I sort of miss the days when every TV show theme was a two-minute long capsule summary of the show’s plot. A fair rule of thumb was the more imaginative—or preposterous—the plot, the better the theme song (IDENTICAL COUSINS YOU GUYS COME ON). As lost cultural gold goes, that ranks up there with songs whose titles are the names of dances and whose lyrics describe how you must dance to them, and diners built to look like anything but diners. And while I applaud Arrested Development for keeping the flame alive, I admit there’s a lot to be said for the Lost approach—did that show need any more of an intro than the word “LOST” floating across the screen for a few seconds? And surely that’s why the practice fell into disuse—why squander valuable airtime re-explaining the show every time it airs when that time can be sold to an advertiser? And now, in the binge-watching era made possible by DVD anthologies and streaming, you can see the same intro a dozen times a day on a properly lazy day, and one that goes on forever thus becomes irritating as hell. (Lookin’ at YOU, Dexter; who needed to watch Michael C. Hall make breakfast and shave 96 goddamn times?)

Probably the all-time champ among classic heavy-expository TV themes is Gilligan’s Island. Admit it, when you saw the headline to this post, you heard “a threeeeee hour toooour” in your head, did you not? So ingrained is it in post-WWII American culture, I’m certain that more people of a certain age can sing it in its entirety than can name all 50 state capitals. I’d even bet good money that more people know that song than know their own blood type.

This post is not about that song.
 

 
The theme song (and show) that could have been was very different from the one we all know and love—or rather know and simply can’t shake off. It was a pretty wretched calypso-inspired number, intended to be sung by the then-popular singer Sir Lancelot, but that didn’t happen. It was written at the 11th hour by the show’s creator Sherwood Schwartz, who also sang it himself, impersonating Lancelot. Poorly. As he related the tale in his book Inside Gilligan’s Island, CBS wasn’t sold on Schwartz’s shipwreck concept and wanted the series to be written in a guest-star anthology format, with a different group of charter passengers every week. Schwartz protested that the series’ backstory could be told in the theme song, and was even ready to actually pitch Sir Lancelot as the singer, but he was facing an implacable executive nicknamed “the Smiling Cobra” in a morning meeting, and had to have the actual song finished overnight.

Any thought of trying to contact Sir Lancelot that night was out of the question. Even if I could talk to him, I had no song. Even if I had a song, I couldn’t make a recording by 10:00 the next morning.

I has several friends who were songwriters, but who could I call at 8:00 p.m. to write a song by morning? I would have to explain the whole idea of the show and get someone to incorporate in the lyrics all the exposition I wanted in the song. No, that was hopeless.

Ignoring the fact that I was trying to do something that couldn’t possibly be done, I began to write the lyrics for Gilligan’s Island.

Which certainly accounts for its awkwardness. You’ll note that the Professor is a high school teacher in the original scenario, and that the farm girl and starlet characters were a pair of secretaries, none played by the actors who would go on to perform in the actual show.
 

 
When I comes to trash TV, I don’t play around. If I’m going to watch some shit entertainment, I want it to make me feel like I’ve been drowned, poisoned, and lobotomized. I want my IQ to decrease by one-half to three-quarters; I want spinal fluid to leak from my nose; I want to exhibit three or more symptoms of severe head trauma. To a person of my tolerance, an episode of The Brady Bunch is the TV equivalent of a wine cooler. I can only regard its partisans as effete, middle-class mama’s boys slumming in the lower reaches of the VHF dial, “experimenting” with brain damage. No, give me “the hard stuff”—give me Gilligan’s Island and its many authorized sequels and spinoffs.

Producer Sherwood Schwartz was not one to let go of a good thing. Following the initial three-season run of Gilligan’s Island, Schwartz sold Dusty’s Trail, a new series with Bob Denver that was just Gilligan’s Island in the Old West; a Saturday morning cartoon produced by Filmation called The New Adventures of Gilligan; and three TV movies that reunited the original Gilligan’s Island cast, minus Tina Louise, who hated the show. After all this, Schwartz knew the idea still had some life in it. You can almost feel the excitement of the original pitch as Schwartz outlines the idea for the second animated series, Gilligan’s Planet, in his revealing book, Inside Gilligan’s Island: From Creation to Syndication:

In 1982, I developed another animated series called Gilligan’s Planet, based largely on [Filmation founder] Lou Scheimer’s idea. In this series, the Professor on Gilligan’s Island manages to reconstruct a spacecraft that had been aborted by N.A.S.A. and had landed on their island. All the Castaways crowd into it, expecting to contact N.A.S.A. and return to civilization. Unfortunately, the spacecraft goes back into space and lands on an uninhabited tiny planet far removed from Earth. The Castaways are still cast away, but instead of an island somewhere in the Pacific, they are cast away on a little planet somewhere in space.

 

 
Bob Denver devoted two sentences to the animated Gilligan shows in his memoir, Gilligan, Maynard & Me. I quote them in full from my own tear-stained copy. You can almost feel the excitement in the voiceover studio as Denver reminisces:

In the 1970s, I did the voice on two animated series: The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan’s Planet. All the old cast—except Tina Louise—did their character’s voices as well.

 
You’ll notice a few things about life on Gilligan’s Planet. There’s a laugh track. There are colorful forests of giant Stropharia cubensis fungus everywhere. And, as you’ve already guessed because you remember Glomer from the Punky Brewster cartoon and the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones, Gilligan has a mischievous alien buddy, a space lizard named Bumper.

Though “Gilligan in space” might seem like the last possible iteration of the Gilligan’s Island premise, Schwartz, writing in 1994, left the door open to further exploitation of the franchise:

Is there a possibility of another animated series? Like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under “Gilligan’s Island”?

As Mr. Howell would say, “Heavens to Jules Verne, why not?”

 
A mash-up long before the term was coined, “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” by Little Roger and the Goosebumps came out briefly in 1978 but was quickly pulled from the market due to legal threats from Led Zeppelin’s attorneys. Ultimately it became known due to repeated plays on the Dr. Demento radio show. (I sheepishly confess to owning this 45. I’ve had it for at least 25 years and haven’t played it once since the day I bought it)