Burton's film has three great things: Rick Baker's practical make-up, an awesome musical score by Danny Elfman, and some wicked production design. Everything else in that film is terrible.

The cat and dog plague thing is a bridge too far for me, apparently. I can handle time travel, I can handle talking apes, but I can't abide a fucking Cat and Dog Plague being the reason for the Ape uprising. That's bullshit.

Subtlety is overrated.

Well Escape DOES have a shopping montage, so I'd call that a big edge on the other films in the series.

The best part of this is that that's the copy that I had on VHS, and yet I was still surprised by the ending when I first saw it.

I'm pretty sure he acted out the fantasies of every exhausted high school teacher in that film.

I watched the show when I was in the grip of "Ape Fever" about ten years ago. It's terrible, but still enjoyable in a stupid, seventies kind of way, and I loved Galen and Urko (played by Star Trek's Mark Lenard!).

There's a detailed book with the same title, I believe, and it's pretty great.

Trundy played one of the mutants in Beneath, I believe. I don't think she's in the first.

Noel, your ranking of the series is dead-on. I just watched through the whole series with my oldest kid, and they STILL have power, and he was thoroughly entertained. Aside from Burton's "re-imagining", Apes is one of the most consistent science fiction franchises in terms of overall quality. Battle suffers from a…

That's a hell of a story!

Where do we all go when we disappear up our own butts?

I'd say he's pretty much up to all of those tasks.

Very rarely does a reasonable discussion happen around these parts. Only on Wednesday afternoons.

It turns out the Undying Lands are just a public library with an open common area.

Don't you mean nail an iron file into my skull with a crudely made mallet?

Or my sister's version that she wrote in high school about that lying, smoking door braggart, "The Handjob of Johnny FitzPatrick."

Is it pronounced Glosster, or Glaw-chester?

Conversely, jazz fusion has been proven to whip people up into a frenzy of confused violence.

Every comfort we enjoy today borrows time from the future.