Today, as part of TV Bingo Tuesday, we play TV Bingo with Gilligan’s Island!
You know the concept, I use a TV Bingo card (one for dramas and one for sitcoms) and I’ll go through the episodes in order and see how quickly I hit a bingo. In case you don’t know how bingo works, the idea is that you mark off a box (in traditional bingo, someone will draw ping pong balls with numbers and letters on them like a lottery machine) and when you check off five boxes in a row (whether left to right, up and down or diagonal) then that counts as a “bingo.” Here, we’ll be going episode-by-episode and seeing whether they match any of the boxes on our bingo card. When we hit five in a row, that’s a “bingo”!
Today, based on a suggestion by reader Rob S., we check out the famous sitcom about a group of strangers stranded on a remote island together following a shipwreck, Gilligan’s Island
Let’s take a look!
Season 1’s “Voodoo Something to Me” involved a voodoo plot, but really, there were TONS of paranormal episodes of Gilligan’s Island.
Season 1’s “Sound of Quacking” involves a dream sequence.
Season 1’s “The Big Gold Strike” involves them seemingly striking gold (which is weird to have a “strike it rich” plot when one of the characters is a millionaire already)
Season 1’s “Birds Gotta Fly, Fish Gotta Talk” is technically a flashback episode, using footage from the original pilot of the series.
Season 1’s “Three Million Dollars More or Less” sees Gilligan winning $3 million wagering with Mr. Howell.
Season 1’s “Big Man on Little Stick” involves a surfer getting memory loss when he returns from the island (he surfed there on a tsunami…somehow).
Season 1’s “Forget Me Not” has the Skipper have amnesia, which they help cure through hypnosis.
Season 1’s “Diogenes, Won’t You Please Go Home?” is not only a Rashomon episode, it even involved a Japanese character!
I think Season 2’s “Erika Tiffany Smith to the Rescue” counts as a Secret Admirer episode, as the Skipper is a secret admirer of the socialite who lands on the island (although she only has eyes for the Professor). If not, “The Postman Cometh” a couple of episodes later also has Secret Admirer aspects to it. Season 3 had an episode specifically called “Lovey’s Secret Admirer.”
Season 2’s “Will the Real Mr. Howell Please Stand Up?” has Jim Backus play both Mr. Howell and a man pretending to be Howell.
Season 3’s “All About Eva” involves a makeover of a bookish librarian until she looks like Ginger (Tina Louise playing a dual role).
And that’s a bingo!
Feel free to suggest other shows you’d like to see us play TV Bingo with by e-mailing me at brian@popculturereferences.com
You could fill in more squares:
* The Mosquitoes (a Beatle-esque band) could count as celebrities. If not, they definitely overstayed their welcome. The castaways tried to force them to leave their self-imposed exile. And the women’s performance as the Honeybees could count as a brush with stardom.
* In “Voodoo Something to Me,” a convict robs the castaways of supplies.
* In “Gilligan’s Mother-in-Law,” Gilligan is almost married to a Native girl. He jumps ship before the ceremony, but a wacky wedding was in the offing.
* If you count dreams, the castaways played different characters in historic or fantasy settings several times. For example, the Old West in “The Sweepstakes.”
Yeah, the original series never used “real” celebrities, which hurt them in that category.
Good call about the robbery and Old West, though, I should have counted those two! Would we have hit a bingo earlier with those two?