Planet of The Apes

Finally! The only Planet of the Apes score to not have an album of its own finally does! Jerry Goldsmith returned for the third film in Twentieth Century Fox's Planet of the Apes saga. For Franklin J. Schaffner's original classic, Goldsmith wrote one of the all-time GREAT films scores. Remarkable in every way and truly groundbreaking, there was no topping what he had done previously. So Jerry Goldsmith did what he always did in that situation… he wrote something completely new! And once again he soared! For Escape From The Planet of the Apes (1971) Jerry miraculously brought Planet of the Apes to the 1970s and gave it a groove! That's not to say his original score didn't have plenty of groove itself, but in a very different way. Here he added an electric guitar, a steel drum and a sitar to his orchestra! And what fun it all was! Previously available only as an abbreviated "bonus track" on our own Planet of the Apes CD, this release of the complete score from Escape From The Planet of the Apes finally plugs one of the of the most important holes in Jerry Goldsmith's discography.

Academy Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino grew up fascinated with both movies and music and has gone on to a successful career writing scores for acclaimed films, television series and video games. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Giacchino started his career composing scores for a number of successful video games including the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises. In 2001 producer J.J. Abrams invited Giacchino to write the music for his television series, Alias and later the music for the hit cult series, Lost, for which Giacchino won the Grammy Award for Outstanding Dramatic Score in 2005.

Set around a dozen years after the 1967 Charlton Heston-starring Oscar winner of the same name, this Planet of the Apes is a 1974 TV spin-off that attempts to recapture the appeal of the original apes films. A second spaceship arrives on the planet, the basic plot being the same as in 67, as two surviving humans go on the run with a renegade chimpanzee, Galen (Roddy McDowell essentially reprising his Cornelius character under another name). The actor provides the strongest lead, while Booth Colman as Zaius (replacing Maurice Evans from the original film), offers fine support. The humans Ron Harper and James Naughton are relatively bland, a buddy duo very much anticipating Starsky and Hutch, while the stories, in which our heroes have a new adventure each week and then move on, fall very much into the formula that dominated earlier shows such as The Fugitive, Star Trek and Alias Smith and Jones.
This is a post-apocalyptic world where everyone has perfect hair and make-up. But if the action and effects are limited, at least that gives the stories room to concentrate on some moral debates about the nature of human violence. A show finally hamstrung by the tight limitations of its formula, Planet of the Apes: The Television Series lasted only 14 episodes and was cancelled so abruptly it lacks any resolution. Nevertheless its reappearance offers a welcome chance to reassess it in context with the classic movies it apes.

An astronaut crew crash-lands on a planet in the distant future where intelligent talking apes are the dominant species, and humans are the oppressed and enslaved.

The sole survivor of an interplanetary rescue mission searches for the only survivor of the previous expedition. He discovers a planet ruled by apes and an underground city run by telepathic humans.

In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Planet of the Apes, the classic science-fiction film from 1968, The Making of Planet of the Apes tells the film and offers exclusive, never-before-seen photographs and concept art.