Go Ape for a Day
How Fox turned five Planet of the Apes movies into a nine hour theater event
Planet of the Apes was already a successful film series by 1973, but Fox found a new way to sell it. Instead of treating the first five movies as separate releases, they turned them into an event. One ticket. One theater. One very long day. On Tuesday, June 12, 1973, the Warfield Theater in San Francisco ran all five Planet of the Apes films back to back, one day before Battle for the Planet of the Apes opened to the public. The marquee read “Go Ape for a Day.” Two thousand, two hundred people formed a block long line for a dollar ticket. The complete showing ran nine hours, longer than a back to back pairing of epics Ben Hur and Gone With the Wind. James Sutton, district manager for National General Theaters, watched the crowd pour in and said, “We ought to sell a lot of hot dogs.”
The theater sold four thousand of them.
The San Francisco Chronicle found Kris Lewellen and Lane Lees, both thirteen, who had gotten out of bed at 7am to be first in line. A seventeen year old told the paper he had already seen the first four films four times each and did not think that was unusual. Eva Paz had seen the first film eleven times and was near the front. She explained simply that she loved it. One person in line mentioned that the films would not be on television until 1978, which was reason enough to come.
The San Francisco Examiner ran a follow up piece the next day titled “The Funny Things Humans Do for Apes.” It noted that more than 90 percent of the audience had stayed through all nine hours, and that a second full showing was held that same evening. Bob Wilkins, host of KTVU’s Creature Features, had given away 500 free tickets after receiving 5,300 requests. Writer Michele Lomax compared the fan culture forming around the films to the Star Trek phenomenon and noted that there was already a French magazine dedicated entirely to the franchise.
Marathons spread to San Diego, Sacramento, Denver, Portland, Seattle, Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. At the Embassy Theatre in New York, the event was repeated twice more during the second week alone. In Los Angeles, Fox staged a promotional stunt outside the Hollywood Cinema and the Beverly Theatre, where costumed figures carried picket signs reading “Apes Opt for Equal Opportunity” and “No Watergate in Simian Society.” In June of 1973, that one did not need much explanation.
By mid July, the format had reached suburban New Jersey and Long Island. Ads for drive ins and indoor theaters show the same pattern, all day Apes programming, extra dates, and crowds large enough that some locations had to add more screenings. The marathon was no longer just a San Francisco stunt. It had become a repeatable event.
What happened the following year was more organized. Fox vice president Ben Barron told the Los Angeles Times in June 1974 that the 1973 events had been “basically a publicity stunt” and that “the idiots were waiting in line all day to see the films.” However he meant it, Fox had clearly learned something from the turnout. The studio had not just sold tickets. It had found a format.
The five films were being presented as a numbered sequence, known around the Fox lot as Apes 1 through 5. Three hundred licensed products were in preparation. The CBS television series starring Roddy McDowall was set to premiere that September. The slogan tying it all together was “Go Ape for a Day.” The theatrical marathons had started as a stunt, but by 1974 they were part of a much larger push.
A 1974 Daily News ad shows Toys R Us offering 1,500 free movie tickets through a drawing during in store appearances by Cornelius, Geoffrey, Gigi, and Baby Gee at New Jersey and Long Island locations (see you in Paramus). Individual theater ads from the period show how the format spread and changed from market to market. A Mountain View, California ad from November 1974 advertised all five films from 9am to 5pm at two dollars a seat, with free color Apes photos and an actual Planet of the Apes makeup demonstration thrown in. A Roanoke, Virginia listing from June 1974 shows only three films under the Go Ape for a Day banner. A Waco, Texas ad from July 1974 runs all five films with individual start times, the last beginning at 9:15pm.
Not every market ran all five. Not every version looked the same. Local exhibitors took the idea and adapted it to what they could manage.
The newspaper coverage captures the scale of the promotion, but the memory of the marathons survived in a different place. Decades later, people were still turning up in blog comments and message boards to say they had been there.
