Directed by Doug Wildey, the same Doug Wildey who was responsible for a lot of the Marvel Superheroes cartoons of the 1960s and who created Johnny Quest, the short lived Return To The Planet Of The Apes animated series served as sort of a condensed version of the movies without the heavy political overtones. Think of it as a somewhat dumbed down version geared towards kids and you're on the right track. That being said, even in this less cerebral version the storylines and some of the symbolism are a little heavier than you might anticipate.

The premise of the series, in a nutshell, is that three astronauts - Bill Hudson (Tom Williams/Richard Blackburn), Jeff Allen (Austin Stoker), and Judy Franklin (Claudette Nevins) crash land on Earth in the future world of 3979 where apes rule supreme. Things differ from the films here in that when our humans arrive, the apes are even more advanced in that they now have modern cities and motorized vehicles as opposed to the huts and the wagons that we saw when Heston was running around causing trouble for our fine, furry friends. At any rate, General Urko (Henry Corden) is in charge of the military and he has no patience for humans at all. His philosophy is basically that if they can't be enslaved they might as well be put down as they are of no use whatsoever. Thankfully for our astronauts, Zira (Philippa Harris) and Cornelius (Edwin Mills) don't share Urko's hatred and they're happy to help the humans whenever they can.

As the episodes progress, characters develop a bit and we get to know our heroes. While very few of the episodes end on cliffhangers or spill over into one another, there's a definite continuity to the series so watching them in order helps a fair bit.

The complete animated series (thirteen episodes in total which ran from September 6, 1975 through November 8, 1975) is represented on this two disc set in the following order:

Disc One:
Flames of Doom
Escape from Ape City
The Unearthly Prophecy
Tunnel of Fear
Lagoon of Peril
Terror on Ice Mountain
River of Flames

Disc Two:
Screaming Wings
Trail to the Unknown
Attack from the Clouds
Mission of Mercy
Invasion of the Under Dwellers
Battle of the Titans

Return To The Planet Of The Apes is a very mixed bag indeed. When one takes into account the fact that this show was designed as kid's material it's a little surprising how dark some of this material is, from the opening credits sequence where the silhouettes of some humans tied and left to die out in the desert contrast with the text on the screen to the gruff and sinister behavior of some of the gorillas. The show is very definitely a product of its time, as it's unlikely that you'd see material like this being marketed to children these days. Some of the material is also fairly heavy in that it deals with man's treatment of animals and of each other – again, not the type of thing that you'd expect in a kid's show.

On the other hand, whenever the storylines start to get interesting the show tends to cop out and hit us with more typical action cartoon fare like a chase scene or a fight scene. This wouldn't be so bad if these were handled well but the fact of the matter is that the animators recycled as much material as they possibly could throughout the series and so we end up watching a lot of the same snippets over and over again. This makes it hard to want to pay attention sometimes, even if what's going on underneath some of the repetition is actually fairly interesting. That being said, the animation isn't poor in all regards. The backgrounds and design work that you see in the cities and the more rural areas that the series takes place in are pretty interesting and while the characters don't always move around a whole lot they've at least got cool costumes and sometimes sport some interesting facial expressions. Sometimes things look pretty dated but there are some genuinely creative flashes evident throughout the short lived series.

Video:

Each of the episodes in the set is presented 1.33.1 fullframe which is as it should be seeing as these were meant to be seen that way. While the transfers aren't perfect, for an older animated series they're not bad at all. Color reproduction is quite nice and while the contrast gets a little odd sometimes and there's some mild grain present from time to time, more often than not the image is pretty clean. Don't worry about mpeg compression artifacts or any serious edge enhancement issues as they're not a concern here and the black levels stay fairly consistent. Considering the age of the materials, these episodes fair well enough on this two disc set.