
You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you all to hell!
It’s one of my favorite twist endings ever. Rod Serling wrote it and he's the one who made 'The Twilight Zone.'
But it's all downhill from there.
In the sequel, we find out about a third faction: A race of disfigured, telepathic mutants who live in the underground ruins of Manhattan.
They’re survivors of the nuclear war and worship an atomic bomb, because why wouldn’t they worship the thing that made them mutants?
Wow! You guys worship an unexploded nuclear bomb? Yeah, but nobody's that observant. It's mainly a Christmas and Easter thing.
After a battle breaks out between the apes, mutants, and humans, a mortally wounded Taylor decides to end the violence. permanently.
He detonates the doomsday device and destroys the entire planet.
Earth is gone. Forever.
So the question is: How do you make three more ‘Apes’ movies, a live-action TV show and an animated series when the whole planet is a floating cloud of rubble?
Easy. With a dash of imagination and a whole lotta time travel.
Welcome, gentlemen, to the United States..."
Turns out Cornelius and Zira blasted off in the Icarus just before the world got nuked. Convenient.
The explosion hurls them back to Earth in 1973, the year after the ship launched in the first place.
Naturally, the military scoops them up and detains them in a zoo.
Here you go missy, have a banana!
The apes become a worldwide sensation.
Dr. Cornelius! Tell me, how do you find our women? Very human.
But the reception gets a lot chillier once Cornelius reveals the origins of the ape revolution.
It began in our pre-history, with the plague that fell upon dogs. And cats.
Mittens and Fido are replaced by apes. We beef up their intelligence with years of genetic engineering, and soon all those cute ape pets are treated like slaves instead.
After 500 years, a chimpanzee named Aldo is the first to talk back to his human masters.
He. Said. No.
That’s when things get, you guessed it, bananas.
Could we do that one more time with a little more joy on the ape pun please?
There is no joy in ape puns.
The apes defeat the human race, but not before mankind launches nukes at all of Earth’s major cities, creating the apocalyptic wasteland we see in the first two films.
Basically the humans were like, ‘We messed up. We’re kind of dicks. We lost. But we’re still going to nuke everything because we’re not gonna let some monkeys take our stuff’.
Got all of that? Good. Now forget about it.
Because Cornelius and Zira showing up in the past created a completely different timeline.
‘Apes’ doesn’t operate under ‘Terminator’ rules, where everything is one circular, self-repairing loop.
It’s more like ‘Back to the Future,’ where a change to the past creates a whole separate timeline.
I believe that time is like an endless motorway with an infinite number of lanes running from the past into the future.
So the government freaks out and kills the two future apes.
But not before Zira gives birth to a little baby chimpanzee and hides him away in a circus with Ricardo Montalban.
Intelligent creature. But then so were your mother and father.
His name is Caesar, just like the star of the reboot, but his story is a lot different.
Since his parents are two evolved chimps from the future, Caesar can talk and think hundreds of years before the apes would have figured it out themselves.
It’s not exactly an “I’m my own grandpa” level paradox, but it changes everything.
Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa!
The plague that kills all the cats and dogs arrives much earlier, and this time it also makes apes smarter.
But how? How? They don't have the intelligence to use such tools!
Don’t question it. Time travel.
Caesar gets to lead the ape uprising hundreds of years before it was supposed to happen.
Now he’s the first ape to talk back to humans, not Aldo.
Lousy human bastards!
The apes kick the crap out of the humans, but Caesar rejects the violence and pleads for peace between the two species.
Now we will put away our hatred! Now we will put down our weapons! And we who are not human can afford to be humane!
That doesn’t stop the nukes from flying.
The apes are still in charge, and their leader Caesar fights to make sure the brutal future his parents came from never comes to pass.
And it works!
The series ends on a cautiously hopeful note, with humans and apes living together in harmony for hundreds of years.
We're still weak, my children. But as I look at humans and apes living in friendship, harmony, and peace now, some 600 years after Caesar's death.
At least we wait with hope... For the future.
We never see what kind of planet Taylor would have landed on in this timeline, but it would have probably been a lot different.
He’s just out there flying through space as history changes all around him.
The Planet of the Apes chronology is kind of hard to wrap your head around-- And that's before the reboots.
The Tim Burton movie is a one-off.
It’s not a sequel, or a prequel, or even a remake really.
Burton called it a “re-imagining,” so we’re gonna go with that.
What would you call it? I'd call it a piece of shit.
Oooh, that was mean, sorry.
I hate this movie more than I hate the ape puns.
I think it's fair to call this hostile territory.
He travels to the year 5021, way farther than the original series.
And the titular planet isn’t even Earth. It’s a made up world called “Ashlar.”
Honestly, you’d need a time machine yourself to explain all the bullshit in this one.
Especially the end, where we find out that Earth has been ruled by apes since the Civil War.
It’s best to just kinda sweep this movie under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen.
Now the 2011 reboot is awesome, but it’s kind of hard to see where it fits into things.
James Franco is a scientist working on a cure for Alzheimer’s.
It gives the apes he’s testing it on enhanced intelligence.
This is unbelievable! How many moves was that? 20. Perfect score is 15
And when a subject named Bright Eyes gives birth to Caesar, he inherits his mom’s smarts.
Now this isn’t the Caesar from the old series.
He came from the future, remember? Cornelius and Zira’s kid.
The new Caesar is just a regular chimpanzee hopped up on brain medicine.
But just like his non-CGI counterpart, this Caesar isn’t monkeying around.
He fights back against humanity after his abusive captors push him too far.
That's what you get! What's wrong with you?! NOO!!!
At the same time, it turns out that Alzheimer's cure is a highly infectious virus that’s fatal to humans.
The Simian Flu escalates into global pandemic.
It wipes out 90% of humanity while making all the apes on Earth smarter.
James Franco basically ruined everything.
Caesar leads the revolution, and he still wants a peaceful coexistence.
But by the end of the second movie, his people are ready for all out war.
APES! MUST! ATTACK! ATTACK! HUMAN! CITY! FIGHT! FOR! CAESAR!
So is it a canonical prequel to the original series? Or is it a straightforward reboot?
“Rise’ does show the launch and disappearance of the Icarus, but it happens in 2016, not 1972.
But there’s still a lot of stuff that doesn’t line up, especially when it comes to the virus.
The plague in the first series came from space, and it didn’t affect humans, just cats and dogs.
It's really sad.
There’s also no hint of a nuclear war in the reboot.
But shit, we’re talking about time travel!
There are tons of ways you can justify the new series.
Maybe Cornelius and Zira created some sort of spacetime ripple when they came back.
Or the timeline is trying to repair itself after the paradox of the original Caesar’s birth.
Look, If Superboy Prime can punch the universe and bring Jason Todd back to life, James Franco can start the ape apocalypse.
I can't even light this thing on my own.
This is science fiction. If you use your imagination, you can make anything work.