John Busser, writing on the Space 1970 blog in 2012, remembered going to the Parma theater, which originally had more than a thousand seats. It was packed for the first film. By the time Battle for the Planet of the Apes started, there were maybe thirty people left. He was one of them.
Other memories follow the same pattern. Someone who went to the Times Square showings remembered two full cycles in one day, the first from 10am to 6pm and a second from 6pm to 2am. He walked out into Times Square after 2am and still had an hour commute home on the 7 train. Another account describes a family piling into a station wagon for a dusk to dawn drive in showing. The dad and the twelve year old stayed awake for all of it. The seven year old did not.
That is the part the ads cannot really capture. The campaign was built around a simple dare, could you sit through all five Planet of the Apes movies in one day. For the people who did it, the endurance became part of the memory.
The theatrical marathons had a second life almost immediately on television. In September 1973, CBS bought the broadcast rights to the first three Planet of the Apes films for one million dollars and aired them in prime time (guess it wasn’t 1978). The result was a 33.6 Nielsen rating and a 57 percent audience share, the highest ratings recorded for a science fiction broadcast up to that point, and the number one spot for the week. CBS ran the films again in its Friday Night Movie slot.
Those numbers, together with the theatrical turnout, helped convince the network to move forward with a weekly series. The CBS live action Planet of the Apes series premiered on September 13, 1974, and ran fourteen episodes before cancellation. Why? Well, it had the bad luck of going up against Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man on NBC.
The Go Ape format stayed useful on television well past the series. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, stations began programming Go Ape weeks, running the five films on consecutive nights. Those blocks drew well enough that ten episodes of the 1974 TV series were repackaged as five two hour films, giving stations more Apes material to run.
New prologue and epilogue segments were filmed with Roddy McDowall returning as an older Galen, looking back on the adventures of Virdon and Burke. Those segments gave the series a little more closure than it had received during its original run, including an explanation that the two astronauts had found their computer in another city and disappeared into space. The wraparounds do not appear to have been included on the later DVD release. So we still can look forward to maybe getting that one day.
Of all the licensing that followed the Go Ape push, the Mego toy line may have the best origin story. Marty Abrams, president of Mego Corporation, had never seen a Planet of the Apes film until his son Kenny brought him to one of the 1973 marathons. According to the Mego Museum, Abrams spent much of the day watching the audience. The turnout told him there was something there beyond another science fiction movie series.
The next morning, Abrams contacted Fox about the toy rights. Mego outbid rival toy company AHI and introduced its Planet of the Apes line at Toy Fair in February 1974. It was Mego’s first movie based toy line, and it became one of the company’s biggest successes. The marathons had shown Fox that the series could still draw a crowd. They also showed Mego that kids might want to take that world home.
The 1974 CBS series failed to hold an older audience and was gone within a season. The animated Return to the Planet of the Apes followed on NBC in 1975. The Go Ape television weeks kept the films visible through the early 1980s, but without new theatrical entries, the momentum eventually ran out. The franchise went quiet for a while.
That all changed when Tim Burton’s 2001 remake brought people back briefly, and the Caesar trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011 gave the property a real revival. Each time a new entry arrives, someone programs a marathon somewhere, whether in a revival theater or at home. The five original films still run in order, from afternoon into night.
The original Go Ape Days belonged to an era when wanting to see all five films meant giving up most of a day in a theater. In 1973, the five Apes films were still recent, but most people had seen them one at a time. The marathon changed that. For nine hours, the films became one long strange story, with the world ending, starting over, and then ending again.
Fox had found more than a way to sell older movies. It had found a way to make Planet of the Apes an event. The idea spread from city to city, moved onto television, and helped feed the licensing push that followed. For the people who sat through it, though, the appeal was simple. They spent a day in a theater, watched all five Apes movies, and could say they made it to the end.
I was never around for those marathons in theaters, but I certainly remember when TBS would run all day marathons of them. I think they did it for Labor Day in 1994 as one example.
Fox must've understood how popular this franchise was, yet still decided to keep cutting the budget for future installments during the original run. Imagine how good the sequels could've been if they just put the same money into them.