If you thought the premise of being stranded on a tropical island with a millionaire (and his wife), a movie star, and a professor was already a stretch, you won’t believe how the castaways of “Gilligan’s Island” wrapped up their live-action run. The final TV movie in the franchise went full sci-fi, tossing basketball teams, super-powered minerals, and athletic androids into the mix.
“The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island” was the third and final live-action reunion film following the cancellation of the “Gilligan’s Island” TV series. Most of the original cast reprised their roles for the 1981 made-for-TV movie, with Constance Forslund stepping in as Ginger Grant. (Tina Louise, who’s now the only surviving Gilligan’s Island cast member, declined to return for the films.) Jim Backus — who could not commit to a larger role due to health reasons at the time — made a cameo as Thurston Howell III, with David Ruprecht playing his son, Thurston Howell IV.
Picking up where 1979’s “The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island” left off, the story finds Gilligan (Bob Denver) and his pals running their island resort when a plane carrying the Harlem Globetrotters — a popular all-Black exhibition basketball team — crash-lands nearby. Meanwhile, a corporate industrialist named J.J. Pierson (Martin Landau) has discovered that the resort sits on top of a massive deposit of a powerful mineral known as “supremium,” and he cooks up a scheme to take control of the land. He challenges the resort to a basketball game, but he has a sneaky trick up his sleeve: a team of basketball-playing robots called “New Invincibles.”
Network execs wanted to bring in the Harlem Globetrotters
Between the fictional energy ore known as “supremium” and the ball-dribbling droids, “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island” is pure sci-fi from start to finish. As for how this wildly bonkers outing came to be, the backstory is different depending on who you ask. According to MeTV, the crossover concept may have come from NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff or network chief Fred Silverman.
Meanwhile, Hamilton Cloud, who served as Tartikoff’s director of motion pictures for television, recalled that, while the idea might’ve come from his boss, it was “Gilligan’s Island” franchise creator Sherwood Schwartz who pushed for a movie featuring the Harlem Globetrotters, who had already been guest stars on “The New Scooby-Doo Movies.” Producer Lloyd Schwartz (Sherwood’s son), however, recalls Silverman as the originator. Lloyd told the Tampa Bay Times (via MeTV), “Fred was very high on both the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and The Harlem Globetrotters and was trying to get them guest-starring in different shows.”
Regardless of where the idea came from, “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island” didn’t perform so well, and it marked the end of the live-action franchise. “I liked them,” Lloyd told the Television Academy in 2007 when asked about the three movies. “They did reasonably well. They’ve done well in syndication. … It was in descending ratings, and so it didn’t look like it was going to go any further, and that was okay.”
