now that you mention it.....Gilligan ALWAYS wore red!
Yep. Communism.
Sometimes a silly comedy is just a silly comedy.
I always suspected Ginger of being a commie femme fatale subversive.
When I was doing a summer press tour of Hollywood as a newspaper TV columnist, I sat in on one of the show’s script readings. I confess I was much more interested in Tina Louise and Dawn Wells than any political leanings the show may have had.
the actress who played Ginger was actually fairly pissed off with everyone on the show because her role when it was Pitched to her was said to be sort of a star.
instead she was more or less just another one of the cast so she was pretty pissed off.
I heard Gilligan it was a great guy who helped everyone get along.
In real life the actress who played lovey went on to marry some Hollywood big wheel.
The 'elite's remained elite -- the Howells had the best of everything, while the proletariat slept in hammocks. Ginger walked around looking good, while Mary Ann did most of the cooking & cleaning.
The proletariat (Gilligan and Skipper) were chiefly responsible for holding back the talented (Professor), and foiled every attempt to get off the island.
They were all trapped in this system with no way to "escape" and no way to leave it, even if they wanted to.
Yeah, they pretty well nipped Communism in the bud.
Here’s a movie by Dawn Wells about her time on the show. I like it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnjkfZ47w_M
So was StarTrek.
William Bradford proved communes suck.
Sounds like a controversy in search of a story....or is it vice versa?
Actually some small scale communes have worked.
The problem is when they try to subvert a entire country who is not interested in joining via political manipulation or media propaganda.
Kind of like the lefty leftards of the US of A.
If it was a communist paradise, how come every episode was about them trying to escape it?
Ginger was a classic honey trap. Mr. Howell was the George Soros of the Island.
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.
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.
Sherwood Schwartz never shared any of the residual money from his shows with the actors. How communist of him.