Get LOST on Gilligan's Island with Season One

One of the fun things about LOST is the rich array of influences that can be identified throughout the series. The drama has made reference to everything from Watership Down and The Chronicles of Narnia to Ulysses and A Brief History of Time. But before any of us knew how diligently Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse would try to expand our bookshelves and DVD collections, back when our only inkling of the mystery to follow was Dom Monaghan's enigmatic "Guys... Where are we?" whispering its way out of the television screen, one pop culture icon stood out above all others as the most obvious basis for comparison. I'm talking, of course, about Gilligan's Island.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I spent many happy hours with Gilligan and his merry little band of castaways when it ran in syndication on an available channel. I particularly remember when Weird Al's Amish Paradise renewed my interest by quoting the part of the end-credits lyrics, inspiring me to commit the famous theme song to memory. I suspect I can trace my obsession with stranded-on-an-island stories back to Swiss Family Robinson, but Gilligan's Island certainly helped to feed my fascination. So I was tickled when I received season one on DVD for my birthday this year, along with a note from my dad assuring me he would be LOST without me and speculating as to the possibility of the time-jumping survivors of Oceanic 815 encountering the passengers and crew of the Minnow.

Gilligan's Island, created by Sherwood Schwartz, is one of the silliest shows ever to hit the airwaves. In nearly every episode, you can count Skipper or Gilligan suffering bodily injury, an outlandish plan for rescue or a perilous situation presenting itself and Gilligan either ruining or fixing everything at the last minute. There are plenty of pratfalls, and although each of the seven main characters - paternal, short-fused Skipper Jonas Grumby (Alan Hale, Jr.); hapless, guileless first mate Willie Gilligan (Bob Denver); aristocratic Thurston Howell III (Jim Backus) and his daffy wife Lovey (Natalie Schafer); seductive movie star Ginger Grant (Tina Louise); sweet Mary Ann Summers (Dawn Wells) and brilliant Professor Roy Hinkley (Russell Johnson) - seems anxious to get back home, their Island lives couldn't be cozier. It seems you can make just about anything out of palm branches and coconuts if you've got a genius living with you, and whatever he can't make, the Howells brought, since they are apparently accustomed to packing a year's worth of supplies for a three-hour trip. Ridiculous mishaps are always occurring, but none of them have any consequences. By the next episode, everything is idyllic again.

Before receiving this DVD, it had been several years since I'd watched Gilligan's Island, so I went into it this time with the fresh eyes of a LOST fan, looking for parallels. Naturally, given the specificity of the situation, there were many. There's an attempt to build a raft, though this comes at the beginning of the first season rather than the end as it did on LOST. The S.O.S. signal on the beach comes earlier in the sit-com too - and is built not out of rocks but out of dead fish (one of which, incidentally, previously swallowed the castaways' radio). The all-important radio is much more omnipresent on Gilligan's Island and much more cooperative, allowing the survivors unlimited access to news (and, in Mary Ann's case, soap operas) from the mainland.

Among the more particular parallels are the fact that on both shows, a small plane is found in the jungle; an attempt is made to contact civilization by tying a message to a migratory bird; the government tests a dangerous weapon on the Island; the castaways set up their own golf course for leisure purposes; the de facto leader gives a "live together, die alone"-style speech; and running throughout the series is a fundamental man of science / man of faith debate, in this case between Professor and Skipper. Gilligan's Island has a much smaller cast than LOST - so small I can't imagine what Schwartz was thinking when he relegated the Professor and Mary Ann to "the rest" in the first-season version of the theme song - which means everyone knows each other right off the bat, and we never have the sort of fracturing that must be dealt with on the drama, though the castaways tend to somewhat divide themselves into three groups: the Howells; Skipper, Gilligan and Professor; and Mary Ann and Ginger.

