The Castaways on Gilligan's Island Warning - this review contains spoilers. We recommend you watch Rescue from Gilligan's Island before reading it...

The Castaways on Gilligan's Island was made six months after the successful Rescue from Gilligan's Island, and it's events are set immediately after the castaways have re-shipwrecked themselves back on the island. We have the exact same cast as in the previous tele-movie (again with Judith Baldwin as Ginger). It aired over two separate nights. The first thing that struck me was that the actors are back on their A game. Everything seems as good as the original TV series. They had seemed just a little rusty in Rescue, so this was a wonderful surprise. Naturally the focus of the story gets back to it's classic origins, getting rescued! And the second time around this is achieved quite quickly, when Gilligan discovers an old lost airforce landing strip hidden in the overgrown jungle. Again, with the Professor's superior intellect, and even a little unusually useful advice from Gilligan, the castaways are able to mount an escape bid. It doesn't go perfectly, but it does lead to their re-rescue! Thrilled at their success, Mr Howell declares that he is going to turn the island into a luxury holiday resort, and make all his fellow castaways equal partners.

The Professor fixes the radio - to everyones delight!

Jump to a year later and the island is now as Mr Howell promised. The gang are now the managers of a popular island resort paradise. At this point the whole vibe of the show changes from that of a "TV movie" to that of a weekly TV series again, the theme being similar to that of The Love Boat with a guest cast of "holidayers" on the island, and the gang now essentially the crew of the ship, except on an island...

Tom Bosley (in the midst of his Happy Days success) and Marcia Wallace (fresh out of her success with The Bob Newhart Show) play a husband and wife with marital problems. Lesser known actors Rod Browning and Joan Roberts play another couple, and child actor Ronnie Scribner plays a runaway who has stowed away on the arrival boat and sneaked onto the island. Naturally, during the course of the show the guests problems are resolved, and the castaways new life on the island is now joyful and luxurious, and their future bright and clearly full of fun new adventures. We then end the movie/episode with a new theme song, welcoming us to come back EACH WEEK to join the castaways! Looking back it seems like a strange direction to take a "reunion movie" in, but there was a reason for this... the studio was planning to reboot the weekly TV series! Sadly, unlike the first reunion movie, the ratings were not a big success, and the planned reboot never went forward. We did however get a third TV movie, The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island...

Ginger teaches Tom Bosley & Marcia Wallace to Hula dance

Again, as with Rescue from Gilligan's Island the DVD options are poor. Unlike Rescue there are not even any commercially made DVD's for Castaways, and one is limited to taping a TV airing or searching for low quality TV recordings online, or buying copies that have been "burned" to disk. To make matters worse it appears that the available copies are missing footage (perhaps as much as 20-24 minutes, which has probably been cut from the TV airings to allow for more advertisments). We can only hope for proper studio releases in the future.