Why Planet of the apes is horrifying and excellent.

So I'm excited for Rise, if you're a true Planet of the Apes fan, that's all you call it, Rise. This movie will fall in the continuity of the other five movies and depict the initial beginning of the super intelligent apes.

A friend of my father's said that Planet of the Apes was popular when he was a kid because it was one of the only sci-fi things they had, but I beg to differ. Planet of the Apes was and is popular because it horrifies and intrigues due to cultural establishments.

To understand why Planet of the Apes is popular, we need to go back to the late 1400's. Why are the late 1400's important to Planet of the Apes? I'm getting to it. The grinding stone and the printing press were both invented in that period, and that's important because then serfs didn't have to work as hard, because the grinding stone did their work for them, so many of them ran away and eventually became the middle class. With the printing press, they could formulate and spread their ideas. In other words, a group of people was created that had nothing better to do than learn about and criticize the world around them. This is what the layman calls the Renaissance.

During the Renaissance, four values arose among western civilization, the most important one was humanism. Humanism, put simply is the belief that humans are the cat's pajama's and the bee's knees and anything that says otherwise gets made into coats and furniture.

Whether you know it or not, humanism and the other Renaissance values still have an astronomical effect on modern culture, so people still think that nothing can beat them. A perfect example of humanism in culture is Independence Day.

So when Planet of the Apes came out, suddenly people were exposed to humans being turned in to slaves and pets, and apes, a species we thought we had mastered, dominate them. People, thinking this was impossible, were intrigued by the concept, went to the movie, then were horrified by the startling possibility.

So there you have it, we have Guttenburg and Martin Luther to thank for Planet of the Apes.