Four Hestons of the Apocalypse

...from Apes to Apotheosis...

(originally published April 2015)

If Buster Crabbe is the Rudy Vallee of scifi thespians, then Charlton Heston is the Elvis. And like Crabbe, there is a certain thematic unity to Heston's work that bears examination.

In the 1950's, when Heston was a young actor, the USA experienced a perceptible increase in overt religiosity. No doubt this was some kind of collective reaction to the successive deprivation and horrors of the Great Depression and World War II, as well as a cultivated propaganda campaign of the early Cold War.

Indeed, in 1954, the US Congress voted into effect the national motto: 'In God We Trust,' ostensibly as a tribute to the bronze-age Hebrew war-god Yahweh, AKA Allah, AKA God. In 1957, US mints began printing the motto on paper money, uniting the two things Americans worship the most.

Sec. of State, John Foster Dulles, author of some of the USA's most aggressive imperialist actions, such as the Iranian Coup, made this statement in 1955:

• “Our people have always been endowed with a sense of mission in the world. They have believed that it was their duty to help men everywhere to get the opportunity to be and do what God designed.”

During this period of theocratic exuberance, there was a string of big budget religious movies, such as Sampson and Delilah (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), and The Robe (1953). From the 21st century point of view, it's strange to contemplate the Religious Film as being a big box office genre, since such films are now mostly Direct to Home Video or a commercial flop, but it filled a distinct need in 1950's America. Religious films allowed Hollywood to traffic in violence, lust, and all the other salacious ingredients Americans prefer, but with a veneer of sanctimony, so that movie-goers could still feel sufficiently pious.

Victure Mature, as Biblical Beefcake in Samson and Delilah

The biggest of these films was The Ten Commandments (1956), which featured the young thespian Charlton Heston.  He had previously appeared in notable films such as The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and The Naked Jungle (1954), but directors and the American filmgoer obviously sensed a certain ecclesiastical quality in him, because it was the beginning of a string of religious-themed epics featuring Heston:

• Ben Hur (1959)
• El Cid (1961)
• The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
• The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

The Heston Method

Although his acting style is not generally well-regarded by today's critics, Heston took his craft seriously and had high aspirations. While getting steady work in Hollywood A-pictures was no doubt appealing, he must have had misgivings about being Testamentary Typecast.

It was no doubt a fortuitous moment when Arthur P. Jacobs pitched Heston the idea for Planet of the Apes in 1965. Heston signed on the same day, and later participated in a short 'test reel' for 20th Century Fox, demonstrating the concept. 

Reading this article from the vantage point of the 21st century, it is worth a short side-trip into the history of Scifi film. Scifi cinema has trafficked in various apocalyptic scenarios since at least Things to Come (1936), but the sub-genre really came into its own in the 1950's. The need for low-budget product to fill the screens of America's drive-in theaters, combined with the potential thrills of Scifi and Atomic Age Anxiety, inspired a number of shoestring auteurs to produce a profusion of end-of-the-world epics. These films often opened with stock newsreel footage of exploding mushroom clouds and usually featured the desolation of Bronson Canyon or the Bronson Cave standing-in for a post-apocalyptic hell-scape. Robot Monster (1953)  and The Day the World Ended (1955) typify this group.

Humans fighting back against ape dominance in a post-apocalyptic Earth: the micro-budget Robot Monster (1953) strangely foreshadows Planet of the Apes.

Planet of the Apes (POTA) would be cut from different cloth. Costing almost $6 million to produce (in less inflated, 1968 dollars), it had an adequate budget, and an excellent cast and crew. The very fact that the story transpires on a ruined, post-apocalyptic earth is concealed until the last scene, although there are hints throughout the film. 

The Heston Method

POTA was released in early 1968, which turned out to be perfect timing for an apocalyptic Scifi film. Just a few weeks after the film's release, Walter Cronkite famously declared the Viet Nam war unwinnable, and was shortly thereafter followed the horrendous My Lai massacre. In April, and June, two eloquent and earnest political figures, MLK and RFK, beloved by millions, were respectively gunned down, shattering dreams for racial equality and peace.  In August, national TV broadcast live images of Chicago police brutalizing American youth at the National Democratic Convention. The self-righteous hypocrisy of American exceptionalism, the creed of the 1950's, was being challenged by disturbing realities.