As leader, Skipper has some qualities in common with Jack, though I would more readily compare him with season four addition Frank Lapidus, a crusty but highly capable pilot. Professor, meanwhile, bears some resemblance to Sayid, whose expertise as a communications officer comes in so handy when there's need to get a radio or transmitter working, but he's equally akin to twitchy physicist Daniel Faraday, another season four addition who is in the habit of saying things that go way over the heads of nearly everyone around him. I would compare Ginger to Kate, as they've both spent so much time using their feminine wiles to manipulate people, while wholesome Mary Ann is more like the innocent Claire. Rose and Bernard, like the Howells, are married and older than most of the castaways, and they appear to be fairly well-off, but there's certainly little in their dispositions that would be considered similar. The readiest comparison I tend to make is between Gilligan and Hurley; both are bumbling, honest to a fault, extremely devoted to their friends and much more interested in sharing wealth than possessing it. Of course, Hurley never makes nearly the mess of things that Gilligan does, thank goodness; LOST's castaways have enough problems to deal with already! But each of them, it could be argued, is the heart of his show.

Season one of Gilligan's Island contains 36 episodes - all, sadly, in black and white. But watching the show as a quaint precursor to LOST, I found the lack of color appropriately antiquated. I was a bit surprised to realize that at least in this season, Gilligan's Island doesn't get nearly as much traffic as I thought it did. When people laugh about how ridiculous the show is, one thing they cite is the steady parade of visitors that always manage to get away within the space of an episode when the septet from the Minnow still can't manage it after months. Granted, even one such visitor is cause for a raised eyebrow; nonetheless, it was interesting to me that only a few of these episodes feature more than just the main seven. My favorite of the visitors were a young Kurt Russell as a jungle boy whose presence is never explained and Hans Conried, who I know primarily as the voice of Thorin Oakenshield in Rankin and Bass's The Hobbit, as Wrongway Feldman, a loony pilot who manages to wind up on the island twice. A few memorable nonhuman co-stars also surface, including a chimpanzee, a frog and a duck. Some guests, meanwhile, are a tad cringe-worthy, including a very phony-looking gorilla played by Janos Prohaska and a Japanese soldier who thinks it's still World War II, portrayed in two episodes with embarrassingly stereotypical overtones by Vitto Scotti.

Getting off the Island is not always the primary preoccupation of the episode. Mr. Howell directs a play for the purpose of giving Ginger an ego-boosting starring role. The Howells adopt Gilligan in one episode and try to fix him up with Mary Ann in another. The revelation that Gilligan keeps a diary has all the castaways burning to know what he wrote about them. Skipper and Mr. Howell race tortoises for fun and profit. The castaways hold an election, with surprising results. A desperate search for fresh water ensues when Gilligan accidentally empties the current supply. While the basic arc of each episode tends to be pretty similar - Gilligan accidentally thwarts rescue or Gilligan accidentally averts disaster - there's plenty of room for variation, and it's always fun to see the different ways in which these characters adapt to island life. There's quite a bit of bickering that goes on, but one reason this show is such a pleasure to watch is that these people so clearly care about each other. That includes Mr. Howell, who likes to lord his status over everybody but is a pussycat of a man deep down.

Season one is the longest of the show's three seasons by a few episodes, and the DVD includes a number of fun features, most notably the unaired pilot, Marooned, featuring John Gabriel as the Professor and Kit Smythe and Nancy McCarthy as secretaries Ginger and Bunny. It also has a completely different theme song with a bouncy calypso beat, sung with a goofy accent and including such verses as these: "Two secretaries from U.S.A. / Sail on the Minnow this lovely day. / A high school teacher is next aboard; / All taking trip that they cannot afford. / The next two people are millionaires; / They got no worries, they got no cares. / They climb aboard, and they step inside, / With just enough bags for a 6-hour ride." If you're not too keen on buying a whole season of Gilligan's Island, I recommend looking up this original theme song on YouTube; it's a hoot! But if you've ever dreamed of putting down roots in a hut neighboring Gilligan's - or wanted to wash up on LOST Island but don't fancy dealing with the monsters, polar bears and artillery-laden natives and invaders - sit right back and enjoy season one of Gilligan's Island.