Bill Hudson leads the crew of the Venturer NASA spaceship which gets thrown through a strange disturbance and onto a planet of apes. Shortly after being rescued by primitive humans, Bill is captured by the apes, who are scared of the potential threat intelligent humans pose. He escapes, with the help of Zira and Cornelius, and helps the other human slaves to escape too. Leading them to safety in a distant hidden valley, he and Jeff, and later Judy and Brent, struggle to build proper defences for the embattled humans against ape armies and against some of the bizarre mutated creatures that live around the area. Bill remains the only intelligent human that Zaius and Urko know about.
Notes[]
- The character of Bill Hudson was created by writer Larry Spiegel.
- Hudson was given the rank of Commander in the first novelization of the Animated Series.
- The character of Bill Hudson is analogous to George Taylor from Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in that he is the leader of a crew of astronauts who travelled to the future and whose ship sank in a lake. When captured, Zira refers to him as "Blue Eyes", just as Taylor had been called "Bright Eyes". Like Taylor, Hudson is the first human revealed to be capable of speech, but Hudson differs from Taylor in personality, lacking Taylor's cynicism.
- In the 2018 novel Death of the Planet of the Apes, Hudson is a NASA astronaut who became skipper of the ANSA Probe Six experimental space-flight alongside Lieutenants Stewart and Franklin. Commander Hudson is, along with Lieutenant Allen and Major Virdon, selected for the ‘Accelerated Future Corps’, a five-year program in agriculture, engineering, medicine and technology that would help start life on a new planet.
Gallery[]
Production art for 'Bill Hudson'