#the castaways on gilligan's island

[tgsclassics]

Raquel Welch auditioned for the role of Mary Ann in the 60s tv series "Gilligan's Island", but was considered 'not wholesome enough' for the part. The role went to Dawn Wells

[nathanolsenart]

Stranded

[stone-cold-groove]

Looks like a Ginger to me.

[tvshowpilot]

Buckle up and join us as we delve into the best TV shows about being stranded on an island, where every episode is a battle against nature and escape seems like an ever-elusive dream!

[slapstikcomedyentertainment]

5 Classic Comedies That Make Us Regret Not Being Older

Oh, the power of comedy. It can make us laugh. It can make us cry...

Oh, the power of comedy. It can make us laugh. It can make us cry. It can make us feel like absolute idiots compared to the geniuses writing it. Most of us feel unworthy when considering hilarious writers such as Tina Fey, Michael Schur, and to pick an entirely random example, me. But comedy has a long history. We’re not the only ones who have enjoyed actors’ antics on the silver screen. Comedy…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You were promised a jetpack by liars

TONIGHT (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/

The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.

And of course, the rocket belt wasn't going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.

Once you know about the jetpack's technical limitations, it's obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor's interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it."

But what's most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt's limitations, and by callously risking Suitor's life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants

The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/

Practical rocketeering wasn't ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn't be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.

The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

It's not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8

The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it's arguably worse than useless:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

The centuries' worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson's dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

As Charlie Stross writes, it's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:

https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/

That's quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX."

In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

[mydaddywiki]

Tom Bosley

Physique: Average/Chubby Build Height: 5'6" (1.68 m)

Thomas Edward Bosley (October 1, 1927 – October 19, 2010) was an American actor, television personality and entertainer. Bosley is best known for portraying Howard Cunningham on the ABC sitcom Happy Days (1974–1984) for which he received a Primetime Emmy nomination. He's also known for his role as Sheriff Amos Tupper in the Angela Lansbury lead mystery series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1988), and as the title character in the series Father Dowling Mysteries (1989–1991). He died on October 19, 2010 at the age of 83.

Portly, warm-voiced and soft-featured, Mr. Bosley personified paternal authority, especially on Happy Days as Howard "Mr. C." Cunningham. And it was those Happy Days reruns that his warm smile and the way he walked, with a kinda swagger that I found appealing and the way his suits clung to his body. Especially his pants, how they hugged his wide hips and bubble butt. My mind suddenly switched from the show to thoughts of anal penetration.

Lets see, had a daughter with his first wife. He was married until his death to his second wife. And what hot piece of ass she was. If Bosley was into 3-way swinging, I'm in. But wow… the filthy things I fantasied I would do to this man.

RECOMMENDATIONS: The Castaways on Gilligan's Island (1979) Happy Days (1974–1984) Murder, She Wrote (1984–1988) Father Dowling Mysteries (1989–1991)

[oldshowbiz]

"The Castaways on Gilligan's Island will return after station identification."

[ashleywool]

Possible fanfiction prompt:

A reboot of Gilligan's Island, but the seven castaways are the Spectrum Club 7 from How to Dance in Ohio.

Gilligan = Tommy (friendly, means well, tries hard, but kind of chaotic and likely to ruin things, usually seen in red)

Skipper = Drew (charismatic, good leader, but knows how to delegate when necessary, usually seen in blue, also I just like the idea of him clonking Tommy on the head a lot)

Professor = Marideth (more intellectual than emotional, has a vast knowledge of facts about pretty much everything, most likely to figure out how to do anything...except fix the boat)

Thurston Howell III = Remy (highly influential and well-connected, could be morally corrupt but chooses not to be, the most likely to pack an absurd amount of "necessary" possessions to keep with them on a three-hour tour)

Eunice Howell = Mel (stronger than they seem, wiser than you expect, protective maternal energy, also I just like the idea of Mel and Remy being married because probably what happened is Remy got rich and famous from influencer income and married Mel so that they could afford to leave Paws & Claws and have a better life with adequate healthcare and that's the wholesome queer aro/ace love story we deserve)

Ginger Grant = Jessica (is a star, knows she's a star, knows that you know she's a star, acts accordingly)

Mary Ann = Caroline (sweet, wholesome, has a toxic ex, bffs with Jessica, and people totally like her better than Jessica, but don't tell Jessica)

cc: @traderjoesfan2008 @indigogirl420 @wakanda-never

[kwebtv]

TV Guide -  October 5 - 11, 1963

Phil Silvers (born Phillip Silver; May 11, 1911 – November 1, 1985) Entertainer and comedy actor, known as “The King of Chutzpah.” He is best known for starring in The Phil Silvers Show, a 1950s sitcom set on a U.S. Army post in which he played Master Sergeant Ernest (Ernie) Bilko.

In the 1963–1964 television season, he appeared as Harry Grafton, a factory foreman interested in get-rich-quick schemes, much like the previous Bilko character, in CBS’s 30-episode The New Phil Silvers Show, with co-stars Stafford Repp, Herbie Faye, Buddy Lester, Elena Verdugo as his sister, Audrey, and her children, played by Ronnie Dapo and Sandy Descher.

