Gilligan's Island | Through the Shattered Lens

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! Here’s some thoughts on what I watched this week!

The Amazing Race (Wednesday Night, CBS)

I wrote about the latest episode of The Amazing Race here!

The Brady Bunch (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

One of the Brady kids needed to make a movie for his Thanksgiving project. The entire family helped! Needless to say, Mike took it all way too seriously. The movie itself looked awful but I’m sure the Brady kid — I think it was Peter — got an A. No one ever had the courage to stand up to those Bradys.

California Dreams (YouTube)

Surf dudes with attitude….

Catholic Mass (Sunday Morning, The CW)

I always feel a bit weird watching Mass on television. This Sunday, I felt even stranger about watching it while wearing a bikini and getting ready to lay out on the deck of my cousin’s place at Lake Texoma. But, I did promise my sisters that I would try to go to Mass on Sunday so I did what I had to do!

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (Apple TV+)

Erin and I watched this classic on Wednesday. She wrote about why she loves this special a few years ago.

Cheers (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

I haven’t seen many episodes of this show but I’ve read all the online praise and I am an unabashed fan of Frasier Crane. The episode that I watched on Sunday was a Thanksgiving episode. A bunch of barflies decided to spend Thanksgiving together. Needless to say, it turned out to be a bit messy but also funny and even kind of heart-warming.

City Guys (Tubi)

They’re the neat guys. I wrote about them here.

Football (FOX, NBC, CBS, Thursday)

The family was watching football so I joined them, kind of. I cringed with every tackle and I felt terrible for the teams who lost. I mean, what a sucky way to spend Thanksgiving. Personally, I think they should allow for tie games so that everyone can be a winner! But apparently, that’s not the way that football works.

Frosty Returns (Friday Night, CBS)

Frosty’s back! But an evil businessman is going to destroy him with something called Summer Wheeze! The 90s version of Frosty The Snowman tries a bit too hard. I prefer the original.

Frosty the Snowman (Friday Night, CBS)

Yay! Santa was able to bring Frosty back to life! Seriously, I first saw this special when I was little and I was traumatized by melting Frosty! Trauma aside, I love these old Christmas specials.

Full House (Sunday Evening, MeTV)

I watched two episodes on Sunday. The first episode was from season one and it featured the Tanners having their first Thanksgiving since the death of Danny’s wife. This was actually one of the better episodes of Full House. This was followed by a much later episode of Full House, in which DJ finally got a boyfriend and started to show some independence from her overbearing family. Good for her!

Gilligan’s Island (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

A bank robber (played by Larry Storch) somehow ended up on the island. He menaced everyone with a gun, tried to hide his money, and then left without offering to help anyone else return to civilization. I haven’t seen many episodes of Gilligan’s Island but apparently, this was a fairly common occurrence on the show. For the record, I only watched this episode because I thought it was going to be Thanksgiving-themed but it wasn’t.

Happy Days (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

Upset that her family was more interested in football than fellowship, Marion Cunningham told the story of the First Thanksgiving. To be honest, Happy Days is one of those popular old shows that I just don’t get. The extremely enthusiastic “live audience” drives me crazy. That said, this was an okay episode. The cast got to dress up like pilgrims.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (NBC, Friday Night)

I love Boris Karloff!

The Love Boat (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

MeTV aired a Thanksgiving episode of The Love Boat on Sunday. It was from season 6 so it’ll be a while before I get to review it as a part of my retro television reviews.

Saved By The Bell (Sunday Morning, MeTV)

I woke up early on Sunday morning and I watched six episodes of this show — that’s three hours! — as I had breakfast, cleaned up around the lakehouse, and packed for the trip home. The episodes were a bit random. It started with the Senior Prom episode, in which Zach realized that he still had feelings for Kelly. This was followed by the infamous Graduation episode, in which the entire school rallied to help Zach avoid summer school despite the fact that they didn’t owe Zach a damn thing. Then it was time for the “Time Capsule” clip show, in which a bunch of loser students gathered in Belding’s office to watch a VHS tape that had been left behind by Zach and the gang.

Time then moved backwards. Suddenly, Zach was meeting Slater for the first time, Zach and Slater were competing to take Kelly to the school dance, and Zach was pretending to be Candy in order to get Screech to do his homework.

All of these episodes were, of course, pretty dumb and cringey. But they made for nice background noise. At this point, I think I have ever episode of this silly show memorized.

Survivor (Wednesday Night, CBS)

I wrote about the latest episode of Survivor here!

WKRP IN Cincinnati (Sunday Afternoon, MeTV)

“Oh my God! They’re turkeys!” Jeff introduced me to the Thanksgiving episode of this classic sitcom a few years ago and, since then, watching it has become a Thanksgiving tradition. Poor Mr. Carlson!

I know that this is going to shock some people but Rescue From Gilligan’s Island is dumb. In fact, it is not just dumb. Instead, it is very, very, very dumb. It’s just about the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.

The first TV movie sequel to the 60s television show about a group of castaways on an uncharted isle, Rescue From Gilligan’s Island picks up ten years after the final episode of Gilligan’s Island. The castaways are still living on the island and trying to figure out how to get back home. There’s the Skipper (Alan Hale, Jr.) and Gilligan (Bob Denver). There’s Mary Ann (Dawn Wells), the Howells (Jim Backus and Natalie Schaefer), and the Professor (Russell Johnson). Ginger is also there but there’s something different about her. Tina Louise refused to return to the role because she always said appearing on Gilligan’s Island ruined her career. Ginger is now played by Judith Baldwin, who looks glamorous but who also plays her role distressingly straight, as if she was the only person unaware that nothing about Gilligan’s Island should have been taken seriously.

After ten years of being stranded, the professor finally figures out how to get the castaways off the island! You’ll never believe the plan he comes up with. He decides that the castaways should build, get this … a raft! Ten years on the island and it never occurred to them to just make a raft? The castways do get some help from a tsunami, which pushes them out to the ocean. And then when Gilligan sets the raft on fire, they’re saved by the Coast Guard.

(How did they spend ten years on the island without killing Gilligan?)

Despite having been away from ten years, everyone settles back into their old routines but it’s not just the same. The Professor tries to teach but the students just want to hear about what it was like to be marooned on an island. Ginger returns to acting but is expected to now appear in PG-rated films! Mary Ann agrees to marry her old boyfriend, Herbert, despite not loving him. The Howells go right back to their old lives because the Howells are just as weird as on the mainland as they were on the island.

As for Gilligan and Skipper, they try to convince their insurance company to pay to fix the Minnow so that they can go back to giving three-hour tours but to do that, they have to convince all of the castaways to sign a form swearing that the Skipper was not liable for what happened during that last tour. (But, even if they could fix up the Minnow, why would anyone want to take a tour with the Skipper and Gilligan when the entire world probably knows that doing so mean risking having to spend ten years on a deserted island? There’s a reason why no one wanted to fly with George Kennedy after the fourth Airport movie.) So, Gilligan and the Skipper travel the country and visit old friends while being pursued by two Russian agents (Vincent Shiavelli and Art LeFleur) who want to steal a metal disc that Gilligan found on the island.

I told you it was dumb.

Dumb it may have been but it was also the highest rated show for the week that it aired. While this didn’t lead to a new series, it did lead to two more made-for-TV movies. In the first one, the castaways opened a resort. In the second one, they teamed up with a group of sports superstars and kept Martin Landau from exploiting the island’s natural resources. Dumb as this movie may be, it was necessary steps towards teaming the Skipper up with the Harlem Globetrotters.