A Scrapped Gilligan's Island Idea Would Have Explained Some Of The Show's Nonsense
In 1989, "Weird Al" Yankovic released a song called "Isle Thing," a parody of Tone Lōc's 1988 hit "Wild Thing." In Yankovic's version, the song's narrator met an attractive woman at the Circle-K and went back to her place, presumably for some active coitus. Instead, however, the woman eschewed sex for a marathon of "Gilligan's Island" reruns. (In the parlance of the song, "She loves that Gilligan's Isle Thing.") The narrator immediately began to recognize the logical inconsistencies in Sherwood Schwartz's beloved 1963 sitcom, notably that the Professor (Russell Johnson) could build a nuclear reactor using only coconuts, but wasn't able to construct a boat to escape the desert island he and the castaways were stranded on. Yankovic also noted that "those homeboys brought an awful lot for just a three-hour tour."
The premise of "Gilligan's Island" is made clear in the show's opening theme song. Two sailors and five guests were to take a three-hour boat tour around Hawai'i when they hit bad weather, were pushed off course, and crash-landed on an uncharted desert island. The series lasted for 98 episodes, and the seven characters seemed well-stocked with supplies and clothing throughout. They had food, gadgets, and shaving supplies. A casual viewer may immediately wonder if the castaway packed all that stuff on a mere three-hour tour. Yankovic merely gave voice to several popular criticisms of the show. (In fact, the initial reactions to "Gilligan's Island" were ... not good.)
It seems that the makers of the series weren't being forgetful about the seemingly unlimited supply of food on the desert island, they were being cheeky. In an interview with the Southern Illinoisan (and handily reprinted by MeTV), actor Bob Denver recalled a proposed logical conceit that would have explained where the castaways were getting their supplies. Rather than employ logic, however, the showrunners thought it would be funnier if nothing was explained.
The sunken ship
By Denver's admission, it seems that "Somewhere in the first year we were going to have a freighter sink off the island so we could go down and get all the stuff we needed and not make it up out of thin air."
It's easy to envision the scenes required: Denver and his co-stars diving underwater and emerging with sunken supplies they could use to survive. Or, heck, one wouldn't even necessarily need underwater scenes. Supplies could merely float to the surface and wash up on the beach as plot contrivances required. Do they need beauty supplies? Freighter. An umbrella? Freighter. A pile of Chiffons 45s? Heck, those were on the freighter, too.
Sadly, that idea was abandoned and illogic won the day. Denver even recalls he and his co-stars addressing the weird tendency of Gilligan and the castaways suddenly having supplies on the island as the plot warranted ... and then roundly ignoring it. If the audience was kept off-balance, he felt, the comedy would be stronger. Denver recalled:
"We all looked at each other and went, 'Nah, let 'em wonder!' It goes into fantasy at that point. You either buy it or you don't. No one ever asks how it was that I could fly until the Skipper pointed out that I couldn't."
One might recall that "Gilligan's Island" operated by cartoon logic. This was a series, after all, that spawned a movie wherein the Harlem Globetrotters washed up on the desert island in order to play a basketball game with a team of robots. In a world like that, it hardly matters where Gilligan and the castaways got costumes to put on a musical version of "Hamlet." They got their costumes from the same place Bugs Bunny gets anvils.
Click here to read about how "Gilligan's Island" stirred up some chaos for the real-life Coast Guard after it premiered.