The Fate of "Gilligan's Island": The castaways are rescued, mentor a child star, play basketball with robots, and blast into space

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, a buffed surfer, and a Tarzan clone.

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 ten years later, the sequels and adaptions started pouring out of the nostalgia factory:

1. The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974-77) appeared as a Saturday morning cartoon opposite other sitcom retreads, The Partridge Family 2200 AD and The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show.  Tina Louise and Dawn Wells weren't interested, but everyone else in the live-action cast returned to voice their characters.

Most episodes involved inter-group squabbles, with an 1970s "the more you know" moral:

They elect Gilligan as President of the island.

They squabble over pirate gold.

The Skipper and Mr. Howell argue.

The Skipper tries to turn Gilligan into "a real man."

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"?

2. Rescue from Gilligan's Island (1978) was a tv movie that every grown-up Boomer kid watched.  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!

Besides, they had ice cream on the island.  Crates full of anything they needed kept washing up in the lagoon.

 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 s*x-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?

There's also something about spies.

3. 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, to appeal to the oldsters, a workaholic husband whose wife wants him to relax (played by Happy Days' Tom Bosley and The Bob Newhart Show's Marcia Wallace)

And to appeal to the kids, an unaccompanied minor (popular child star Ronny Scribner) turns out to be runaway: he's an Olympic hopeful, and the training schedule was too intense.

More after the break

Denny Miller: Gilligan's Island, Tarzan, Quark, n*de dudes, and moments of gay promise

Link to the n*de photos

Picture it: a blustery October day sometime in the 7th or 8th grade. I am sitting in the living room after school with my brother and sister, drinking hot chocolate and watching a rerun of Gilligan's Island (1964-67), the sitcom about "seven stranded castaways" on a tropical island.  Visitors from the outside world drop by in almost every episode, and promise to help, but something always goes wrong.  This time, in the episode "Big Man on Little Stick" (February 20, 1965), the visitor is Duke Williams, a blond muscleman in bulging cut-off jeans -- he was caught in a tsunami and surfed the 250 miles from Hawaii (just go with it).  

I am overwhelmed by joy.  I have seen shirtless men in comic books, and in Tarzan movies, but never on tv, and Duke Williams is beautiful!  I can't take my eyes off him.

It gets better: Duke could surf back to Hawaii and send help, but he doesn't want to, because he likes the girls, Ginger and Mary Anne.  So the castaways have to convince him that they already have boyfriends.  The Professor has no trouble kissing Ginger, but Gilligan doesn't like girls; Mary Anne has to grab him by the ears to force a kiss.    

(Spoiler alert: when he gets back to Hawaii, Duke hits his head on a rock and forgets about the castaways, so they're still stranded.)

Wait -- my parents, teacher, Sunday school teacher, everyone tells me again and again that someday soon, I will "discover" girls, drop my same-sex pals and pictures of musclemen instantly and without hesitation, and devote the rest of my life to the pursuit of feminine curves and smiles.  It happens to every boy.  There is no escape. Yet Gilligan -- played by Bob Denver, a thirty year old man -- has escaped.  (Interestingly, Bob Denver's earlier character, Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was also "allergic to girls").

Duke Williams, played by Denny Miller, becomes an icon of hope.

I don't remember seeing Denny Miller in anything else, but I probably did.  He has a very full biography on the IMDB: Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1934 as Scott Miller, grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and Baldwin, New York, and Los Angeles.  He received a full scholarship to play basketball for UCLA.  He was discovered by a talent scout during his senior year (1956), and cast in Some Came Running (1958) with Dean Martin.

Next came a modern, up-to-date beach boy Tarzan, the Ape Man (1959). It was apparently a poor knockoff that he filmed in eight weeks, with most of the jungle scenes grabbed from Johnny Weissmuller movies.  Still, he bragged that he was the sixth in the grand tradition of movie Tarzans.

Including the silent era, it's Elmo Lincoln (1918), Gene Pollar ( 1920), Dempsey Tablar (1920), James Pierce (1927), Frank Merrill (1928-29), Johnny Weissmuller (1932-1948), Lex Barker (1949-1953), and Gordon Scott (1955-1960), so Denny was #9.

At some point he changed his name to Denny Miller, and got a string of guest spots, mostly in tv Westerns:  Overland Trail, Have Gun -- Will Travel, Riverboat, Laramie, The Rifleman. He may have also made ends meet with physique photography in the burgeoning early 1960s gay subculture (n*de photos on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

More after the break.