10 US Sitcoms Aussie Kids Grew Up With In The 80s

2. Gilligan's Island

26 September 1964 €“ 4 September 1967. 3 seasons. 98 episodes

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, the tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship.The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers set sale that day for a three hour tour. A three hour tour.The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed! If not for the courage of the fearless crew the Minnow would be lost! The Minnow would be lost!The ship's aground on the sure of this uncharted desert isle with Gilligan, the skipper too, the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, the professor and Mary-Anne, here on Gilligan's isle.

"The Ballad Of Gilligan's Island" provides a high level overview of how seven unconnected people came to be marooned on an uncharted deserted island, but it doesn't explain exactly where they were going or how far out to sea they were when this mammoth storm, which the skipper clearly hadn't anticipated, swept them away to an island that nobody had ever charted and which nobody but people who wouldn't help them escape ever went to. Given that a millionaire, his wife and a movie star are among the passengers, it's safe to assume this is no three hour fishing tour. Most episodes end with the castaways either having missed an opportunity to get away, or having come up with some ingenious but ultimately doomed scheme to escape. Their day-to-day existence on the island also raises questions: how can they expertly fashion virtually anything they need from bamboo and shells but they can't build a boat that doesn't sink, disintegrate or otherwise fail to perform the basic service of a boat? How do they so regularly feast on a variety of wholesome, healthy meals at the communal dining table? How does the radio always pick up a signal and never stop working, despite the absence of electricity and batteries? And why did the Howells, Ginger and Mary-Anne interpret "bring a change of clothes" as "bring every item of clothing you ever owned" when they set off for the three hour tour that fateful day, while Gilligan, the Skipper and the Professor wore the same clothes for three years? Curiously, two aspects of Gilligan's Island production were later mirrored by Sherwood Schwartz's other famous sitcom The Brady Bunch. The pilot episodes of both shows were filmed nearly a year before the series' debut, although unlike The Brady Bunch pilot, the Gilligan's Island planet was never broadcast during the show's original run. As well, the last episodes of both shows weren't actually intended as the final episodes of each series, however the anticipated next seasons of both were cancelled months after the last episode had aired. Maybe the networks just didn't like poor old Sherwood.