Silvers also guested on The Beverly Hillbillies, and various TV variety shows such as The Carol Burnett Show, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and The Dean Martin Show. Perhaps Silvers’ most memorable guest appearance was as curmudgeonly Hollywood producer Harold Hecuba in an episode (titled The Producer) on Gilligan’s Island (broadcast in 1966), where he and the castaways performed a musical version of Hamlet. (Wikipedia)

[citizenscreen]

RESCUE FROM GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, TV movie directed by Leslie H. Martinson and starring our favorite castaways, aired on October 14, 1978, more than 14 years after they embarked on a three-hour tour.

[theparadoxmachine]

I've been watching Gilligan's Island on tubi bc I grew up watching it on Nick at Nite and I've got thoughts

Approximately 17% of the show so far has aged like milk (I'm referring specifically to problematic shit like the Italian playing a caricature of a Japanese man. Yikes.) Which is honestly better than I was expecting.

It's a lot less sexist than I was expecting. Don't get me wrong, it's got a lot of sexism you would expect from a show from the 60s but it could have been so much worse

It's as campy and silly as I remember

Gilligan doesn't deserve half the shit he gets from the rest of the castaways or people who watched the show. Half the time the stuff he screws up is because he was given a task the others should have known he wasn't equipped to handle. The rest is him getting blamed for shit that wasn't his fault. The better example of the show fuckup would be the Professor who was panicking about scurvy because they ran out of oranges (hey at least Stede knows he's an idiot) while there are PINEAPPLES sitting on the table next to him.

I feel like there is definitely fanfiction of this show and I am desperately curious but also filled with dread over looking for it

This show gave me a depression spiral but that's a story for another post

I could say more but I need sleep

[grandgillygaupus]

Watched the Christmas episode of Gilligan’s Island. Santa was played by Alan Hale Jr., the same guy that played the Skipper.

The fact that the castaways don’t realize they’ve met actual Santa until he leaves because they think he’s the Skipper is probably one of my favourite gags in the show.

Also shoutout to that bit where Gilligan wrestles a shark and wins.

[byrdsfly]

So there's been a Gilligan's Island marathon on at work and long story short, since the Castaways represent the 7 Deadly Sins I wonder if anyone has done a crossover with it and Full Metal Alchemist...

[oldguy56-world]

I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

You are probably scratching your heads wondering 'what is he going to write about that has something to do with this song title?' Fair question. Simple answer. The theme this week is allergies. (WTF?) For those of you that are not aware I am allergic to coconuts. Yep. Sounds crazy but it is true. (Full disclosure when I was tested the doctor told me I was also allergic to dog fur but as long as I don't ingest any I am okay. I have spent a lifetime overcoming the powerful urge to lick a dog, but so far so good.)

People's first reaction is usually one of disbelief. They think it is something I am making up. I assure you it is true. The second reaction is curiosity as to how severe it is. A small bit and I get stomach cramps. More and it causes severe diarrhea. Some people have asked if I have enough will it kill me. Two issues with this:

First, why are they curious? Are they planning something against me? These people I will never let cook for me again.

Second is simple. I don't know, and I do not want to test out what the limit could be. I do not want my last thought to be "ah, there's the line".

This also cost me a chance at stardom. I was up for the part of Gilligan but after reading the script I had to turn it down otherwise either I would have buried the Skipper each night (remember he slept under Gilligan on hammocks) or worse after a couple of episodes there would have only been 6 castaways left with no ensuing hijinks. To this day I am terrified of crashing on an island unless it is all inclusive.

So I go on, watching out for myself, as do my wife and daughters. I am nice to them because they all know how to take me out if I am not. Macaroons.

Here is the frustrating thing for me. While packaged food all lists their ingredients not so with restaurant food. I have asked many a waiter, especially when dealing with desserts, 'was this made with coconut'. The usual remark is 'probably not' or 'if they do you won't taste it'. Nice. It seems to be the ingredient in vogue right now so I really have to be careful. For everything else I have an iron gut, but if I eat enough I need to find an iron toilet.

I recognize this is a rare allergy, not a fashionable one like peanuts or dairy products. Those people have all the luck.

So I got curious. Are there other unique allergies out there? Rare ones that are not talked about and no one knows? Turns out there is, so be tolerant of others because you just might not know what afflicts them.

Some men are allergic to women. It causes their tongues to swell so they cannot talk and they sweat profusely. There is no cure but there is a safe haven for them. You can find a colony of those afflicted gathered in comic book stores, although some are confined to their parent's basement.

There is an allergy to telling the truth. Symptoms are orange tinted skin, and large weight gains. There is also a weakening of eyesight but that comes in handy for not being able to read your scale properly.

Coyotes are allergic to sharks. That is why you never see them eating one.

Seniors are allergic to paying full price for anything. Our arms stiffen up causing us to not be able to reach for our wallets.

Some sports teams are allergic to silver. That is why they try very hard not to win any trophies.

Store employees are allergic to talking to customers. This is why you see them hiding, talking amongst themselves, or panicking when you approach them.

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK: To be truly strong you have to embrace your weaknesses.

[stellabystarlight12]

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND  S1E30  FORGET ME NOT

A blow to the head gives the Skipper amnesia. The Professor tries to cure him through hypnosis, but he winds up believing that the other castaways are Japanese soldiers.