Planet of the Men

No doubt, this spring, you've heard the media machine cranking up the volume on Tim Burton's latest effort, a new take on Pierre Boulle's PLANET OF THE APES. Aside from the monkey-love controversy, and the questions over whether this film will embrace the novel accurately, and aside even from the mad rush online to download the latest trailer, I'd like to come at this from a different perspective. One that may tax my position as the new editor here, to the hilt. You voted me in. Humor me.

STAR TREK IV (The Voyage Home), when released in 1986, received critical acclaim - and ridicule - as an eco-statement that portrayed a crucial period in environmental history. While fans have scoffed at the blatant tree-hugging nature of Trek's aging cast, who dashed across time and space to save a couple of whales, the consciousness of the theater-going public was enhanced, in a good way. Attention was turned to a nasty topic - whaling - with a bright promise for whalekind: that something can be done to save us from a world doomed without them. Yes, the sappy plot turned away diehard Trekkies, but opened the eyes of millions.

Years later we are replacing our cute, furry, or otherwise loveable costars - species by species - with computer-generated models, and that's not limited to animals; PEARL HARBOR couldn't have been filmed without more than the fifteen or so surviving WWII aircraft in flying condition today. JURASSIC PARK speaks for itself. THE SOPRANOS brought back the dead. Don't even mention JUMANJI or Disney's TARZAN.

But now, Science Fiction turns back to Boulle, and his novel MONKEY PLANET, which was more or less faithlessly butchered into a movie in 1968. Burton's latest revision, a multi-million-dollar epic, puts legs on the old franchise and is due in theaters perhaps as you read this. Before you go out and see it, however, I'd like to temper your appetite a bit and ask you to go do something for me.

Please go to your computer and get online. Once you're there, pick any search engine and type in this term:

BUSHMEAT.

Press Enter.

There. That was easy, wasn't it? Now I don't need to ramble on about stuff you can read at your own leisure, and I can keep talking about Science fiction and fandom, and movie budgets and party schedules... I don't have to talk at all about how Africa's logging industries will in fact extinctify several primate species - aside from miniscule zoological stocks - within ten years as a profitable sideline to logging itself. Or that the Congo's quest for high-tech minerals brings back a steady stream of supplemental income for prospectors in the form of tons of carcasses per week strapped to the backs of trucks. Or how infants are rounded up, caged next to their mothers' corpses, and sold for pets in some village downstream. Or how some areas of Africa, where the likes of Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall were once surrounded by gentle examples of pre-human society that thrived in the bush, are home now to no animals bigger than a squirrel.

Except, of course, for man.

Oh, dear. I think I may have tarried too long. Suffice it to say that several mutiples of your average nature conservatory's annual overhead go into making and selling movies like PLANET OF THE APES, and you might just yet bow to that wave of hype and go see it. By all means enjoy the hell out of it but please, try to remember the plight of the real McCoy - the great apes in the here-and-now.

Boulle predicted that man would devolve, in his original novel. The decline of man sparked resurgence of a segment of our evolutionary family - key to our understanding of threats like Ebola, HIV, and ourselves - that is being wiped from the planet right now. JURASSIC PARK notwithstanding, it's still a hard road back from extinction at the moment.

What can fandom do? Good question. This isn't like gas prices, where we can quit driving for a day and freak out a petrol company. Boycott the movie? I wouldn't be so presumptuous, but what would stop me, unless I knew that a dime of proceeds earmarked for some cause of relief would ever be used there, no matter what the execs in Hollywood may say. YMMV.

What's the answer?

Simple. I've done it already. I've made the connection. Household word meets undervalued issue.

Now a group of you cannot set foot in the theater and watch Markie Mark do the funky bunch without the word 'bushmeat' ringing in your ears. Some of you will dismiss it as tinnitus, and drown it out with the sound of munching popcorn and maybe some of that Danny Elfman music.

Some of you won't. And the few of those who won't, might just know your congressman's mailing address.

Yet others of you will look at the seven fifty in your hand as you get to the box office and realize that poachers on the other side of the world charge as much for an entire family of gorillas, slaughtered for the exotic food market. 'Planet of the Apes' will take on new meaning. My work is done.

Are you guilty? Nah. But what can you do?

You're a human. You're smart. Search the web, and read up. Think of something, then do it. They are running out of time. For X's sake, gas is still cheaper than rice, pound for pound. Leave it alone and do something important.

Hey, in STAR TREK IV, we got a happy ending. I just hope time travel isn't the only solution, because that glorious plot resolution weapon is not in hand yet. Let's not count on it, either. We evolved foresight instead. Let's use it and say we tried.

~freon

http://www.bushmeat.org | http://www.4apes.com | http://www.cwaf.org | http://www.janegoodall.org | http://www.gorillafund.org | http://www.stilyagi.org/aasfa/tanstaafl/feedback.html

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