The Forbidden Zone

TigerBlog caught the last 20 minutes of "Planet of the Apes" yesterday.

The original Charlton Heston version. Not any of the sequels or remakes.

"Planet of the Apes" was released in 1968. TB can't remember when he first saw it, though he is positive it was not in a movie theater. Most likely it was part of the "4:30 Movie," which aired every day on channel 7 in New York when TB was a kid.

Anyway, the movie is freaky. Heston and two other astronauts - who had been stuck in some weird time warp that completely distorted the centuries - land on a weird planet where all humans are mutes and are treated as cattle by the far superior apes. Eventually Heston is the only human left who can speak, though he has suffered a throat injury that keeps him silent for awhile, until he utters the immortal line: "take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape."

Eventually Heston helps prove that humans who could speak inhabited the planet before the apes, except the head ape doesn't want to hear about it. He lets Heston and a mute woman go, and then he destroys the evidence that Heston came up with in what was known as "The Forbidden Zone." Presumably, the head ape also gets rid of the two apes - and their hippie ape nephew - who were siding with Heston.

The final scene is also famous, as Heston and the mute woman ride on horseback - the horses had to be confused by the whole ape/human dynamic, though other than Mr. Ed, there haven't been too many talking horses - along the beach, unsure of what they're going to find.

Eventually, though, Heston and the mute woman stumble upon some ruins, which the viewer can't really see at first, until it becomes clear that it's the Statue of Liberty. The implication is clear, that mankind had some sort of nuclear war or something that destroyed everything, opening the door for the apes to rise.

TB has always wondered about the last scene.

If one makes the assumption that the Statue of Liberty was destroyed in whatever took out the humans in the first place, then the next question is where the statue ended up. While the scene was filmed in California, it's unlikely that the statue would have made its way across the country across whatever was left of the 3,000-mile land mass and ended up in the Pacific.

So that means that the statue was still in the Atlantic. It's possible that over the few hundreds years that had passed, it drifted up or down the coast. Or maybe it just got wedged on the beach and stayed there.

Heston and the mute woman were traveling with the ocean on their right, which would mean going south to north. If the statue had been in the same basic place as always, that means that Heston and the mute woman were riding along what had been the Jersey Shore.

Since the main ape city wasn't on the ocean but because there were no cars, then it's possible that the apes were centered in what had once been Princeton.

Hey, that's not terrible logic.

There isn't a lot of action in the Forbidden Zone this weekend. Most of the games involving Princeton teams are far away from the ape city.

There are 17 Princeton events this weekend, and only three of them are at home. There are two home men's water polo games, against Johns Hopkins Saturday at 2 and Navy Saturday at 7:30, and the football game Saturday at 1 against Lafayette.

Everyone else is away.

The soccer teams are both at Brown. The field hockey team is at Maryland today and Delaware Sunday. Women's volleyball is at Yale and Brown. Sprint football is at Cornell. There are also events for tennis and golf.

Even men's water polo isn't completely home, as the Tigers will be at Bucknell Sunday.

TigerBlog loves the fall weekends when there are home events all day, with field hockey, football, two soccer games and volleyball. There hasn't been one of those weekends yet this year.

There is one Nov. 2, when everyone is home. There's even Heps cross country that day. And women's hockey thrown in.

This weekend?

It'll be quiet around here, or as quiet as it can be with a home football game. TB will be there.

After all, it might be a light weekend on the schedule, but they all count, and you have to take advantage of them while you can.

It won't be too many centuries until this place is crawling with apes.