“I undertook the Herculean task of yet again rewatching all six films, the TV show and the cartoons and rereading all of the novels, novelizations, screenplays and comics,” he told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.

Completists will appreciate the Lexicon’s inclusion of unpublished and unfilmed works along with reportage on stage shows and short films from the 1970s. Handley also contacted comic-book writers from Marvel, Malibu, Mr. Comics and Dark Horse for his Apes encyclopedia, previewed in the gallery above.

“I wanted to learn about the stories that would have been published had their respective series not been canceled,” said Handley, who also authored 2008’s Timeline of the Planet of the Apes: The Definitive Chronology.

Handley got hooked on the franchise when he saw the first Planet of the Apes movie on TV when he was 10 years old. Decades later, he believes the concept still holds water.

“For whatever flaws they may have, the Planet of the Apes movies and TV shows remain timeless,” he said. “They speak to the flaws of human society by holding up a mirror that reflects back a furry-faced, stoop-walked image of man’s arrogance, by knocking him off the evolutionary ladder entirely and replacing him with creatures who, in our time, live in trees, fling dung and pick bugs out of each other’s fur.”

The 322-page soft-cover volume from Hasslein Books, retail priced at $30, hit Amazon.com on Saturday.

Images courtesy Patricio Carbajal. Follow us on Twitter: @hughhart and @theunderwire.

See Also:

• Best Sci-Fi Flicks of the '60s, '70s, According to You
• 10 Sci-Fi Movies We'd Like to Throw Into a Black Hole
• Wired's Favorite Sci-Fi Flicks of All Time — Pre–Star Wars

Authors: Hugh Hart

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