The apes had taken over after the humans wiped out civilization with nuclear weapons. "Damn you! Damn you all to hell," shouts Heston, his misanthropy resoundingly justified.

The political message is ham-fisted but crystal clear: A nuclear holocaust will ruin us all. And then apes will take over the planet. Or something.

"Planet of the Apes," despite a couple of iconic images like that final scene, is a dreadful film, a compendium of clumsy dialogue, one-dimensional characters, risible plot turns and long silences broken by incomprehensible meaningful looks. But it has stayed with us because in conception, if not execution, the film had something to say.

This was before PETA became a household word, before things like animal experimentation controversies could muddle the film's message, which might be the case with Tim Burton's new edition. The original film's metaphor, in those civil rights-riven times, was plain: How would whites like to be treated the same way they treated blacks? Black leaders never really got behind the film, perhaps because, however bad the African-American condition was at the time, they did not feel that a comparison to apes was particularly helpful to their cause.

Ah, the '60s.

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The first film and its four successors through 1973 explored other social issues as well, including slavery, religion, veganism, interspecies smooching, genocide as sport and even animal experimentation. In the late '60s, entertainment often came with a message, but "Planet of the Apes" looked for a different audience. The stuffed shirts got "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Stanley Kramer's all-star look at an interracial marriage.

Everyone else had "Planet of the Apes."

America at the time was awash in social upheaval, controversy, internal struggles and war. American soldiers were being slaughtered for unclear reasons far across the sea. Antiwar sentiment was churning. Race riots ripped the country's underbelly, and our political and civil rights leaders were being assassinated.

Elsewhere, things weren't much better. U.S. Green Beret-trained Bolivian soldiers had executed Che Guevara in 1967. That same year, U.S. planes were bombing Hanoi, and Israelis and Palestinians were at war over the Sinai Peninsula. Concurrently, NASA had suspended all manned space flights after the deaths of three astronauts, who burned to death in a launchpad fire. "Planet of the Apes" also became the methadone treatment for NASA junkies after a fix.

While the films addressed a variety of social issues, they certainly didn't try to solve or address them all. And there were huge blind spots. When the original appeared, feminists were appalled that Nova, Heston's mate, was mute and subjugated. In the second film, "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," Don Pedro Colley was cast as a character called "Negro." (Some blame the writer of "Beneath" for that one, but the stumble was more likely endemic in Hollywood: Colley went on to star in "The Legend of Nigger Charley" in 1972 and "Black Caesar" in 1973.)

Still, more often than not, in the "Planet of the Apes" movies social issues were made anthropomorphic and in your face. Lead characters died. Shit hit fans. People made mistakes. Worlds blew up. What follows is a brief survey of plots and messages from the five original films, from the horrors of nuclear holocaust to talking monkeys to the golden rule: "Ape shall not kill ape."

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