In the first film Taylor is well aware their mission is a one way ticket:-
"The men who sent us on this journey are long since dead and gone..."
So there's no way these same chaps would be organising a rescue mission for Taylor et al...
So the original film stands on it's own.
Beneath, Escape, Conquest & Battle can stand together.
No, this is a direct sequel to the original. Taylor even mentions Dr Hesslain while still in space and we see him in the 3rd movie
shareDifferent continuity.
Yes there was a Charlton Heston & there was a Dr Hesslain in this film's continuity. And there was a Brent send to rescue this Taylor in this continuity. But it's not the same as the original film in which that Taylor knew they weren't going home...
It's only recently that the notion of "canon" in films has made this sort of question seem worthwhile. I saw all these films when they came out and I think most of us noticed the discrepancies. Certainly, I remember talking about them in the '70s. But, I always recognized that these were simply careless, or uncaring, elements of writing in order to produce an acceptable sequel.
This film was cooked up to capitalize on the unexpected success of the first. It is a direct sequel, despite any inconsistencies. Now we would use the term "retcon" to explain the changes. Likewise, Escape from the Planet of the Apes was, legendarily, called into existence despite the obvious impossibility, because the second film was also a success. Of course, if you want to treat the films with seriousness beyond what they deserve, you have to consider the third film to be yet another continuity.
Yeah, a bit like the old James Bond films, these weren't really made with any real sense of continuity and are open to being picked apart today.
But it is fun to try and see how much they can fit together. So for example, like I was saying in the OP, I think if you take this as the first film in a continuity, Escape fits as a direct sequel.
If you accept this, it actually works better because we haven't seen what happened to Taylor's ship in this continuity. Maybe it isn't lying ruined at the bottom of a lake. Maybe Cornelius and co were examining it / working on it long before the planet is destroyed. Unknown is a better fit than attempting to marry it to the original film...
Escape really is hard to justify based on what we know from the first films. Somehow, in a period of time that cannot be more than a couple of years, some apes - with a technology that appears not to include electronics - raise, repair, and learn to operate Taylor's spaceship. The ship was under water and not terribly close to shore in a place where it is surprising that anyone saw it crash. We have to assume that other ape, whatsisname, who accompanied Zira and Cornelius back in time had his own secret expedition to that part of the Forbidden Zone. Beyond that, we need incredible luck, incredible genius, a staggeringly "user friendly" spacecraft and a lot of unseen ape-tech and ape-labor in the Forbidden Zone.
If you want to ignore the first film in large part, retconning the ship to just be sitting, unused and intact in the Forbidden Zone... Well, I just don't mind if the films are a patchwork of crazy that really can only be resolved by setting each in a separate universe.
-- Well, I glanced through the novelization by Jerry Pournelle and he doesn't seem to have come up with the slightest justification either.
I don't even think that a couple years passed between the first film and end of the second. I'm guessing at most maybe 10 months...
shareYou are very likely right. I just like to give them the maximum benefit of the doubt. I don't really think thirty years would be enough and I just kinda skip over the ridiculous business of trying to justify Escape. BUT...
Of course, a clever fool could explain it. We have one batch of radioactive mutants in the underground. How about another weird carry over from before the nuclear war? Maybe the ship was raised and put in flying condition by a pack of surviving repair robots, masterless since the war and with nothing to do but repair one another. So, these robots just happen to live in a hidden bunker on the shores of the body of water the ship sunk in... And, they are overjoyed to the extent their rusty circuits can be overjoyed, to have a shiny, if wet, piece of technology to tinker with. Heck Dr. whatsisname, while puttering in the zone may have found the ship repaired, refueled and pointed at the sky. "Holy Lawgiver, I oughta get Zira and Corneleus out here for a little test drive."
Of course, for all we know there are any number of old science fiction cliches running around what we only know as The Planet of the Apes. Chuds, Morlocks, Molemen, Mermen, talking horses. Pity they all got blown up when Taylor hit the big red plunger.
When I was a kid I thought I had watched the films out of order. I thought Conquest was the first film. they ran it on late night tv once. I was maybe 6 or 7. I remember asking my dad this is how it all began? 😂
When I reached teenager status I watched them all again in order when they did a weekly marathon on a local station. They even went through all the TV series stuff. I knew then that the movies were laden with a few continuity errors to keep it going. They never even bothered to explain how the apes became "intelligent" in the first place. The third film made a point of saying that the apes in the 20th century were primitive. The fourth film had them as pets and still as primitive in the 1990's. The 5th film which is set over 20 years after the fourth has all the apes now at evolved status (at Caesars level) including Caesars wife. In fact Virgil (played by Paul Williams) is at outright genius level. How the hell did he become so articulate in 20+ years???
Anyhow I think the newer film series does a much better job of keeping things straight. The old series is fun but they don't fit together all that well.
This is obvious, but that is what happened with Star Wars. It was a one-off film and then Georgie saw the opportunity to be the world's most successful toy salesman and ret-conned it into a nine part "series".
Georgie: "Yeah, it's a trilogy. No. it's three trilogies. I just started with the second trilogy. Yeah, that's the ticket."
True. But I think (at least as far as the OT was concerned) when George did his retcons they still made sense within the same continuity logic.
This Planet of the Apes misstep is more like the clangers he dropped when writing The Phantom Menace. It was like he plain forgot the backstory stuff he'd written into the OT.
Georgie started ret-conning with TESB. However, you are mostly correct.
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