It’s well-known that Hervé Villechaize left the show from a salary dispute, but did they ever explain in the show why the character left? My googling failed to come up with anything, so I suspect they never explained it in the show. I did discover he was replaced by the guy who would play Mr. Belvedere, which I either never knew or forgot.
No explanation was given, according to TV Tropes:
What Happened to the Mouse?:
- During the Tattoo/Julie year we see Julie see the plane and run off to greet it. While some of the episodes with Tattoo give a short mention that Julie is busy with another fantasy, others show her leave to greet the plane, then disappear completely from that episode without explanation.
- We never find out why Julie and Tattoo leave before the Lawrence episodes.
Julie was Mr. Roarke’s goddaughter. I remembered the butler but I have no memory of this other proxy for Tattoo.
Thanks!
Such disappearances were seldom explained back in the day. (How often are they now?) The audience was basically left to assume characters had either passed away or moved on to more lucrative positions.
They tried to back out of the Pact, so “Mr Roarke” sent them to Hell.
GODdaughter?
Can the Devil even have a goddaughter? Won’t they all burst into flames or something?
Unless you are of the school that believes Roarke is God Himself?
I read somewhere in my recent Googling that Ricardo Montalban thought Roarke was a fallen angel.
On another “why did someone not show up again who logically should have?”, what about Mr. Roarke’s young stepson?
I think Tattoo was in charge of the books and once he came up a little…
No, I can’t.
How many times has your wife heard this?
(Happy New Year, Burp! You my Favorite!)
Shucks folks, I’m speechless!
Just as an aside, I was a young teenager during the show’s run, and I remember the pilot episode in which Mr. Roarke was not some sorcerer who created the fantasies through magic, it was all done with illusion, and he had an infrastructure of workers helping him.
One of the plot lines of the pilot was that a guest kept almost getting killed in his fantasy, and it turned out that one of the workers had a past grudge against the guest and was trying to kill him. In the climactic scene the worker revealed himself to the guest and was about to kill him, saying “the hell with you” when Mr. Roarke appeared with a shotgun, and calmly said, “no, the hell with you, Mr. Smith”.
That was a pilot episode I could get behind. When the show turned into pure magic I was disappointed at how cheesy it became.
Long ago I was watching a soap opera with a woman. I’d never seen one before, nor since. A character was onscreen and a caption proclaimed, “the part of Cynthia is being played by “Actresses Name” today”.
The shows are produced daily, well planned and scripted ahead of time, so they will use substitutes if someone calls in sick. In 1968 Joan Crawford stepped in for her daughter Christina on the soap Secret Storm for 5 days while Christina was ill. Alert viewers may have noticed that Joan was in her 60s and her daughter was only 28.
I ndo remember an episode in which a guest did get killed. For real. He was an ex-soldier who wanted to go out doing something worthwhile, and he helped Roarke rescue other guests were held hostage by invading terrorists.
The Devil showed up on a couple of episodes, as I remember. He was played by Roddy McDowell.
Being the mortal servitor of a demigod/ fallen angel/ Prospero is a good job until it isn’t.
You sure he wasn’t actually God?
I don’t trust that show,…
(I prefer Haunts of the Very Rich, a made-for-TV movie about a “fantasy island” resort that was not as it seemed. I have always considered that the unofficial pilot for FI.)
^ OMG! Someone else saw that besides me? My condolences.
I remember liking it. The twist, as it were, was new to me back then. I was impressed. I see it is sort of a remake/inspired by the 1930 film Outward Bound.
And in the spirit of the obsolete technology (vinyl records) thread, I own it on VHS. 