Behind every cheerful, carefree franchise, there’s a fan theory hypothesizing that someone was dead the whole time. Despite having aired decades before fans began sharing viral theories that the castaways on “Lost,” musical teens in “Grease,” and even the old sweetie pie in “Up” somehow died before the opening credits rolled, “Gilligan’s Island” has nonetheless gotten swept up in a grim fan theory like a ship in a monsoon.
Generally, these weirdly dark non-canonical fan theories titillate some people while making others (myself included) respond with a big ol’, “Who cares?” In the case of the tale of Gilligan’s isle, though, the depressing theories are based on a real part of the show — an inconsistency in the theme song that becomes more and more noticeable each time you throw on an episode.
The “Gilligan’s Island” theme song, brought to us by series creator Sherwood Schwartz and prolific composer and songwriter George Wyle, is an undeniable earworm that has permeated pop culture over the past half-century. Before I had ever seen the show, I already knew most of the words to the story song that implores viewers to “sit right back” and “hear a tale” about a shipwreck that left a ragtag group of passengers stranded. The song does the narrative heavy lifting of reintroducing the show’s premise each week, and its sea shanty format gives us hints about just how goofy the sitcom will get.
Did the S.S. Minnow castaways kill a guy?
The show only includes seven major characters, and the theme song’s ending ostensibly refers to Gilligan, Skipper, Ginger (Tina Louise), Mary Ann (Dawn Wells), Thurston (Jim Backus), Lovey (Natalie Schafer), and The Professor (Russell Johnson). Thus, the eighth castaway only appears in the opening credits — a quirk that’s led to some sinister imaginings among fans. According to MeTV, the unaccounted for person in the opening credits seems to be a man piloting the boat. No one in the show ever mentions, mourns, or misses this man, but per Cracked’s reporting, that hasn’t stopped viewers from theorizing that the crew threw him overboard, murdered him, or even cannibalized him in a classic desert island worst-case scenario.
There doesn’t seem to be any official explanation for the extra passenger or crew member aboard the S.S. Minnow, though it’s worth noting that the grain on the footage from the early ’60s is strong enough that the man is barely distinguishable. In his memoirs, Schwartz wrote about his stubborn insistence in the face of network interference that the theme song be used to introduce the show’s story, but he died in 2011 and never set the record straight with regards to the extra person who may have been lost at sea. As with most fan theories based on wild extrapolations, it seems likely that Occam’s razor applies here, and the simplest explanation is the best one. In this case, I would guess that someone with real maritime experience was needed to steer during the moment set aboard an actual ship, and cameramen assumed the driver wouldn’t be noticeable. That, or Gilligan is actually a serial killer who dispatched the poor guy and assumed his identity as a crew member for the rest of the series.
