The official trailer for Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes arrived in 1968, announcing one of the most audacious science fiction films a major Hollywood studio had produced, a film that used its premise as a vehicle for pointed satire of human arrogance, racial hierarchy, and Cold War nuclear anxiety with a directness that mainstream filmmaking had rarely attempted. The trailer's most striking quality is its refusal to apologise for its central conceit, presenting images of ape society and human captivity that signal the film's satirical intelligence with a visual authority that makes the strangeness feel like creative necessity rather than gimmick. Schaffner understood that the film's obligation was not to explain its world but to make it feel real, to give audiences a visceral sense of a civilisation so fully realised and so uncomfortably familiar in its social hierarchies that the satirical argument would make itself. Charlton Heston's George Taylor, a man of arrogance and capability who crash-lands on a planet where apes are dominant and humans are mute primitives, is introduced with enough physical authority and moral complexity to make his humiliation feel earned rather than simply ironic.
First Impressions
Schaffner's film had no obvious precedent to lean on, and the trailer reflects that position: there is no familiar genre shorthand to reassure the audience, no attempt to soften the premise into something more palatable. The ape makeup and costume design create a world simultaneously alien and uncomfortably familiar, and the footage trusts that discomfort to do the work that a lesser marketing campaign would have explained away. It is a trailer that treats its audience as capable of sitting with something genuinely strange.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes the premise with economy, presenting Taylor's capture and his discovery of the planet's social hierarchy with enough clarity to convey the film's satirical thrust without revealing its extraordinary final image. The footage hints at a film using science fiction to ask serious questions about human nature, and the trailer carries this intellectual ambition with images of power and strangeness that give the marketing a weight well beyond what the genre typically demanded.
Music and Sound
Jerry Goldsmith's score is one of the most innovative in Hollywood history, its use of unconventional instrumentation, prepared piano, and atonal composition creating a sonic landscape of genuine alienness that perfectly complements the film's visual world. The trailer deploys the music to amplify the footage's sense of profound wrongness, the score's unsettling textures marking a film operating at the outer limits of mainstream cinema's imaginative possibilities.
Most Memorable Moment
The first full reveal of the ape civilisation, with its extraordinary makeup presenting a society of simian scientists, soldiers, and politicians rendered with a detail and conviction that the trailer captures unflinchingly, is the footage's most arresting passage. It is an image of cinematic audacity, presenting a world never seen before with a sureness that makes the film's satirical intentions immediately legible.
Trailer Verdict
A trailer for one of the defining science fiction films of the twentieth century, a film that used its premise to deliver some of the most pointed social satire in Hollywood history and concluded with one of cinema's most celebrated final images. Planet of the Apes is a film of real intellectual ambition and extraordinary craft. Schaffner promised a mirror held up to humanity. The trailer made that mirror feel dangerous. The film made it impossible to look away.