Gilligan's Island
| Fandom | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Gilligan's Island |
| Abbreviation(s): | |
| Creator: | Sherwood Schwartz |
| Date(s): | September 26, 1964 – April 17, 1967 |
| Medium: | Live-action Television series |
| Country of Origin: | United States |
| External Links: | Wikipedia |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
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Gilligan's Island is an American sitcom. The show followed the comic adventures of seven castaways as they attempted to survive (and in a later movie escape from) the island on which they had been shipwrecked. Most episodes revolve around the dissimilar castaways' conflicts and their unsuccessful attempts to escape their plight, a failure for which Gilligan was frequently responsible.
Ann Marie Fallon places the series within a more traditional literary context:
Perhaps the most obvious versions of Robinson Crusoe in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictions and films are the castaways. In the film Cast Away as well as Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, the screenwriter and the novelist respectively recreate a Robinson Crusoe-like story in the modern world. Rather than being images of Robinson Crusoe walking through the modern city, these characters experience instead the island castaway narrative. There are many versions of this particular fantasy, from Gilligan's Island to Crusoe on Mars.[1] [note 1]
Susan Naramore Maher suggests that there is a long canonical connection with the source material:
In Crusoe, the legacies of high and low culture merge. Defoe’s novel is canonical, but from chapbooks to Gilligan’s Island the castaway story has dug itself deep into the collective unconscious.[2]
The show became popular for decades, and fans noted in the 1990s that the "Gilligan's Island" theme song lyrics were interchangeable with the lyrics from the old Christian hymn "Amazing Grace" - either song can be sung to either tune.
Despite its comedic overtones, the show had been an attempt to present a disparate cross-section of society learning to get along.[3] It was later declared by one commentator to be one of the shows from the 1960s which displayed "utter banality" when compared to later shows that began to explore more sophisticated and socially aware content.[4] The increasing sophistication of television content and audience expectations (or their cynicism of lighthearted content) may have been a contributing factor when, in the late 1990s, both the comedic element and the optimistic societal ideals of Gilligan's Island were challenged with a proposal to reboot the series containing an element of murder and cannibalism. Creator/Producer Sherwood Schwartz and his estate opposed any such reboot.[5][6]
Fandom
Pairings
- Gilligan/Mary Ann Summers
- Eunice "Lovey" Howell/Thurston Howell III - canonical
- Ginger Grant/Roy "The Professor" Hinkley
- Gilligan/Jonas "Skipper" Grumby
- Ginger Grant/Mary Ann Summers
- Gilligan/Ginger Grant
- Roy "The Professor" Hinkley/Mary Ann Summers
Zines
Archives & Fannish Links
- Gilligan's Island & crossovers works at FFN
- Gilligan's Island works at AO3
Notes
- ^ The idea of castaways and particularly of Fallon's reference to 'a Robinson Crusoe-like story in the modern world' can be explored in the comedy TV series, "It's About Time" which was also being made by Sherwood Schwartz concurrently with "Gilligan's Island". It featured two astronauts as castaways in the prehistoric past, facing dinosaurs and primitive tribes, while befriending a cave-man family. When ratings on that series began to drop, Schwartz reversed the story by having the astronauts return to modern times and bring along their cave-man family friends, who were then castaways in 1966/7. A similar role reversal can be seen in the 1971 film, " Escape from the Planet of the Apes", which used tragi-comedy to make satirical comment upon modern society.
References
- ^ Ann Marie Fallon, Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions of the Island Story in the Twentieth Century, The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe', 2018, p. 216. (ACADEMIA).
- ^ Susan Naramore Maher, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe. By Andrew O’Malley. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. (Review), Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2014, p. 181. (ACADEMIA).
- ^ Sandy Schaefer, The Howells Had So Many Clothes While Stranded On Gilligan's Island, slashfilm.com, 13 July 2024.
- ^ J. Zeitz, Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s — Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October 2008), pp. 673-688; p. 685. (JSTOR).
- ^ Danielle Ryan, Charlie Kaufman Once Pitched A Gilligan's Island Reboot Filled With Murder And Cannibalism slashfilm.com, 13 October 2021.
- ^ Carly Tennes, Gilligan's Island Almost Got An Unthinkable Reboot, cracked.con, 18 October 2021.