Gilligan's Island - Reunion Films, Clones, and Spin-offs

Reunion Films, Clones, and Spin-offs

The success of Gilligan's Island spawned a number of clones and spin-offs:

• Dusty's Trail was a 1973–1974 syndicated television series by Sherwood Schwartz starring Bob Denver as "Dusty" Boots, a shotgun aide-de-camp and Forrest Tucker as "Mr. Callahan", wagon master of a wayward coach wagon/ trail. Its cast was made up of nearly identical character roles as Gilligan's Island.
• The New Adventures of Gilligan was a Filmation-produced animated remake that aired on ABC Saturday Morning from September 7, 1974, to September 4, 1977, for 24 episodes (16 installments airing in 1974–75 and 8 new ones combined with repeats in 1975–76). The voices were done by the original cast except for Ginger, voiced by Jane Webb, and Mary Ann, voiced by Jane Edwards. An additional character was Snubby the Monkey, voiced by Lou Scheimer.
• In a 1978 made-for-television movie, Rescue from Gilligan's Island, the castaways did successfully leave the island, but had difficulty reintegrating into society. During a reunion cruise on the first Christmas after their rescue, fate intervened and they found themselves wrecked on the same island at the end of the film. It starred the original cast except for Tina Louise, who refused to participate and was replaced as Ginger by Judith Baldwin. The plot involved Soviet agents seeking a memory disc from a spy satellite that landed on the island and facilitated their rescue. Gilligan and the Skipper "rescue" Mary Ann right as she is to marry her longtime fiancé, which contradicts the series where it was established that Mary Ann had no boyfriend after having made up a story about a boyfriend to keep the others from feeling sorry for her.
• In a 1979 sequel, The Castaways on Gilligan's Island, they were rescued once again, and the Howells converted the island into a getaway resort, with the other five castaways as "silent partners". Ginger was again played by Judith Baldwin. This sequel was intended as a pilot for a possible new series in which the castaways would host new groups of tourists each week, using the all-star cast anthology format made popular by Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. The series never materialized, though the premise was the basis of a short-lived 1981 series titled Aloha Paradise.
• In a second sequel, The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981), villains played by Martin Landau and then-wife Barbara Bain (who also appeared together on Mission: Impossible and Space: 1999) try to take over the island to gain access to a vein of Supremium, a valuable but volatile element. This time, Ginger was played by Constance Forslund. They are thwarted by the timely intervention of the Harlem Globetrotters. Jim Backus, who was in poor health at the time, only appeared at the very end of the episode, arriving back on the island. David Ruprecht played the role of Thurston Howell IV, even though the series had established that the Howells were childless.
• Gilligan's Planet was an animated science fiction version produced by Filmation and starring the voices of the Gilligan's Island cast save for Tina Louise (Dawn Wells played the voices of both Mary Ann and Ginger). They escape from the island by building a spaceship, and get shipwrecked on a distant planet. Only 12 episodes aired on CBS between September 18, 1982, and September 3, 1983. In one episode, they travel to an island, get shipwrecked there, and Gilligan observes, "First we were stranded on an island, then we were stranded on a planet, and now we're stranded on an island on a planet."
• Good Morning America featured a Gilligan's Island reunion presided over by Joan Lunden in November 1983. This was the first time that the entire cast had been reunited (including Tina Louise), even though Jim Backus was not able to be physically present. He was able to join the cast, though, via a live video remote from Los Angeles, California.
• ALF featured an episode in 1987 called The Ballad of Gilligan's Island in which the alien dreams he is on the island. Bob Denver, Alan Hale, Dawn Wells, and Russell Johnson portray darkly skewed versions of their characters after being stuck on the island for 23 years. The missing castaways are explained as having set up a camp on the other side of the island.
• The original cast members (along with Sherwood Schwartz) reunited on television for one last time, on a 1988 episode of The Late Show with Ross Shafer.
• Gilligan's Island: The Musical was first produced in the early 1990s, with a script by Lloyd Schwartz, Sherwood Schwartz's son, and songs by Schwartz's daughter and son-in-law, Hope and Laurence Juber. After extensive revisions since 2001 it has been produced at various theaters around the U.S.
• Gilligan's Island: Underneath the Grass Skirt (1999).
• In 1989, Denver and Hale filmed several short clips for TBS in their Gilligan and Skipper outfits, to promote reruns of the show on that network. Hale's ill health and weight loss in these clips, filmed the year before his death, are apparent.
• Roseanne (which was shot on the same Studio City sound stage as Gilligan's Island) had an episode titled "Sherwood Schwartz: A Loving Tribute". Part of the episode is a fantasy sequence parodying this series. Most of the regular/recurring Roseanne cast portrayed the Gilligan's Island characters:
  • Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) / Gilligan
  • Dan (John Goodman) / Skipper
  • Leon (Martin Mull) / Mr. Howell
  • Bev (Estelle Parsons) / Mrs. Howell
  • Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) / Ginger
  • Mark (Glenn Quinn) / Professor
  • Darlene (Sara Gilbert) / Mary Ann
  • During the end credits, Bob Denver, Tina Louise, Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells appeared as the appropriate Roseanne characters. Sherwood Schwartz also appeared as himself, although his appearance is edited out in syndication.
• The E! True Hollywood Story (2000), a backstage history of the show, featuring interviews with some of the stars or their widows.
• Surviving Gilligan's Island (2001) was a docudrama in which Bob Denver, Dawn Wells, and Russell Johnson reminisce about the show.
• Gilligan's Island has had numerous recurring gags featured in a series of commercials:
  • Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer appear together as a wealthy couple in an Orville Redenbacher commercial throwing a party. It never mentions that the characters in the commercial are Mr. and Mrs. Howell, but the behavior of the characters are the same.
  • Bob Denver reprises his role as Gilligan in an AT&T commercial, lying in a hammock receiving a phone call from Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.) telling him how he missed him and the other castaways. Skipper on the other line, suggested a reunion tour, and Gilligan agreed, but wanted to go to Yellowstone by bus.
  • Dawn Wells, reprising her role as Mary Ann, appears in a Western Union commercial in a talk show format as to why she is upset with her boyfriend for not wiring her money on time to be rescued. The talk show host and audience members asked her from the lines of Ballad Gilligan's Island in description of her experience: "No phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury. Like Robinson Crusoe, as primitive as can be."
  • In a Snickers commercial, a worried mother looking out the window out onto the ocean waiting for her son Gilligan to come back home. While chewing on a Snicker's bar, she is talking to her friend and tells her that, when her son left, he said that he was only going out to sea for: "a three hour tour, a three hour tour"!
• Gilligan's Wake (ISBN 0-312-29123-X) is a 2003 parallel novel loosely based on the 1960s CBS sitcom, from the viewpoints of the seven major characters, written by Esquire film and television critic Tom Carson. The title is derived from the title of the TV show and Finnegans Wake, the seminal work of Irish novelist James Joyce.
• On November 30, 2004, the TBS network launched a reality series titled The Real Gilligan's Island, which placed two groups of people on an island, leaving them to fend for themselves à la Survivor – the catch being that each islander matched a character type established in the original series (a klutz, a sea captain, a movie star, a millionaire's wife, etc.). While heavily marketed by TBS, the show turned out to be a flop with a very Survivor-like feel but little of its success. A second season began June 8, 2005, with two-hour episodes for four weeks. TBS announced in July 2005 that a third season of the show would not be produced.
• At the end of the A Very Brady Sequel movie, it is stated that Carol Brady's first husband was the Professor and the horse statue that was the MacGuffin for the movie belonged to Gilligan's father.