Damned dirty apes

I blame Brian Keene.

He posted on a message board about the Planet of the Apes Ultimate Collection DVD that comes in a collector’s box in the shape of an ape head. Until I saw that post, this boxed (aped?) set hadn’t appeared on my radar. Of course I had to buy it. It arrived last night, 14 DVDs in a container shaped like Caesar, the Roddy McDowell character from the fourth and fifth movies (Conquest of and Battle for).

I’m a POTA fan from way back—since the TV series aired in the 1970s. I was hooked. Finally got to see the movies (this was before the time when you could just walk to the video store and rent a film you wanted to see—you had to wait for it to show up on TV, and we didn’t even have cable so it was a crap shoot), picked up the comic books that came out around the same time as the series aired, bought the novelizations of both the movies and the TV series (the latter were written by George Alec Effinger). Even had a few of the action figures.

One year for Halloween, I used great gobs of black plasticine to turn my white Jasonesque goalie mask (my brother and his friends used to dress me up in goalie gear and take shots at me; they were seven years older than me) into a gorilla mask. I was impressed with my sculpting skills; it was a decent recreation of the makeup used for the series.

Of course, I already had a lot of the DVDs in this collection, so now I have duplicates that I’ll have to get rid of, but this is the ultimate POTA geek experience. It even has the cartoon series, which I’ve never seen.

* * *
I started dabbling at a new short story this morning. About a month ago I was invited to submit a 100-word proposal to an anthology of stories set in an existing universe. This is the first time I’ve written about existing characters in a well established reality. It’s also the first time I’ve pitched a short story before I’ve written it. My proposal was accepted, so now I have until October to come up with the goods. Though I have a fairly good idea of the overall plot, and the characters are already established, I’m still finding my way. I don’t want to lose my voice completely, but it must be subsumed to a certain extent, by the constraints of the extant material. Another interesting challenge. I’ll say more once this project becomes public knowledge.