The Fate of "Gilligan's Island"

What Boomer kid doesn't get all wispy and nostalgic upon hearing "Just sit right back, and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip..."

Gilligan's Island (1964-67) was an iconic Boomer tv series, part of the "lost far from home" genre, about seven people who set out from Hawaii on a "three hour tour" and ended up shipwrecked on a desert island.  We didn't care that their escape attempts were ludicrous, or that visitors managed to make it off the island with no trouble.  What counted was the adventure: they fought pirates, headhunters, mad scientists, Russian spies.  They found a Jungle Boy and a buffed surfer.

It was a "boys only" paradise, with no girls or grownups around to spoil the fun.

Ok, the Howells were grownups.  Sort of.

Ok, there were two girls, Ginger and Mary Anne, but no one acted all goofy around them.  They were like big sisters.

Although they paid lip service to the goal of getting off the island, it was obvious that no one really wanted to leave.  Back home they were failures, parodies of themselves.  Ginger was an actress relegated to horrid B-movies, but on the Island, she was a star.  The Professor was a polymath teaching high school science, but on the Island he was a genius.  On the Island they all could shine.

There was no ongoing plot arc, as is common in tv series today, nor was there a conclusion.  The last episode of the series leaves them still stranded on the island.

But iconic Boomer tv series don't stay dead for long.  There were endless reruns, and, 10 years later (1974-77), The New Adventures of Gilligan  appeared as a Saturday morning cartoon. Most episodes involved inter-group squabbles, with an 1970s "the more you know" moral, rather than escape attempts.



The characters look considerably younger than the actors they depict.  Gilligan and Mary Anne could be in their teens, and Skipper and the Howells look barely 30.  And why is Ginger platinum blonde instead of "ginger"?

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In October 1978, I was a freshman in college,  and like every Boomer kid, I had no choice but to watch the tv movie Rescue from Gilligan's Island .  They finally made it back to civilization!  Except instead of having them shipwrecked for a reasonable amount of time, the premise is that they've been on the island for 14 years, since 1964.  They're obviously older, well into middle age or old age, which makes their stuntwork cringeworthy.

They arrive in Hawaii to a huge crowd of well-wishers and fans (except none of their family or friends).  The moment Gilligan leaves the coast guard ship, a soldier hands him an ice cream cone.

Giving a middle-aged man an ice cream cone rather than a hefty check from the insurance company? Bogus!

 They try to go back to their old lives: the Professor to his research university, the Howells to their snooty friends, Ginger to the movies, Mary Anne to her farm in Kansas.  But it's the midst of the sex-and-sleaze disco era, everything has changed, and they're miserable. Fortunately, they end up being shipwrecked on the same island again.  There's no place like home?

Every Boomer kid watched them being rescued again in The Castaways on Gilligan's Island (1979).  This time they return to convert the island into a resort, where they proceed to solve guests' soap opera problems.  Apparently this was the pilot to a proposed tv series, with different problems every week, sort of like Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

First up: a workaholic husband whose wife wants him to relax (played by Happy Days' Tom Bosley and The Bob Newhart Show's Marcia Wallace), and an unaccompanied minor (popular child star Ronnie Scribner) turns out to be a runaway.

Since this is a tropical island, there is some beefcake among the extras lounging at poolside.

Not many Boomer kids, now young adults, cared enough to tune in to The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981).  The island is still a resort, with the Harlem Globetrotters as guests, but the plot involves the villainous Martin Landau trying to get control of the valuable mineral "supremium."

Jim Backus, who played Thurston Howell III, was in poor health, so he appeared only in a cameo; his character was channelled by David Ruprecht (left) as his never-mentioned-before "son,"  Thurston Howell IV.

The last gasp of Gilligan's Island, except for in-character guest spots and retrospectives, came in 1982-83, with the Saturday morning Gilligan's Planet. The Professor can't built a boat, but he builds an interstellar spacecraft.  They end up spacecraft-wrecked on an uncharted planet.

Really?

I was in grad school at Indiana University at the time, too old for cartoons.  But even if I was 10 years old, the premise seems unbearably far-fetched.

Besides, I had already seen Lost in Space.

See also: Gilligan's Island