Gilligan's Island

::For the NES video game, see Gilligan's Island (video game).

Pilot vs. first broadcast episode

The first episode broadcast is often wrongly referred to as the series' pilot. This episode begins with the characters on the beach, immediately after they were shipwrecked, listening to a radio news report about their disappearance. This is the scene which reveals that the Skipper's name is Jonas Grumby and the Professor's name is Roy Hinkley.

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In fact, there was an entirely different episode from this one that actually served as the show's pilot. That episode dealt more with the characters' background and how they came to be shipwrecked. However, there were significant cast and character changes made after the pilot. The part of the Professor (originally played by John Gabriel) was re-cast to Russell Johnson. The parts of the two secretaries, Ginger (played by Kit Smythe) and Bunny (played by Nancy McCarthy), were changed to a movie star, Ginger Grant, and a Kansas farm girl, Mary Ann Summers, and re-cast respectively to Tina Louise and Dawn Wells. These changes meant that when the show was finally broadcast, the original pilot could not be used as its first broadcast episode.

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Rather than re-shoot the same pilot story again for broadcast, the show just proceeded on, and the series would begin broadcasting with what otherwise would have been the show's second episode—the episode beginning in the immediate aftermath of the shipwreck. In recognition of the fact that by doing this, the audience would have lost all of the background that the pilot episode provided, the scene with the castaways listening to the radio broadcast was added to provide that background as succinctly as possible.

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