By 1968, Americans had witnessed hundreds of civil rights marchers getting hosed. Now it was happening to a white guy.

A hard-hitting satire of race, religion, and politics, Planet of the Apes must have seemed like a bitter yet indispensable tonic. Its central conceit, to take a representative of the white male establishment, the most entitled species ever known on Planet Earth, and reverse his station, to humiliate him, cage him, cake him in filth, call him an animal and make him stand before a court of simian inquisitors, is Swiftian satire that remains potent after nearly 50 years.

The Heston Method

At the time of the film's production, Heston was mostly liberal in his political views, and decidedly anti-racist. There was no contradiction between the politics of the film and those of the thespian. 

Heston himself plays a character radically different from Moses or Michaelangelo, a hard-boiled, cynical, lusty, gun-toting, machismo American astronaut. This hero marks a significant step in the evolution of cinematic scifi, since most protagonists had heretofore been square-jawed hero types, ala Rex Reason, Gene Barry, or Leslie Neilsen.  

Heston would later describe Astronaut George Taylor in these terms: '...physically fleeing earth because of his contempt for man as a generally unsatisfactory animal. He finds himself thrust into the ironic situation of being the only reasoning human being in the anthropoid society, where he is forced to defend the homo sapiens whom he despises.This is a very interesting acting situation. I was of course fascinated by it...'

Yet in bringing to life such a character, there is more than cynicism and machismo, as evidenced by this excerpt from Astronaut Taylor's opening soliloquy:

• 'I leave the 20th century with no regrets. But one more thing - if anybody's listening, that is. Nothing scientific. It's purely personal. But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely. That's about it. Tell me, though. Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?'

Might these sentiments have also fit one of the actor's ecclesiastical performances as well?

Being as it is a satire of religious hypocrisy, it makes sense that POTA is full of quasi-scriptural language. Dig this quote from the simian holy book:

• 'Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.'

But the concept of Apocalypse itself comes to us from religion. Nuclear War and the other technological horrors of the 20th century had merely brought Apocalypse back into style after a thousand year hiatus.

The POTA script, and the final, sucker-punch scene, strongly imply that the planet was the victim of war. War of course, is one of the famed Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from the Biblical Book of Revelation. The Four Horsemen are typically identified by Christian Mythologists as follows: Conquest, Pestilence, War, and Famine.

Planet of the Apes was a mega-blockbuster and a genuine cultural phenomenon, grossing over $20 million in 1968 dollars, recapping the production cost more than threefold. A sequel was inevitable.

Mr Heston was not enthusiastic, but agreed to it, citing a feeling of obligation to producer Arthur P Jacobs. The Flapdoodle Files suspects that the actor also wanted to put a few more miles between himself and the cinematic Holy Land.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes was released in 1970, and was another hit for both 20th Century Fox and Heston.  It is, admittedly, somewhat loopy, but good apocalyptic fun is still to be found. There is a particularly enjoyable speech by the Elvis of Sleaze, the great James Gregory, as General Ursus, as he eggs the ape parliament onward toward an invasion of the Forbidden Zone. Watching the film today, the Ursus speech is strikingly familiar to watching the primates on our current 24-hr cable news channels, egging us onto our next campaign of military aggression.  This film corresponds to the Horseman Conquest.

The Heston Method

BTPOTA is also graced by the presence of an underground cult of H-Bomb worshiping telepathic mutants. Since the film ends with the detonation of a world-destroying mega-bomb, one could say this film shows the power of prayer.

By this time, Heston was though with the Planet of the Apes but not finished the Apocalypse. While flying on a passenger jet, he chanced to read Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend and became interested in its adaptation to cinema, seemingly unaware that it had been previously by an Italian producer under the name The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring the brilliant but effete Vincent Price in the titular role. 

The Heston version was titled The Omega Man (1971) and takes many liberties with the source material. In the film, Heston plays a hard-boiled, cynical, lusty, gun-toting, machismo Army doctor, whose blood is uniquely and mysteriously immune to a strange post-apocalyptic plague of zombism.  This film corresponds to the Horseman Pestilence. 

Although this was Heston's third go at apocalyptic scifi, his leading lady, Rosalind Cash, balked at doing a nude love scene with him, citing her own reluctance to "screw Moses." Despite his efforts so far, the Biblical aura was still clinging to the craggy thespian.

