Planet of the Apes reflected white fear of a Black uprising.

Evidence

When White astronauts land on a planet after a 2,000-year journey, apes enslave them. One astronaut escapes, and in one of the iconic scenes in Hollywood history, at the end of the movie he comes upon a rusted Statue of Liberty. The astronaut—Charlton Heston—and the viewers realize with dismay that he is not light-years from home, but back on Earth. Planet of the Apes took the place of Tarzan in racist popular culture, inspiring four sequels between 1970 and 1973, three more in the twenty-first century, a television series, and a host of comic books, video games, and other merchandise—you name it, the franchise produced it. While Tarzan put on America’s screens the racist confidence of conquering the dark world that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century, Planet of the Apes held up in full color the racist panic during the second half of the twentieth century of the conquered dark world rising up to enslave the White conqueror. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1012

Categorization

• SEED: A nice essay angle: how blockbuster speculative fiction encodes the racial anxieties of its era — Tarzan as expansionist confidence, Planet of the Apes as inversion panic.
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s ADDENDUM article on complaints about immodesty: both treat pop-culture artifacts as coded class/political signals rather than surface content.