Gilligan's Island: The Complete Second Season (1965)
Review by Cosette
Film:
DVD:

Created and Produced by Sherwood Schwartz
Starring Bob Denver, Alan Hale Jr., Jim Backus, Natalie Schafer, Tina Louise, Russell Johnson, Dawn Wells

Features:

• All thirty-two second season episodes
  
• Season introduction by actor Johnson and creator/producer Schwartz
  
• Running audio commentary from Schwartz on Episode #3: "The Little Dictator"
  

Released by:Warner Home Video
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: Yes.

My Advice: Rent it if you are jonesing for some Gilligan.

Just sit right back...yes from just those four words you know what show we're talking about. Seven castaways marooned on a desert island with seemingly unlimited supplies of "primitive" supplies and outfits--exactly how many of the latter would you bring on a three-hour tour? Apparently quite a few. This second season came with its own improvements: unlike the first, this time around it's in color, and the Professor and Mary Ann also get their own lines in the theme song.

Everyone who grew up watching the crazy comedy will no doubt remember quite a few of these thirty-two episodes from 1965 and 1966, perhaps the most memorable of which are "Hi Fi Gilligan," in which Gilligan is able to pick up radio signals in his mouth, and "Smile, You're on Mars Camera," in which a Mars rover accidentally lands on the island, making the NASA folks think there's life on the red planet. The show was so well-known that people wrote letters to the show (and the Coast Guard) asking them to please send a ship out to rescue the poor people on the island.

I never really watched this show growing up, and so it was a new experience for me. As cheesy as it is, some of the jokes are indeed quite funny. In both the season introduction and in the Episode 3 commentary, creator Sherwood Schwartz talks about different reasons why the show was so successful. It had little to no sexual innuendo, making it very family-friendly. The writers and directors did a good job of utilizing the different types of comedy that the different cast members excelled at: Gilligan and the Skipper were best at physical slapstick gags, for example, while Mr. and Mrs. Howell did a sharper, wittier verbal sort of comedy. Because of the differences in comedic style (and also the fact that there were two lovely ladies on the show), the show appealed to several different demographics, keeping its ratings and popularity up.

The season introduction and commentary were very informative, and a nice addition to the set. Like I said, I'm one of the few who missed seeing this during its many reruns, it was nice to be filled in a bit and brought into the world of the series by its creator; a era in television when cleavage and belly buttons were too risqué for its viewers (and had to have special costume alterations accordingly). Listening to the commentary with Mr. Schwartz was a bit like watching it with your grandfather--he got really tickled by the jokes and pointed out some of the gags excitedly. He talked a lot during "The Little Dictator" about how important the message of the episode was, furthering the idea that democracy is a very essential ideal--I have to admit that I didn't really find the episode to be as underlying serious as he made it out to be, but it was amusing.

If you love the show, you may want to own it, but if you just want to take a trip down memory lane with the show's creator, it's a rental.