Hey, the man started out the first movie claiming he hated Earth anyway. In the climax, the hero is given a chance to return to his own time (courtesy of a spaceship piloted by non-crashing human astronauts), but Taylor rejects this opportunity in order to remain and, he hopes, resurrect humanity. Holing up in an abandoned city, Taylor fights off the remaining apes that dogged his trail and attempts to save humanity in this new bastion of (retroactive) civilization. In Serling’s first version, Taylor (played in the first film by Charlton Heston) becomes a defender of humanity, deeming himself mankind’s last hope. Serling actually came up with three bold ideas for the screenplay-to-be, each one hairier than the last. However, when Planet of the Apes became the monster hit that it was (critically and commercially), both Serling and Boulle stepped forward to offer their suggestions for a big sequel. Wilson’s changes were mostly due to the fact that Serling’s script was too close to Pierre Boulle’s original novel with technological apes in a post-modern society (all of which would have been prohibitively expensive to film). Most every fan knows that The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling had written the original screenplay that was later polished by Michael Wilson into Planet of the Apes (1968). Rod Serling’s Planet of the Apes II (1968 – 1969)
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