THE 'LOST' PLANET OF THE APES MOVIES (STARLOG MAGAZINE)

Remember the 'other five' PLANET OF THE APES movies?

This is a STARLOG magazine article about the five additional teleflicks cobbled together by 20th Century Fox in the late Seventies.

Cobbling together TV Movie versions of defunct TV shows were a canny way of recouping some of the studio's investment in short-run series that local stations (in the pre-cable age) wouldn't touch with a Neilson Meter.  Other examples that I know about are packages hacked together from KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STAKER, SPIDER-MAN and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA/ GALACTICA 1980.  I'm sure there are many others as well.

I'm calling these the 'lost' movies because they have vanished in the last twenty-odd years.  The 14-episode TV show (complete with UK inaccuate box text) has been available on DVD for a long time (and is worth picking up) but the movie edits (with their overblown titles) aren't part of the set (understandably) and aren't available seperately.

Surprisingly, they did pop up on British TV in the late 1990s, albeit without the special ABC introductions.  Anglia TV (and, I assume, other ITV regions) ran most (or possibly all) of them as part of their Saturday afternoon schedules.  This was back in the day when dayparts outside primetime were still handed over to each region to schedule locally... which made TV a lot more interesting!  I taped them at the time but - silly me - I eventually taped over them.  Grrr.