10.   UP ABOVE THE WORLD SO HIGH SHIMON WILCELBERG   Our people spot a soaring machine. It is primitive, a kind of hang glider, and has been developed by a young “Da Vinci” who is bright, almost arrogant in the pursuit of knowledge and highly inventive. The Astronauts become involved with him, help him and then learn he has been ostracized by other villagers because past inventions have brought down the wrath of the Apes. His wife is also antagonistic to his work, although she loves him.   The Inventor is spotted by Apes who play on his hubris, offering him aid in the form of better material. The Apes mean to use the flying machine for nefarious purposes. The Astronauts get to the Inventor and try to convince him he is being irresponsible in not considering social uses of his invention.   It is not clear what the Inventor will do. He is taking a test flight which, if successful, will convince the Apes of the practicability of the device. The Astronauts are ready to shoot him down with a catapult javelin to prevent catastrophe to all humans, but the Inventor deliberately crashes, breaks a leg. Apes now “know” flying is impossible, the villagers re-admit the Inventor and he will work in future, on more useful and less dangerous devices.     Notes: The tone of this synopsis is very different to the story we saw on-screen and, as with TOMORROW’S TIDE, demonstrates that the author had originally had a serious point to make at the heart of the story—a point that was lost, subsequently.   It is significant that one early draft of the script for this story bears only the name of Arthur Brown Jnr., whereas the finished episode bears the name of Brown and Shimon Wilcelberg’s pen-name: S-Bar David, which suggests that the latter may have gone to arbitration to fight for his credit... For me, one of the fascinating things about this synopsis is the presence of Leuric’s wife. One of the disappointing aspects of the Apes series is the absence of any strong human women in the stories. The only significant female characters are Apes: the Chimpanzee farmer’s wife and ex-doctor Zantees (“The Good Seeds”), the “Surgeon”, Kira, and scientists Wanda (“The Interrogation”) and Carsia (from the filmed version of “Up Above...”).   This may be have been attributable to a movie technician’s union rule, in place during the time Apes was in production, which stated that if there was a woman in the cast of a TV series, she had to have her own make-up person, separately from any staff dealing with the men. Inevitably, this increase in staff would inflate the costs for the relevant episode. It was for this reason that the final season of Irwin Allen’s “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” did not feature any women as guest stars. Perhaps this also explains the absence of women from “Apes.” It is possible that the production team could have argued that the female ape characters were not “women”, or that the ape make-up was a special exemption, and that any women portraying apes could be attended to by the same make-up staff who were working on the male apes...   In any event, it is noticeable that Wilcelberg’s synopsis does not mention Carsia or any notion of ape revolutionaries and suggests, instead, that it is Zaius and company (“the Apes” in general) who are after the secret of flight...