I remember watching all of those movies in the theater when they came out. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter should have received Oscar’s for projecting force of personality through all of the makeup, because even Boris Karloff in Frankenstein had a more human face. Eric Braeden was a great villain, not because he was inherently evil, but that he saw the existential threat and wanted to protect humanity. I want so say, that picture was one of the best scenes in the movie. Ricardo Montalban saving of Caeser at the end showed that when you know that your government has done the wrong thing, that doesn’t mean you have to obey them. For the younger readers out there, this film came out a few years after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, The assassination of Rev. Martin Luther king, the riots that insued, the Vietnam War was on and we had gone into Cambodia, National Guard troops had shot students at Kent State during a protest. Black activist Angela Davis had been acquitted by an all white jury of charges brought against her by the FBI under Hoover. Times they were a changing, and like all good science fiction stories, this one addressed current events by metaphor. If you know the history of the times, there are lots of subtle and not so subtle jabs at society in this movie. One of the missed things that is glossed over is that the astronauts in the original planet of the apes abandon their spacecraft. In this one the Apes are able to repair and launch it. Perhaps only Eric Braedan’s character has a grasp of the significance of this. The apes are damn smart.
Monkeys learning to use tools.
2001: A Space Odyssey monkey scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmX7K8noikE