The Omega Man is a harbinger of changes in Heston's political views. Instead of being a bearded, dirty, hippiesque type of hero, as he was in Planet of the Apes, in this film he is clean-shaven, wears a smoking jacket and ascot, lives in a plush apartment, drives a Detroit land-yacht, eats caviar and drinks expensive whiskey. Not quite a square, he nonetheless embodies The Man. He is menaced and persecuted by a bizarre counterculture zombie cult known as The Family, likely inspired by The Manson Family. 

To put it bluntly, The Omega Man is not a good film, suffering from a daffy script, uninspired photography, and overall inept direction. It is of value mainly to film historians, to scholars of the Fantastique, and to hecklers.  Despite its failings, however, due credit should be given to its clumsy director, Boris Sagal, for having the guts to create the film's final image, a crucifixion parody/homage, underscoring the fact that Our Hero saves the world by shedding his blood. A little bit of sacrilege worthy of our admiration, yet at the same time, revealing a messianic ego. 

The Heston Method

Heston's final apocalyptic scfi film was Soylent Green (1973), which contains the earliest cinematic usage the term 'Greenhouse Effect' known to the Flapdoodle Files. Soylent Green (SG) features Heston as the hard-boiled, cynical, lusty, gun-toting, machismo detective Frank Thorne, in the near future year of 2022. SG transpires in an NYC trapped in perpetual summer (due to the Greenhouse Effect), overpopulation, food scacrity, resource depletion, 50% unemployment, and a disintegrating infrastructure. A whodunnit set amidst extreme urban decay and masses of ragged homeless people crowding every available inch, there is a disquieting plausibility to SG which only increases as the years pass and our own prognosis grows ever worse. While NYC doesn't look quite like Soylent Green yet, a few cities, like Rio and Mumbai, look worse.

Viewers accustomed to the spectacular battles and dazzling special effects of the post Star Wars era will perhaps be perplexed by SG, which uses the format of a police procedural to tell its own particular apocalyptic story, which corresponds to the Horseman Famine. The gritty dystopian whodunit is interspersed with enjoyable expository scenes featuring Heston alongside the great Edward G. Robinson, in what would be his last role.

Although unlike anything made in recent years, Soylent Green is an excellent film and its social commentary is even truer now than in 1973. Approaching from another angle, we note that Robinson's character is named Sol, evoking both a disciple of the legendary demi-god Jesus and the Roman emperor who made the Jesus-cult a State Religion. The name is likely not coincidental, since the movie features a famous sequence featuring Sol's voluntary surrender of his own life and technological transubstantiation into foodstuff, echoing the ritual of Christian Cannibalism.

The Heston Method

It is a testimonial to the impact of Soylent Green that almost no reader was shocked by that last spoiler, just as no readers were shocked when we mentioned that Earth is really the Planet of the Apes. The film was a box-office success, and mostly approved by the critics.

This would be Heston's final apocalypse, with the thespian moving on to supporting roles in a number of genres, then to TV soap-opera, and then to lesser roles. He had broken through his ecclesiastical typecasting and had somehow avoided being completely pidgeonholed in scifi.

The Four Hestonian Apocalypses, each from a different director, each a divergent vision of the apocalypse, have an accidental quality of unity. Each features the former Moses as a hard-boiled, cynical, lusty, gun-toting, machismo protagonist, trying to make sense of a world gone mad. Heston serves as a kind of Gulliver, traveling between these strange worlds.

At the same time, Heston's hard-boiled, cynical, lusty, gun-toting, machismo scifi hero has become a genuine archetype, forming the basis for multiple performances by Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Kirk Russell, Bruce Willis, and others. 

In the meantime, America and it's middle-class experienced a continuation of the national traumas and culture shocks which had begun with the 1968 Planet of the Apes release. The Stones at Altamont, the Mansion Murders, the Kent State Tragedy, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the drug-related deaths of numerous promising young rock and roll artists disheartened the youth movement. Concurrently, the bills for the Viet Nam war started to come due, corporations began to move their factories overseas, and Oil Shock combined so that, after 25 years of gains, the American middle-class began its long (and as yet unabated) slide backwards.

