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 ...
It was Boris and Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show that indoctrinated kids on the finer points of Communism. Those kids, when they got to college, protested against the Vietnam War and started moving the country to the left.
Ginger was a classic honey trap. Mr. Howell was the George Soros of the Island.
Actually it is nice to know that because it affirms that the attempt to influence didn't work as nobody realized it until now.
Sort of why the Beauty and the Beast director had to speak up. Nobody would have ever noticed the "exclusively Gay moment" if he hadn't opened his yap.
Well, they certainly failed with me.
Instinctively I knew the anti-Vietnam people were more anti-American than anti-Vietnam.
All you had to do was listen to them. They hated our nation like the Leftists in our day do.
My parents never had to say a word, but by the time I was 16 I had them pegged.
I registered as a Republican based on what I observed, and never looked back.
Cast my first vote for Nixon, and never felt bad for doing so.
Now that they are trying to “NIXON” Trump, I have only two words for them. I’ll not post them here.
I thought Gilligan and the Skipper were the main characters? Marryann seemed like a minor character.
If it were Communist, they would have just killed The Millionaire and his wife.
“”So nice Schwartz shared the royalties....oh wait.””
We’re going to have to drag that evil ‘landlord’ Schwartz out in the streets!
Lee Merriweather was a bit of allright too.
Just watched the first episode of season 5 yesterday. I binge watched the first 4 seasons a couple of weeks ago tomrefresh my memory. Loved Prison Break.
I’ve never seen it but I started about two weeks ago. I’m towards the end of season one. Pretty has just pulled the knife on the warden. Next episode tonight!
Yikes!
Yikes!
I read a few theories about the island being purgatory.
The professor. He would deny science and blame global warming for being stuck on the island. He would also deny biology and nature and be the token homo.
And the "Little Buddy" is NOT Gilligan.
Seriously (no, really... seriously), it can't be Gilligan because the ABCDQVC people wouldn't stand for the screw-up who ruins everyone's chances of rescue being the "gay guy."
-PJ
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Schafer
She is memorable as the unloving mother in “The Snake Pit.”
Rumored to have left most of her estate to...Dawn Wells.
And if your life in the outside world stinks, a desert island may be a great place for you (think Hurley or Sawyer on Lost). But I didn't see anything communist about it.
Schwartz and his writers were probably too busy thinking up idiotic plots (Gilligan picking up radio stations in his teeth, a WWI German submarine landing on the island, the Hamlet musical, etc.) to work political propaganda into the show.
The story I heard is that the boat was called the Minnow as a dig at Kennedy's appointee (and Obama's pal) Newton Minow, who castigated American television as a "vast wasteland." It wasn't a joke you'd expect from a hard core leftist.
You may remember George Zimmer, the Men's Warehouse founder who got into the Occupy movement in his later years, probably out of nostalgia for the politics of his younger days. I suspect something similar may have happened to Sherwood Schwartz.
Schwartz came out of the Great Depression years and probably idolized FDR. Maybe he wanted to recapture some of that enthusiasm toward the end of his life, but in the 60s, leftists would have seen him more as part of the problem than as part of the solution and he probably would have known that.
Backus was in a movie with Marilyn Monroe. One day, she beckoned to him to come inside her trailer. She backed him against a wall, and said: “Do Mr. Magoo!”
Sherwood Schwartz never shared any of the residual money from his shows with the actors. How communist of him.
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