The Original ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Theme Song Was Terrible

Gillian’s Island would be nothing without its theme song, or at least a lot more confusing. It's one of the most iconic TV theme songs for a reason. It's catchy and masterful in its exposition: it describes the show’s characters, explains where they are, what they’re doing, and how they got there. It so brings you into the story so completely that a pilot became unnecessary. That was not the case with the original iteration of the show. It did shoot a pilot that went unaired for decades, and that included different characters, different actors, and thank god, a different theme song.

The theme song that opened the pilot episode of Gilligan’s Island was a disaster on just about every level, which is all the more shocking as it was composed by a man well-known for scoring disasters flawlessly. None other than John Williams -- then with only a few credits to his name and, even more disturbingly, still known as “Johnny” -- wrote what can only be described as a musical hate crime. The calypso-style composition sounds like an advertisement for a tropical resort that’s mostly an organized crime front, and it’s sung by series creator Sherwood Schwartz in the style of Sir Lancelot, a popular Trinidadian singer. Yes, Gilligan’s Island once opened with Oscar-baiting vocal blackface.

It’s not clear why the song was reworked by Schwartz and composer George Wyle. It might have been because it sucked, but it also might have been because it was three minutes long and viewers would have tuned out halfway through. Whatever the case, the original theme song -- along with the rest of the pilot -- was shelved until 1992, when Turner Classic Movies found the episode in their archives and decided to air a special broadcast. If you want to adopt the headcanon that Williams, by then a renowned composer, was so embarrassed that he made the Jurassic Park soundtrack just to distract us, we wouldn’t dream of stopping you.