Heston himself seemed to have misunderstood what was happening to America, perceiving it as being somehow a set of misfortunes exclusive to the white heterosexual male, as opposed to the generalized and widespread deprivation that actually existed. His final role, as a right-wing fundraiser and president of the NRA, afforded him a high profile platform to utter shocking, offensive, and surreal soliloquies such as these:

• "I find my blood pressure rising when [the President]'s cultural shock troops participate in homosexual rights fund raisers but boycott gun rights fund raisers - and then claim it's time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts and suggest that sperm-donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served."

• "The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of those wise old, dead, white guys who invented this country. It's true - they were white guys. So were most of the guys who died in [Abraham Lincoln]'s name, opposing slavery in the 1860s. So, why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is Hispanic pride or black pride a good thing, while white pride conjures up shaved heads and white hoods?"

For a rich white heterosexual man who had lived the greater part of his life with the privileges of a fame and wealth to argue that white heterosexual men were an oppressed group in the America of the 1990's is certainly an endeavor of the imagination. Heston's evolution from celluloid thespian to a Right Wing Talking Head, to his final cameo performance as an elderly and infirm man in Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine is perhaps more similar to the Reality TV Star than it is to the Performance Artist, however. 

The Heston Method

In fairness, Charlton Heston's emergence as a right-wing bloviator coincides with the Angry White Man movement of the 1980's and 1990's, in which millions of self-pitying Caucasians blamed the falling fortunes of the middle-class on Affirmative Action, Ebonics, liberals...anything but the structural economic forces actually at work.

Apotheosis is the term to describe the process by which ancient heroes or kings became transformed, in the imagination at least, from mere mortals to gods.  Charlton Heston began his career as an ordinary actor, appearing in westerns, crime stories, and other genres but at a critical moment in cinema history became so closely identified with religious heroes that in the mind of the public, the borders began to blur.  

In the seemingly-secular realm of scifi, each his characters each confronted the apocalypse, a concept with origins in ancient religions, and there is a strange messianic quality in these performances. The final chapter of his life, as a professional demagogue, thrust his own personality, or at least the simulacrum of it, into the public eye, upon the stage of the 24-hour TV news cycle. 

Even now, 7 years after his death, the NRA website has immortalized Heston's speeches, in all their racist/homophobic dog-whistling glory, echoing across the globe via the information superhighway.  

Alternatively, while his Biblical and religious-themed films are seldom seen today, the original Planet of the Apes is still in regular rotation on classic movie channels and scifi film festivals, and Astronaut Taylor preserves the memory of Heston for millions of viewers. 

An Old Testament prophet, the Last Man on Earth, an Angry White Man...a living technicolor memory, transmitted digitally, toward an undefined apotheosis... 

The Scifi/Supernatural Sixties: Silliness, Surrealism, Superheroes and Subversion

We have recently observed the huge collective outpouring of grief over the death of thespian Leonard Nimoy, who became an icon as the result of his work in a mid-1960's TV series called Star Trek. Star Trek was one of an amazing plethora of science fiction and fantasy programs aired by the 3 major US networks in the mid-1960's, and their collective popularity is such that Nimoy was not the only icon to emerge from the group.  These series include sitcoms, dramas, and action/adventure programs.

French critics group science fiction, horror and fantasy into one genre, which they call The Fantastique. The Flapdoodle Files believes this grouping to be both logical and useful for our purposes. 

For most of the past 45 years, The Fantastique has been a marginal genre in American network TV...at any one time, there might be between one and three successful Fantastique series on the air concurrently, such as Third Rock From the Sun and X-Files, for example, but never in numbers approaching the frequency of crime shows, workplace sitcoms, or medical programs.

In the mid-1960's, however, 31 Fantastique programs premiered on the Big Three American TV networks within a 6-year period. Considering that fantastical productions such as these all had special production requirements, such as optical and practical special effects, special make-up, special wardrobes and sets, and considering the technological and budgetary limitations of the period, this is a singular phenomenon in the history of TV. 

Technically primitive by today's standards, The Outer Limits was shocking and surreal to its original audience.

Note: The Flapdoodle Files has endeavored to list all Fantastique series, but has deliberate omitted cartoon and puppet series, simply for purposes of simplification (no disparagement of cartoon or puppet shows is intended). Gilligan's Island, which also contained many elements of the Fantastique is also omitted from this list, simply to avoid the need for side-tracking into a lengthy analysis in support of its inclusion.

