A Father's Obligations: Shmoikel and I Go Ape

As a father, my portfolio of responsibilities includes giving my son Shmoikel a good cultural and moral grounding. Some highlights of my efforts:

-- Ending each night by saying the "Shema" prayer together, and starting each day by reciting "Modeh Ani"

-- Driving him around as a baby on Saturdays to the sounds of Irish and Gaelic music on WFUV

-- Explaining the difference between capitalism and communism

-- Teaching him that "bad pop music is bad pop music, whether it's in Spanish, Swedish, or Hebrew"

-- Together Watching "The Planet of the Apes" (POTA) movie series

We had great father-son bonding this weekend with POTA. Over the summer we watched the original POTA and greatly enjoyed it. It holds up incredibly well from the eerie beginning to the shattering climax. The cultural pay-off came quickly when Shmoikel saw the movie "Madagascar," which has a scene of a tiki version of the Statue of Liberty. One of the characters sees it and starts pounding a beach, shouting, "Darn you all to heck!" Shmoikel was the only kid in the theater who got the reference. I was so proud -- seriously.

We decided we had to see the entire POTA series. On Wednesday we found a boxed set at a library here in Gold Coast Connecticut. Friday night, fortified with popcorn, we settled in to watch the second installment, "Battle Beneath the Planet of the Apes." Alas, the tape wheel was stuck and wouldn't play. Darn that antique VCR format to heck!

Undaunted, we watched the third installment Friday and the final two as a rare double-feature on Saturday. While I had heard the series weakened as it went along, Shmoikel and I both found them mostly fascinating and deeply thought-provoking. The last episode faded in its first half into a mutant-zombie flick, but then the mental and moral issues kicked in.

As a series, POTA asks profound questions. It challenges viewers to consider what makes us human or inhuman, what are the implications of our treatment of other creatures (the fourth movie echoed immigration issues and what's gone wrong in Europe), the corruption of power, and the morality of killing to change history. The series can inspire good discussions between parent and child.

As is our wont, Shmoikel and I immediately went online to check fan clubs, official film sites, and anything else related to POTA. The first offshoot of going ape: we may see Charlton Heston's other two sci-fi classics, "The Omega Man" and "Soylent Green." Truth be told, I gave away the secret to the latter movie and we ran around my apartment chanting "Soylent green is peeeeeeople!" for a while.

I may hold off on The Omega Man because of its scorching scenes of interracial shtupping between Heston and tough-talking soul sister Rosalind Cash. Those scenes mightily impressed me when I saw the movie in 1971 at the Border Theater in Mission, Texas. (They'd seem tame today, but as with so much erotica, it's all in the context, baby.) Every movie has its time, and that time hasn't quite come yet for Shmoikel.

The next Heston movie weekend will consist of "El Cid," "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments."