Posted on 04/05/2017 10:42:38 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
It was one of America's best-loved sitcoms at the height of the Cold War, but a new documentary claims "Gilligan's Island" was in fact a hymn to "communist" values.
In the last interview before he died in 2011, Sherwood Schwartz -- the television producer who also created "The Brady Bunch" -- said that the fictional utopia he invented for a group of castaways on a tropical island was meant as a light-hearted critique of capitalism.
Award-winning filmmaker Cevin Soling told AFP that Schwartz, a biologist who began his career writing jokes for Bob Hope, "affirmed to me what I had long suspected ... that Gilligan's Island was a communist paradise".
All property on the island was shared and the series' main heroes were its only two working-class characters -- the bumbling ship's mate Gilligan and salt-of-the-earth striver Mary Ann.
Although far from a communist himself, the left-leaning Schwartz told the documentary "The Gilligan Manifesto", which was presented at the MIPTV gathering at the French Riviera resort of Cannes this past weekend, that the comedy had a serious political side.
But he said he didn't want to force that down people's throats. "Sometimes those lessons are hammered into you, whereas doing it gently with comedy you achieve the same purpose and sometimes it's longer-lasting.
(Excerpt) Read more at ctvnews.ca ...
No wonder I never liked it, and I thought MaryAnne was the cutest!
I hate when they do this. Nobody needs to know this. Everyone enjoyed it for what it was, a silly show. Nobody needs to know the agenda behind it 50 years later. It seems they want to ruin everything today.
I spent a great deal of my adolescence fantasizing about Comrade Mary Ann.
Who cares? I only tuned in to watch Mary Ann.
Me too!
Now I know why I always detested that show. LOL.
Really never watched it much, always found the characters annoying. Of course it was supposed to be silly but it just grated on me....
So nice Schwartz shared the royalties....oh wait.
Kato Kalen is living proof Mary Ann and Gilligan did it
Which is probably why the only sentient beings in the universe who took it seriously were the terminally-naive Thermians from “Galaxy Quest”.
Thurston Howell was funny and got off some thinly masked conservative jokes about Democrats.
I’m watching season one of Prison Break on Netflix and I recognize it as being heavily influenced by Gilligan’s Island.
With two rich people, that for some reason, brought suitcases of money for a 3 hour boat ride?
And they did eventually open a hotel there.
No wonder they always screwed up the one job they had: get off the island. Also, the Professor (who was actually just a high school teacher) should have collectivized the coconut trees and shot Mr. Howell as a kulak.
True for most of us : )
One would think that it was fairly obvious from the start.
The Howells, the lazy capitalists vs. everybody else, academia (the Professor), the entertainment industry (Ginger), the industry sector (Skipper) and the proletariat (Mary Ann and Gilligan).......................
Mary Ann was from the country, so at least she wouldn’t be useless.
Well of course. It was a fantasy.
The show Lost was just a simplified ripoff of Gilligan’s Island.
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