Planet of the Apes / Referenced By - TV Tropes (2024)

"Kowalski! You maniac!"

Comic Books

• Jack Kirby was told to create Kamandi as a Follow the Leader even though he'd never actually seen the film, so he just put in what little he knew, such as the cover showing the title character paddling past a ruined Statue of Liberty, and a world ruled by Talking Animals with the Apes being one of the main factions.
• One of the stories in the third annual issue of SpongeBob Comics is “Planet of the Fish”, a full parody of the original film featuring Squidward in the role of Taylor. It ends with Squidward learning he was home all along… and in the hundreds of years while he was gone, the Krusty Krab (and a very much alive Mr. Krabs) are somehow still intact.

  Squidward: DARN YOU! YOU DIDN'T BLOW IT ALL UP!

Film – Animated

• The Haunted World of El Superbeasto: El Superbeasto found Otto carrying Velvet Von Black with him saying the "damn dirty ape" quote.

  Otto: That's a little derivative, don't you think?

• Madagascar: When Melman accidentally burns Alex's attempt at a distress beacon, a Statue of Liberty made of sticks, the charred ruins end up looking like the Statue from the film.

  Alex: You maniac! You burned it up! Darn you! Darn you all to Heck!

• The Powerpuff Girls Movie: Mojo Jojo raises an army of genetically-enhanced simians and says he will be "king of the planet of the apes". A little later, Buttercup shouts to a gorilla "Get your hands off him, you darn dirty ape!"
• Rugrats Go Wild!: When Angelica finds her Cynthia doll washed up on the island, it's in the same half-buried pose as the Statue of Liberty from the film.
• This line from The Curse of The Were-Rabbit:

  Victor: Get your furry mitts of my future wife you big brute!

Film – Live-Action

• Argo has Tony Mendez thinking of using a movie as a cover story for its refugee extraction plot as he watches Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
• Spaceballs: Near the end, the Mega Maid falls onto a planet's beach. Two intelligent apes notice the villains climbing out of the half-buried ship, which is now posed like the Statue of Liberty, and one of them bemoans "Oh, sh*t. There goes the planet."

Literature

• In Harmony (2016), Tilly wonders if the Motherland Calls statue will sink so far into the earth that she looks like she's climbing out of a hole, like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes.
• Prudence Penderhaus: In 17 Marigold Lane, Cassius grabs a bully and shoves him against the floor. The teacher puts his hand on his shoulder. Cassius pushes him away and says, "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape."

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • In the season 2 premiere episode "When She Was Bad", at the beginning, Willow and Xander are quizzing each other on quotes from movies, and Xander does the line, "It's a madhouse!" (actually, he tries to do the line, but Willow interrupts him with the answer).
  • In the fourth season premiere episode, "The Freshman", Oz describes college life as, "It's pretty much a madhouse, a madhouse."
• Garth Marenghis Darkplace. "The Apes of Wrath" has people mutating into apes who then take over the hospital. Marenghi is portrayed as a hack writer who rips off all his ideas from more popular films and novels, so this one is hardly surprising.
• Mad Men: In the sixth season episode "The Flood", not long after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Don takes Bobby to see the movie, and they end up watching it twice.
• When Mystery Science Theater 3000 watched Invasion of the Neptune Men, one of the riffs on the Hitler building is "You sons of a gun! You blew it up!" in the same delivery as Taylor.
• The Cold Open of the Saturday Night Live episode that Charlton Heston hosted completely ripped off the film, with Heston falling asleep in his dressing room and waking 2000 years in the future to find apes running everything, with the human cast now imprisoned the way humans were. This keeps going through the introduction with the human cast being replaced by apes capped off with the announcer declaring that "Captured Human Charlton Heston" is the host. He's then brought out on to the stage in chains, with the band and audience having been replaced by apes as well.

Music

• Brazilian band Jota Quest's second album De Volta ao Planeta, "back to the planet" — the album cover◊ and the ape-heavy video for its Title Track makes it clear which planet.

