eBay Today: Oh, The Humanity! Posted by Rich on April 22, 2007 at 01:00 AM CST: Thirty years before Sideshow started monkeying around and well before Marky Mark was hanging with the funky bunch, people were going ape for Mego. In 1974, Mego debuted their Planet of the Apes toy line with an initial offering of five, 8-inch figures based on the 1968 motion-picture starring Charlton Heston as marooned astronaut George Taylor. Despite acquiring the license for the Apes property, Mego did not attain the rights to Heston's likeness and a figure based on the Taylor character was never produced. Instead, fans and kids alike settled for a generically named Astronaut figure that looked more like a canyon-jumping daredevil then a space traveler. It wasn't until the following year that Mego made up for the lack of an identifiable human hero, in the Apes line, by releasing figures of astronauts Alan Virdon and Peter Burke. For their time the Burke and Virdon figures -- based on characters from the short-lived Planet of the Apes television series -- possessed a strikingly accurate resemblance of the actor's likenesses. Ironically, it's a lack of detail on Mego's part in the form of a spelling error on the figure packaging that lives in infamy. Whether you blame it on '70s-era quality control or a case of spell-it-like-it-sounds copy editing, Mego misspelled the name Alan Verdon [sic] on the figure's card backer. To the chagrin of the many variation hunters still trying to figure out the difference between Ursus and Urko, a revised version with corrected spelling was never released. Nevertheless, the Apes line grew into a top seller and to this day remains popular among Apes collectors and Mego enthusiasts. MEGO "PLANET OF THE APES 1967 Alan Verdon So what's the story on the Apes TV series? The series follows the adventures of astronauts Peter Burke and Alan Virdon -- who as Taylor a dozen years before them -- found themselves stranded on a planet where a primitive human race is superseded by a sociolinguistic ape civilization. With the help of a chimpanzee named Galen, played by Roddy McDowell, Burke and Virdon traverse the land in search of a way home. Despite a fanatical pursuit by gorilla-soldier General Urko, Burke and Virdon never pass on a chance to lend an ape a helping hand and show them humans aren't so bad after all. 004