1963

• My Favorite Martian (3 Seasons)
• The Outer Limits (2 Seasons)

1964

• Bewitched (8 seasons)
• Voyage to the Bottom of the  Sea (4 seasons)
• The Man From UNCLE (4 seasons)
• Addams Family (2 seasons)
• The Munsters (2 seasons)
• My Living Doll (1 season)

1965

• I Dream of Jeannie (5 seasons)
• Get Smart (5 seasons)
• The Avengers (already broadcast in the UK for several years, it premiered in the USA in 1965, for a total of 5 US seasons)
• The Wild, Wild, West (4 seasons)
• Lost In Space (3 seasons)
• My Brother the Angel (1 season)
• My Mother The Car (1 season)
• Honey West (1 season)

1966

• Mission Impossible (7 seasons)
• Dark Shadows (5 seasons)
• Star Trek (3 seasons)
• Batman (3 seasons)
• Tarzan (2 seasons)
• The Girl From UNCLE (1 season)
• The Time Tunnel (1 season)
• The Green Hornet (1 season)
• It's About Time (1 season)

1967

• The Flying Nun (3 seasons)
• The Invaders (2 seasons)
• Captain Nice (1 season)

1968

• Land of the Giants (2 seasons)
• The Ghost and Mrs Muir (2 seasons)
• The Prisoner (premiered in the UK in 1967...1 season)

[Many readers will note that some Spy Shows, such as Man From UNCLE and Mission Impossible,  are included in this list of the Fantastique, and yet two excellent Spy Shows, Danger Man and I Spy are not included. This is because we have included the spy shows were science fiction technology or concepts were a regular feature, as opposed to Danger Man and I Spy, which, for the most part, avoided elements of the Fantastique.]

The high water mark for the trend is 1966. Counting series which aired their final episode that year, as well as new series and series which premiered that fall, The Flapdoodle Files counts 22 Fantastique series for that year.  Nineteen-sixty-six was also the year that Mission: Impossible, Batman, and Star Trek premiered. Of the Fantastique Sixties cohort, these shows have spawned the strongest media franchises, with 5 M:I films, 8 Batman films, and a Star Trek universe which includes 4 sequel TV series and 12 feature films. 

Certainly, there had been fantastical programs before the mid-1960's, notably Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949-55), but most of these had been aimed exclusively at a juvenile audience and were primitive, ultra-low-budget affairs. Captain Video's props were often toys straight from the shelves of Wannamaker's Department Store, which occupied the same building as the captain's broadcasting studio. Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950-55) and Space Patrol (1950-55) were similar programs, also aimed at a juvenile audience.  

Captain Video was wildly popular, bringing in 3 million viewers at a time when there were about 6 million TV sets in the US, and it spawned a merchandising bonanza of comic books, ray guns, space helmets, etc. It was one of the first Baby Boomer media phenomena. When the Captain left the airwaves in 1955, it was not due to poor ratings, but rather the financial collapse of the Captain's parent company, the DuMont Television Network. 

Capt. Video, Ground Zero for Scifi TV

The same year that Captain Video premiered, the first two network western series, Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger also premiered. Like Captain Video and his peers, these early western series were aimed at children.

But the same year that the main juvenile scifi series ended, 1955, was the same year that the first two TV westerns aimed at adults premiered: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp and Gunsmoke. These series which premiered within days of each other, and were soon followed by numerous other westerns aimed at the same audience, such as The Rifleman, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Rawhide, The Rebel, Have Gun Will Travel, etc.  Besides having better quality writing than their predecessors, these programs all had higher overall production values as well, with many of the creators striving to elevate the medium.

The emergence of 'adult' TV westerns in the mid-1950's seems to stem from two concurrent and related transitions in the TV industry: 1) Scripted TV was moving away from live real-time broadcasts to using material previously filmed or video-taped. 2) Adult dramatic programming, previously dominated by anthology-type shows, began to emphasize series featuring recurring characters and settings. 

