Movie Maunderings

I was watching Planet Of The Apes, which is a lot of fun (the original, not the remake). Then it hit me, this has the same problem most episodes of Star Trek do. They land on a planet and see only a minute portion, but this small simian village apparently stands in for the whole place. I'm guessing this is a hangover from westerns, where you'd ride into a new town and that town was the whole world of the story. Was the rest of the the planet run by talking apes, or humans, or some other animal? Was it uninhabited (and they got lucky, landing within walking distance of the apes)? We'll never know.

This film sure opened up a new career path for Charlton Heston. He previously appared in epics set in ancient times, or westerns, but now he was the go-to guy for futuristic films such as The Omega Man and Soylent Green (which is people, Soylent Green is people!).

I also saw the original Brian's Song for the first time since it aired. It was hugely popular in its day, even beloved. It didn't hold up nearly as well as I expected (and certainly not as well as the contemporaneous TV movie Duel). But the real burning question is why didn't anyone notice that Gale Sayers was so clearly living on the set of Bewitched.