Video Games

• In Crash of the Titans, the Statue of Liberty reveal is parodied when Crash breaks down seeing a statue of N. Gin modeled after it.
• Gaia Crusaders is set After the End, and the New York stage have the half-collapsed Statue of Liberty in its background looking exactly like the ending of the first Planet of the Apes.
• The kaiju game Hakaiou: King of Crusher sees you battling the Statue of Liberty (yes, converted into a mecha) in the final stage. When defeated, she sinks into the ground in a manner similar to the film.
• Injustice 2:
  • Catwoman says to Gorilla Grodd: "Keep your stinking paws off me!"
  • Gorilla Grodd says to many humans: "You damn dirty human!"
• In World of Warcraft, one of the artifacts that the Explorer's League discovered after the Cataclysm is a mostly-buried Statue of Liberty that they've christened "The Overdressed Woman".

Web Comics

• Sheldon: This strip, part of a storyline in which Gramp reveals to have bought seventy-five boxes of razors in preparation for Y2K, has him admitting that he thought the razors would save him as human civilization crumbled. What possible scenario did he have in mind?

  (Imagine Spot of Gramp in a net, wielding a razor over Dr. Zaius and two other apes)
  Gramp: Get your paws off me, you (Symbol Swearing) dirty ape!

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • In his review of Independence Day, the establishing shot of New York after the alien attack is accompanied by "You maniacs! You blew it up!"
  • The Critic has reviewed Tim Burton's 2001 reimagining.

Western Animation

• Bounty Hamster. The episode "Planet of the Japes" is set on a planet of monkeys whose "hat" is practical jokes.
• Family Guy:
  • A cutaway from "I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar" shows Peter making an insensitive joke while at the apes' mercy.
  • In "Road to the Multiverse", Brian and Stewie ends up in an alternate reality where dogs keep humans as pets, and Stewie says to Brian, "Get you stinkin' paws off me you damn dirty dog!"
  • A cutaway from "Quagmire's Quagmire" shows Peter taking his sweet time ordering at a fast-food restaurant; by the time he's made his decision, Earth has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by apes.
• Futurama: In "The Late Philip J. Fry", Fry goes further in time and looks at the ruins of New New York. He breaks down at the sight of a series of Statues of Liberty, showing that mankind, apes, birds, cows, and slugs destroyed their societies.
• Johnny Bravo: "Panic in Jerky Town!" is mostly a parody of the other Charlton Heston flick Soylent Green, but in the ending, Johnny screams, "It's a madhouse!" while being restrained by guards.
• Justice League Unlimited. In "The Great Brain Robbery", the Flash and Lex Luthor switch minds after a botched mind-scanning attempt. When Flash, in Lex Luthor's body, goes to see Grodd, he quickly sees through it:

  Flash-in-Luthor's-body: Me? The Flash? You've like, totally lost it, Grodd! I'm Lex Luthor!
  Grodd: And I'm Charlton Heston.

• In The Penguins of Madagascar, at the end of a Time Travel episode, Skipper screams at the Statue of Liberty in a world consumed by ice cream.
• Pinky and the Brain: In "The Visit", when Brain catches some non-sapient field mice for an experiment, Pinky compares the situation to Charlton Heston being captured in the net.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Deep Space Homer", Homer says at a NASA press conference that he hopes he never goes to the Planet of the Apes... only to realize 30 years too late that it was Earth All Along. He proceeds to reenact Charlton Heston's breakdown, humiliating the NASA officials.
  • In "Bart's Girlfriend", the scene of the town's parents hunting their wayward children spoofs the human-hunting scene.
  • In "A Fish Called Selma", Troy McClure stars in a stage musical based on the film, called Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off!.
  • In "Pulpit Friction", the montage of bedbugs spreading through Springfield spoofs the ending to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. One shot even has Eddie and Lou fighting a monkey on horseback.
  • The Couch Gag for ''Treehouse of Horror XXVII'' has Planet of the Couches, in which couches are the dominant species. The Simpsons' couch rescues the family, and they then kill it and sit on it.
• At the end of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "SpongeHenge", SpongeBob breaks down on seeing the Krusty Krab abandoned and half-buried like the ruined Statue of Liberty.
  • There was also an episode called Planet of the Jellyfish.
• Teen Titans (2003): In "Cyborg the Barbarian", Cyborg tries to avoid interfering with the past at first to avoid a Planet of the Apes-style future.

  Cyborg: Don't do anything, don't touch anything! Sci-fi rule number one: you start messing with the past, you end up with monkeys ruling the future!