The western genre was well-suited to dominate in this transitional period due to several factors: 1) a large, pre-existing infra-structure of sets, costumes, and trained horses, and the requisite staff familiar with the infra-structure 2) in the cinema, the western format had proven highly adaptable to virtually any type of story, so that writers were free to address a diversity of subjects, including love, war, greed, prejudice, even religion. 3) the western genre was immediately recognizable to the audience, so as to reduce the need for exposition 4) guns abounded in this genre, and every story promised some kind of violence, making it highly appealing to Americans, for whom violence is Mothers-Milk. In addition to these practical considerations, the western genre had also achieved mythic status in the imagination of the audience...placing human characters in a distant and timeless zone, where poetry was always just below the surface

While advertisers and networks were willing to devote sizable resources into western programs, the same is not true for science fiction and the fantastic. An adult-oriented science fiction anthology series, Science Fiction Theater, debuted for syndication in 1955, but it had a much lower budget than Gunsmoke, and only two seasons were produced.

The the high water mark for the western trend was 1959, when 26 western programs were broadcast during a single week.  That same year Bonanza premiered, one of the first network series to be filmed in color, and which eventually became a ratings juggernaut.

Most large scale trends do not continue forever.  Nineteen fifty-nine was also the year that the Maverick episode 'Gun-Shy,' an obvious spoof of Gunsmoke, aired.  Perhaps more significantly, that was also the year that Rod Serling's scifi/fantasy anthology The Twilight Zone began its long run.

The next milestone would come in 1961, when the Studebaker automobile company, against the better judgement of CBS, succeeded in bringing Mister Ed to national TV. Mister Ed was a variation of the domestic sitcom, featuring an intelligent horse who understands English and speaks it fluently, a purely fantasy concept, infused into a recognizable setting. Studebaker knew better than CBS, and the show was hit.  

Mr Ed premiered 12 years prior to Equus.

Looking back, it appears as sometime between 1961 and 1966, a lot of people were betting that the Fantastique would supplant the Western as the Next Trend in Television. The Flapdoodle Files has not uncovered any first-hand documentation as to exactly why this occurred, but we will nonetheless speculate:

Technological Acceleration: From the late 1930's onward, certain areas of technological development had been accelerating rapidly, and these developments had gotten heavy media coverage. You can see it dramatically if you Google the 1939 New York World's Fair...it looks something like a Cult of Futurism. Television, radar, helicopters, jet planes, drone bombs, rockets, nuclear weapons, and stereophonic recordings were among the revolutionary innovations unleashed upon the public during this period. These seemingly rapid and certainly dramatic advances created an atmosphere wherein it seem plausible for technology to create almost any fantastic effect. The launch of Sputnik ignited the Space Race in 1957, and it was all suddenly turbo-charged.

Scifi Respectability: Literary scifi had been produced in abundance since the 1930's, and had been gaining in respectability since the late 1940's. Nineteen-fifty-three saw the first Hugo Awards, and by the 1960's a number of scifi writers, such as Bradbury, Heinlein, Poul and Asimov, had achieved mainstream fame and recognition. A number of high profile intellectuals, such as Marshall McLuhan, began to reference scifi within the hallowed halls of academia. 

Demographics: The Baby Boom officially began in 1946, which was also the peak year of the boom, as far as counting births goes. This was the first generation to grow up with TV in their homes, and with the Cult of Futurism as a backdrop. A Boomer born in 1946 would have been likely to have watched either Captain Video or Tom Corbett during grade school years, and at age 10 in 1956  might have read DC Comics' new science fiction hero the Flash. The first group to embrace The Man From UNCLE was college students...a Boomer born in 1946 would have been a college freshman in 1964, the year TMFU premiered. A huge cohort of potential customers was coming of age, each with a long potential life-span to buy cigarettes, laundry soap, ketchup, and automobiles.  It would be odd if the advertisers and network execs were not vigorously competing for the attention of these young consumers.  

Thespians of the Baby Boom: Bill Mumy, born in 1954; Burt Ward, born in 1945; and Angela Cartwright, born in 1952.

