Before I ever saved up my money to buy a water bed, I hoarded my nickels, dimes and pennies so that I might purchase a gorilla mask. Not a goofy, over-the-top-flared-nostrils one, but the real deal from "Planet of the Apes," or a facsimile thereof. It cost forty-nine dollars, which was a good deal of money for a ten-year-old in the nineteen seventies. It was a way to bring my fixation on this particular series of films to some logical end.
In our front yard recreations of the movies, usually "Escape" or "Conquest," I tended to play a chimpanzee in the Cornelius/Caesar mold, but when it came time to pick the mask that would suck up a large portion of my personal fortune at the time I went with the gorilla. It was, in my estimation, a better investment. With or without the mask, when I played ape, I went all in: The hunched back and drooping arms, twitching nose and ears, picking fleas from my friends' hair. Even before the advent of home video, I had seen all five films enough to assimilate the simian look and feel. For some of the other kids in the neighborhood, I was a little too "method."
The mask also helped me past the need to make others up as apes. My younger brother sat still for me long enough to build up a mass of masking tape over his mouth and nose to approximate the look of a chimpanzee muzzle. After blowing through a roll of black and white film shot on my mother's Kodak Brownie Bullseye, his patience wore out and we set about exfoliating his face while we removed the "appliance." Once I had the mask, however, it was a different story. There was no shortage of volunteers who wanted to undergo the relatively painless process of having their eyes blackened and newspaper was shoved in the back of the mask to press the faux monkey's face against the latex, giving the wearer a chance to move the nose and chin. In one particular episode, I helped get a girl from down the street into full gorilla drag. What Susie lacked in stature, she made up for in enthusiasm. There were a few kids who were convinced that there was an ape in the back of the van my father had driven home from work.
All of this is to say that I have recently been made aware of yet another attempt to revive the Apes franchise. Tim Burton's 2001 remake wasn't enough to put a stake through the heart of super-intelligent monkeys. Now there's talk of a prequel. Those of us who were raised on the Sacred Scrolls know that there is no prologue, but rather a cycle if history that explains how apes came to rule the planet and man fell into mute subjugation. It already makes sense. We don't need further explanation.
Or maybe I'm being too sensitive. Just like my own imagination wasn't satisfied by simply affecting the posture, or piling a roll of tape onto my brother's face. I had to buy the mask. If I had motion-capture technology and 3D, would I have used it? What would Doctor Hasslein do?
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