Classic TV show 'Gilligan's Island' was 'communist paradise'

AFP via CTV News ^ | April 4, 2017

[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.

[yarddog]

Schwartz was pretty good at picking out good looking actresses.

I would never have guessed that Maureen McCormick would turn out to be pretty. In the first year she looked sort of like a frumpish little girl. By the last season she had turned into a babe.

[minnesota_bound]

Eva Plumb is my Mary Ann
http://www.wonderland-site.com/pix/series/wonder/season2/ww77-06-12.jpg

We can split the difference and settle on Lynda Carter Wonder Woman : )