Sneaking Past the Censors: The Twilight Zone was created in part as a means for Rod Serling to circumvent interference from the squares at the network and the ad agencies. The Fantastique could be a means to camouflage potentially controversial content and ideas. We know that this also was a consideration for Gene Roddenberry during the creation of Star Trek as well, that he sought to televise stories that pushed the envelope, in terms of sex, politics, religion, and other potentially dangerous topics, but with the controversial aspects disguised by scifi props.  This idea is reinforced when we consider some of the Fantastique sitcoms of this period. My Favorite Martian, for instance, is about two single men living together, pretending to be nephew and uncle, who must conceal the truth about their relationship. I Dream of Jeannie features an unmarried man living with a naive and beautiful woman who calls him 'Master.' Bewitched and Mister Ed are also concerned with respectable middle-class men keeping secrets from the world. 

Two co-habitating men with a secret to hide...

In all likelihood, these combined factors, plus a few others, combined to create a milieu in which the powerful men wearing suits made decisions to spend big money on the Fantastique, a genre traditionally found only on the margins.  


There are two other trends, overlapping the Fantastique TV fad, which the Flapdoodle Files thinks worthy of mention.

One has been already touched upon: The so-called Silver Age of Comic Books, which is a period from 1956 until about 1969 when American mainstream comic books enjoyed a prolonged surge in sales. The Silver Age is characterized by a profusion of science-fiction related super-heroes and monsters, such as DC Comics' Green Lantern (premiering 1959) and Marvel Comics' Incredible Hulk (premiering 1962). The increased sales of comic books was concurrent with the peak years of innovation and virtuosity for a generation of artists and writers, such as Jack Kirby, John Broome, Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Stan Lee and Gardner Fox. The monsters and super-heroes of the Silver Age certainly belong to the Fantastique, and thanks to extensive re-printing, much of the material is still popular today.  

The other trend involved fantastical imagery and references in pop music. In 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary scored a hit with 'Puff the Magic Dragon' and the Marketts charted with the surf-rock single 'Out of Limits,' an homage to both the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits. This trend is too extensive to catalogue for this essay, but it includes Donovan's 'Sunshine Superman' (recorded in late 1965, it commemorates the Silver-Age comic-book hero Green Lantern), 'Windy' by the Association (1967), '2000 Light Years from Home' (1967) by the Rolling Stones, and of course several cuts from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album (1967). As with the Comic Book Men, these artists were also at the top of their game, and many of these songs are still played on commercial radio. 

Scifi super-hero, and Donovan's muse.

TV, pop music and comic books. Consumer art aimed at the youth market, reflecting a fantastical zeitgeist.

The premiere of Batman in early 1966 marks the most obvious convergence of the three trends. The character himself had been in comic book existence since 1939 but had never enjoyed the wide recognition of his pal Superman, and in fact had been on the verge of cancellation in 1964. Saved from a final oblivion by Carmine Infantino's brilliant visual reboot in 1964, it was the TV program which propelled Batman to super-star status and made him  a media and merchandising money-tree. 

Each Batman TV episode opened with a comic-book style animated credit sequence and driving rock and roll  theme song by Neal Hefti. The title song itself was re-recorded by the Marketts (becoming a top-40 hit) as well as by the Kinks and the Who. The producers attempted to reinforce the pop music connection with guest appearances on the show by Leslie Gore, and then Chad and Jeremy. 

Initially, Batman hit its prime demographic targets and more, being hugely popular with children, teens, college students and 'hip' adults, and initiating a marketing bonanza that would never quite disappear, even years after the show ended.  Batman was an immediate phenomenon, mentioned in the same context as Bond and the Beatles...for a while. 

Another popular music connection for the Dynamic Duo...

A number other Fantastique shows were also hits, especially the sitcoms Bewitched, Dream of Jeannie and Get Smart. Perhaps more significantly, a number of non-comedic 'adventure' shows also did well, such as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Wild, Wild, West.

Besides Batman, two other series qualified as bona-fide phenomena. The Man From UNCLE,  which preceded Batman, had its own brief period of spectacular ratings, white-hot fandom, and marketing excess, before being supplanted by Batmania. For reasons unknown to the Flapdoodle Files, MFU was not syndicated in the 1970's, and is now, outside of baby-boomers, obscure.

Star Trek, costly to produce and with lackluster ratings almost immediately generated a cult of die-hard fans and a few high-profile boosters in the science fiction community, such as Isaac Asimov. The passion of Star Trek fans was such that their massive letter-writing campaigns helped persuade NBC to keep the show on the air beyond one season. Despite mediocre ratings, the show seems to have had an influence exceeding the ratings numbers. An RCA ad for Color TV (which was then still a luxury item) is an example:

Beside being the peak year for the trend, the 1966-67 season was also when a number of notable flops premiered: The Time Tunnel, The Girl From UNCLE, The Green Hornet, and It's About Time. Each of these programs was the brainchild of previously successful creators, so their respective failures might have been cause for concern for the networks and advertisers.  

