Sketch o’the week- Gilligan’s Island!

I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The good news is this is the final sketch of my “TV shows Tom watched after school as a kid” series, which everyone must be bored out of their minds with by now. I have plum run out of shows I actually watched after school. I saved “Gilligan’s Island” for last for two reasons. First, it was the quintessential after school show for me. It seemed to be in endless syndication and was on every day on what appeared to be all channels, so I saw every episode multiple times over the years. 

Second, there are seven people in it and this sketch took a long time to do!

Much has been written about “Gilligan’s Island”, which was a solid if unspectacular ratings success during its three season run but exploded in popularity in syndication and is now considered a pop culture icon. I’ve read that few people thought the show would be a hit, including actor Jerry Van Dyke as I wrote about a few newsletters ago. Van Dyke turned down the role of Gilligan in favor of starring in  “My Mother the Car” because he said compared to “Gilligan’s Island”, the scripts for “My Mother the Car” “read like Neil Simon”.

I was told a story about show creator Sherwood Schwartz and then FCC Chairman Newton Minow by Minow’s daughter Nell Minow. Nell, by the way, is a terrific film critic, writer and author. Anyway Nell told me the story about how Schwartz named the ill-fated boat in “Gilligan’s Island” the “S.S .Minnow” as an insult to her father. In 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow delivered a famous speech to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Washington, D.C., where called television a “vast wasteland” and demanded that the networks take more responsibility for the content of the shows they aired. Schwartz thought the fallout from that speech lead to the shift of control of television programming from independent creators to the networks, who strangled creativity. In retaliation, he named the shipwrecked boat after Nell’s father. 

Now for the bad news… I’m going to keep on drawing famous TV sitcom characters, but move on to the 1970’s and 80’s! Sorry, skipper!