Welcome to Reverse Pop Culture Primer! Every week I take a famous catchphrase, punchline, or spoiler that I learned from another part of pop culture without ever seeing the movie it references. How does knowing the joke backwards affect my experience of the movie once I finally watch it?
How fitting that I’m listening to Barenaked Ladies’ “It’s All Been Done” as I write this week’s Reverse Pop Culture Primer, because we’re talking about time travel. Sort of—more like, the major twist at the heart of the Planet of the Apes franchise and the fact that I got it ruined for me at least five years before I ever watched those movies.
As I’ve said before, Mel Brooks ushered me into my sense of humor with his quirky pop culture parodies. Because my dad got me into Star Wars when I was eight, of course I jumped at the chance to watch Spaceballs once I finished the original trilogy and there were no more movies left to enjoy. (This was, of course, before the prequels. And Spaceballs is still better than any of them.)
I caught on to plenty of the jokes. In a rare reversal to this column, I had already seen the source material, so I knew what “Yogurt,” “Dark Helmet,” and “the Schwartz” were parodies of. But the ending baffled me: After the Spaceballs’ giant maid ship gets blasted apart, the head and arm land on a foreign planet populated by… talking monkeys?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD516OENN7s&hl=en_US&version=3]Of course, at the time I was more scandalized by someone saying “shit” in a movie. At the same time, my favorite irreverent CGI cartoon ReBoot aired an episode in the mid-’90s where one character exclaims, “Maniacs! They blew it up!” I began to piece together the references.
Since this was pre-Internet, I had to ask my parents (and not Google) about the significance of apes and the Statue of Liberty. Because I was too young to actually watch Planet of the Apes, they had no choice but to answer my insistent kid questions and explain the twist of how humanity screwed itself over and all that’s left are these shards of famous monuments.
I’m majorly bummed, because I imagine that if I’d watched the 1968 original film, I would’ve been moved by Charlton Heston’s stunned realization at the end:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfcim_p38w&version=3&hl=en_US]I feel like so many good twists seem simple in hindsight, but their power is in the fact that in the moment you never would’ve guessed it. Worse, this was a cinematic classic, so I felt left out of the experience. My dad had shielded me from all Star Wars spoilers, so that when Vader intoned, “Luke, I am your father,” I jumped out of my beanbag screaming, “NO! NO WAY! AHHH!” (My dad was so proud.)
Still, I got a little consolation when the Planet of the Apes remake starring Mark Wahlberg came out in 2001. In fact, I rented it thinking bitterly, Well, I already know the ending. But as I watched the movie and braced myself for Lady Liberty’s head in the sand, I was surprised to see the last few minutes take us elsewhere: To the country’s capital back in Wahlberg’s time, except that the Lincoln Memorial now honors his enemy General Thade. And those police and reporters swarming around him? Are all apes.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl2UGYk9BvM&hl=en_US&version=3]As confusing and sloppy as the remake was (see video above), I have to give them props for tackling a different ending that maintained the voice and twist of the original movie. It allows moviegoers like me to feel like we get to experience something for the first time after it’s already been tarnished.
I’m curious—who here got Planet of the Apes, or a similar classic, ruined for them? I feel like this happens fairly often.
Photo: 20th Century Fox
