#FreeWillyFriday: Willy's Island

 

OK, here's what I think happened...

The only explanation I can come up with for this is “Gilligan's Island.” I wasn't around for the original run of the show in the '60s, but I watched it quite a bit as a kid. When I was off from school in the summer, it was easy to find back-to-back episodes on TBS. I feel like I must have watched them all.

With Gilligan, the Skipper and the Professor in the same clothes every episode and similar setups and structures, the show was essentially a live-action cartoon. That's not meant to be dismissive; I had plenty of laughs and enjoyed the antics of the familiar cast of characters.

I didn't watch a lot of the spinoffs or reboots (apparently some were animated?) but I do recall seeing “Rescue from Gilligan's Island” at one point. After returning to civilization for a while, the castaways landed right back on the island.

Given my affinity for crossovers and basketball, I was naturally drawn to “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island,” a 1981 movie I taped years later on USA and watched multiple times. I was a little miffed that the characters' ultimate rescue was glossed over in song, not realizing until recently that the tale was told in 1979's “The Castaways on Gilligan's Island.” But I feel like the Globetrotters playing basketball against robots to save the island made up for it, so there's that.

(Warner Bros. by way of metv.com)

In an essay entitled “The Same D*** Island,” in the collection “Getting Lost,” author Adam Troy-Castro postulated that Gilligan's island and the setting of “Lost” were, well, the same darn island. He cites a number of similarities from character types to the multiple prior inhabitants of the supposedly deserted islands to the shifty nature of their geography.

I need to rewatch “Lost” and would love to dive deeper into it in the future, but I'll wrap this part up by saying I liked the finale. It's OK if you didn't. Everyone's allowed to be wrong.

I attribute the helicopter to being a child of the '80s who was fascinated by “Airwolf,” which has to be in the running for greatest TV theme song ever. I didn't watch much “Riptide,” but those guys had a helicopter too, right? Helicopters are cool.

As for the island's inhabitants... um, maybe a stereotypical figure from an old cartoon or cartoons? Not my best work.