PASADENA, Calif. — Is there anyone in America who isn't familiar with "Gilligan's Island"? Is there anyone who doesn't know at least some of the words to the 1964-67 TV comedy's distinctive theme song?
Which may explain why, when boarding a commercial airliner, Dawn Wells — who played Mary Ann — has been greeted by a plane full of passengers singing, "Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip . . ."
Which has happened to her not once, but twice.
That's just one of the stories surrounding the show that plays out in the two-hour TV movie "Surviving Gilligan's Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three-Hour Tour in History" (Sunday, 8 p.m., CBS/Ch. 2).
"It's a stroll through a lot of memories," said Wells, who's both one of the stars and the co-executive producer of the project, "and it's a power-walk through a lot of things."
But it's not an exposé — and Wells maintains that previous attempts to dig up the dirt on "Gilligan's Island" have exaggerated or just plain fabricated. "As a kid, you cared about these people," she said. "And you don't want to destroy that image. You want them to come away with the same feeling of warmth that they had when they saw us to being with. And I think we accomplished that."
"Surviving Gilligan's Island" is not just another TV movie — it's sort of a hybrid. Three of the four surviving cast members — Wells, Bob Denver (Gilligan) and Russell Johnson (the Professor) — appear on camera, basically reminiscing about the show. And some of those memories turn into re-creations of events back in the '60s with actors playing the three of them, along with Tina Louise (Ginger) and the three cast members who have passed away — Alan Hale Jr. (the Skipper), Jim Backus (Thurston Howell III) and Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Howell).
"I said, 'Can we do something different here?' " said director/executive producer Paul A. Kaufman. " 'Can we do something that's sort of like 'Spinal Tap,' where people will break the fourth wall and talk to the audience, and we'll have flashbacks and we'll do these things?'"
And, oddly enough, it works. "Surviving Gilligan's Island" manages to strike the same sort of goofy, endearing tone as the original series.
The movie tells the tale of creator Sherwood Schwartz seemingly quixotic quest to bring to TV this comedy about seven people marooned on a tropical island and how he endured multiple rejections before reluctant CBS executives finally said yes.
How Hale was on the verge of leaving acting when he got the part. How Schafer accepted a role in the pilot just to get a free trip to Hawaii, never dreaming the show would get picked up. How Wells had to beat out Raquel Welch, among others, to win her role. How Louise arrived thinking she was the star of the show, and how she grew frustrated playing the airhead movie star.
Louise's much-reported dissatisfaction with the show and her role is as close as "Gilligan's Island" comes to scandal. "That seems to be the most negative you can come up with, because there wasn't anything else that was really a negative. And that wasn't really bad," Wells said. "I just wanted to make sure that the kind side was shown, because there was a kind side. There is a good side to her and it wasn't three years of chaos. . . . There weren't temper tantrums and stuff like you read about today."
(Louise was not, however, asked to participate in this project. "We felt that we were doing the show with Russ and Dawn and Bob, who, really, this show has enriched their lives and enriched their careers, and it's a very positive feeling," Kaufman said. "And I think that Tina has spent the last 35 years trying to distance herself from the show, so we made the decision not to contact her.")
The behind-the-scenes tales — most funny, some poignant — go on and on.
Wells said viewers would be most surprised by "the emotion" of the story.
"You see who these people were in real life," said Kaufman, adding that some of the actors "were very much like their characters on the show and some were very different."
Hale and Wells, and, to a lesser extent, Schafer, were a lot like the characters; Denver, Backus, Johnson and Louise considerably less so. "I think there was a chemistry between all of us right away. . . . Once we all came together for that first reading (of the script) we all bonded together, because the critics hated us so much," Wells said. "We sort of were like the poor little knocked-out kids in the corner."
"All I can say is the critics hated us, and the public loved us," Johnson said.
What a difference 3 1/2 decades makes, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that Wells and Johnson found themselves facing a room full of critics earlier this year, all of whom knew that theme song by heart. "We raised you," Wells said with a laugh. "I think the turning point came after we went off the air. . . . I think the longer it continued to rerun, the more you all grew up . That memory of that sweet time became more and more important. I mean, there is no Mary Ann on television — there is no good girl over (the age of) 12. But I think the fact is that that was part of your youth that you held onto as television changed."
Not that anyone expected the show to live on for what's pushing four decades. "I remember Sherwood Schwartz saying to us after the first year, 'Don't expect to get any reruns out of this show because the first year's in black-and-white, and it will never go," Wells said. "We've never been off the air since 1964, and we're in 30 languages now all over the world.
"It's a translatable show. . . . It's kind of that slapstick comedy that you don't have to know who Monica Lewinsky is or anything to understand the humor."
When the show became a huge hit in reruns, it didn't make the actors rich. Oh, they got residuals — but only for six runs "and it was based on SAG minimum," Johnson said. "So by the end of the first year, when it went into syndication, we were paid off."
And for as little as "$25 a show, something like that," Wells said.
But the show's impact went far beyond the money and the three years' worth of episodes. Johnson and Wells said they recently appeared at a biotech conference where there "must have been 400 or 500 Ph.D.'s and master's-degrees guys and every . . . one of them was a fan of 'Gilligan's Island,' " Johnson said.
"And I bet 30 percent of them said (to Johnson), 'You are the reason I went into science," Wells added.
"It's amazing," Johnson said. "I run into people like that all the time that say, 'I'm a doctor' or 'I'm this' or 'I'm that, and I was inspired to that because of the Professor.' Absolutely astounding to me."
As is the fact that anybody is still watching and talking about "Gilligan's Island" 37 years after it premiered — a fact that Wells attributes to the show's underlying theme of decency.
"That's why it sustained so long," Wells said. "And I think that's Sherwood Schwartz's attitude on life. . . . I think there was a real goodness to the morality of the world that 'Gilligan' expressed subconsciously to all of us.
"And, I think, as silly as it seems to us, it made a difference in a lot of children's lives. Gilligan is a buffoon and makes mistakes. And I cannot tell you how many kids come up and say . . . we're latchkey kids, and now you're my family."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com