intro credits


In the opening credits, we see a bunch of what look like upside-down people crucified, just before the Apes blow their horns. What's up with that?





Rose Tyler: Five million Cybermen, easy. One Doctor? NOW you're scared!

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That was based on the "scarecrows" at the border of the Foridden Zone, in the original movie and Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

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Simple: the creators of the show botched it from their very first step. Apparently no one bothered to research elements of the show even far enough to learn what Forbidden Zone scarecrows actually looked like, vs. the writhing, tortured brethren of those two ever-so-nonchalantly trumpeting gorillas. It was a prophetic and fitting design blunder, considering the clunky, hamfisted designs which characterized each episode; elements and characters whose every detail, already solidified via five movies and a live action TV show, were often barely recognizable.

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That's a little harsh. I would hardly characterize the designs as "hamfisted". Doug Wildey was one of the best, next to Alex Toth, for his designwork. It is held back by the budgets and production schedule, and the crowd sizes. If you compare to most cartoons of the era, it is far more populated than the average Saturday morning cartoon. It gives it greater scope, but causes some of the work to be sloppy, due to time constraints. Also, cartoon backgrounds often use an impressionistic approach to save time and moneey; they give you just enough information to fill in the gaps.

If you are going to compare to the movies, they will always suffer, as they didn't have the same scale of budget. The live-actions series has the same problems, though I always felt the cartoon storylines were superior to the live-action series'.

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I must say i agree with grendelkhan. I expected the animation to be worse, but i was pleasantly suprised how it looked. I like this old school way of animation. No computers or digital effects was used. They didn't have them back then.

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There's nothing wrong with well drawn, limited animation. And a competent animator doesn't need computers or digital effects to execute his craft. Such are people's perceptions today that they think moving pictures of any kind can't created without digital crutches.

How and why Return to the Planet of the Apes is frequently awful has little to do with how good or bad the limited animation is. It also has little to do with the story, which is mostly pretty well done.

It has to do with whether or not the creators of the show did their homework going into the project, and whether they understood the meaning of the word "return".

Clearly they didn't do either, or OP wouldn't have needed to ask his question in the first place.

It's not called Reimagining the Planet of the Apes, after all.

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Technically, the animated series is closer to the original novel than the original film is... So I guess you could say that the original film is a reimagining and the RTTPOTA cartoon is a sequel of sorts to the original novel.








hjl





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