It was about this time that ratings for The Man From UNCLE collapsed, after producers made the disastrous decision to emulate the 'camp' type humor of Batman.  And by spring 1967 ratings for the Caped Crusader himself had also started to hemorrhage.  The near simultaneous collapse of these two very high profile shows must also have been an ominous sign. 

Comic-book artist Jack Davis did the art on this item, evidence of confluence of the medium and Fantastique TV.

The Man from UNCLE was last broadcast on the network in January 1968, and Batman in March 1968.  Declining ratings caused Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea to also be cancelled that year. It was the same year that Walter Cronkite famously declared the Viet Nam war to be unwinnable, the year that MLK and RFK were gunned down by assassins, the year the Chicago police brutalized anti-war demonstrators on national TV. 

No one knows exactly why ratings for so many of these shows seemed to dry up at roughly the same time. It may have simply been over-saturation, or the inevitable end of a fad. 

One possibility comes from the statistics kept by the US Government Selective Service System. Here are the draft numbers from the period:

1962:            82,060
1963:           119,265
1964:           112,386
1965:           230,991
1966:           382,010
1967:           228,263
1968:           296,406
1969:           283,586
1970:           162,746

The peak year for Fantastique TV was also the peak year for the Viet Nam draft. For the Baby Boomer audience coveted by the networks, literally every one of them was either a draftee, a potential draftee, or had friends/family as draftees. The 1966 draft numbers were more than threefold the 1963 numbers. The war hung over American youth like a Sword of Damocles: millions of young men lived with the expectation that any day they would ordered to submit to the institutionalized brutality of military life and the horrors of war. 

In 21st century vernacular, Shit Got Real. 

Circumstances had progressed to the point where perhaps televised fantasy was an insufficient opiate, and that something stronger might be required. 

Star Trek hung on until spring of 1969, in part because Paramount needed a complete third season in hope of recouping some of their losses by selling the program to syndication. The Wild, Wild West was also cancelled in 1969, in part due to pressure from parents' groups regarding the show's violent content.

The Flying Nun, Get Smart, Dark Shadows, Dream of Jeannie, The Ghost and Mrs Muir and Land of the Giants were cancelled in 1970. 

God doesn't give nuns the ability to fly, but TV does.

Of the 'straight' (non-comedic) Fantastique programs, only Mission:Impossible was left. But in fall of 1970, the emphasis of the series changed from super-spy operations, to the less fantastical emphasis of pursuing organized crime. M:I was following the crime-show trend which had begun in 1967, when Mannix and Ironside debuted. With inevitable peaks and valleys, and numerous adaptations to an ever-changing world, the crime-show trend continues to this day.

Bewitched held on until 1972. By this time, Night Gallery was on the air (1970-73) and The Six Million Dollar Man would premier in 1974 (running till 1978). This is the pattern that would prevail over the next three decades: successful Fantastique television shows would occur with only intermittent frequency, until cable programming and 'alternative' networks (i.e., Fox, and The CW) expanded sufficiently to accommodate a greater payload of the Fantastique. 


Because they could be enjoyed by both children and adults, most of the successful Fantastique TV programs of the 1960's were widely syndicated in the 1970's. A few series, such as Batman, Star Trek, and Bewitched have been been broadcast more or less continuously for the last 50 years, so that their total audience has become exponentially greater than their creators ever imagined. The longevity, financial success and cultural ubiquity of the Batman and Star Trek franchises suggest that Mr Spock and the Caped Crusader have both achieved the status of archetype, and even lesser characters, such as Barbara Eden's Jeannie, are said to be iconic. Considering these shows were originally conceived as products to be consumed immediately and then disposed of, their durability and adoption into modern mythology is a testament to their creators and to the power of the Fantastique. 

 Statue of the beloved fictional sorceress Samantha Stevens, from Bewitched, erected in 2005 in Salem, Massachusetts. 
In real life, Salem was notorious for having executed 20 accused witches in the late 17th century.