According to leading man Charlton Heston, Planet of the Apes pioneered a genre of film most commonly associated with Star Wars movies today. "It not only grossed enormous numbers, it created a new film genre: the space opera," he said in his autobiography In The Arena. "Fantasies set in outer space had long been a staple of the comic strips and Saturday morning kiddie TV, but had been disdained by Hollywood. Later, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were to explore space wonderfully, with far better technology, over a series of films, but Apes broke the ground."
While the makers of the Flash Gordon film serials of the 1930s would probably dispute Heston's claims that Planet of the Apes was the first big screen space opera, nobody could argue with the figures. Ironically, those "enormous numbers" Heston spoke of were down to the fact that Planet of the Apes appealed to both the Saturday morning kiddie TV crowd and the adult audience, too.
Maurice Evans, who played Dr. Zaius, told Cinefantastique, "I think it's pretty clear, whether by design or accident, the first picture had this double appeal. The appeal to youngsters [was] as a pure science fiction film, but it had a message to deliver which apparently communicated very clearly to the adult audience."
