Mrs. Skammer and I have been watching Green Acres on HuluPlus. We were both born during its original run, but I had only ever seen a handful of episodes in reruns and she grew up without a TV so had never really seen it at all. The fish-out-of-water humor is still relatable, most of the quirky characters are amusing and Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert are *adorable *together. It’s a huge step up from GI.
Also, Eddie Albert was one of the coolest actors of his generation. Did you know he served as a U.S. spy leading up to WWII, touring undercover as a Mexican circus clown? It sounds like another bad sitcom but it’s true. He was also an ardent conservationist (he spoke at the very first Earth Day in 1970) and one time director of the U.S. Council of Refugees.
This. Especially given that Green Acres’ roots were the dumb and forgettable Beverly Hillbillies and, directly, Petticoat Junction. Green Acres could have been written by Robert Sheckley (high praise in my book) with our normal hero stuck in a universe everyone understands but him.
It is far harder to show a person like oneself in a strange land than to laugh at the yokels confused by your normal world (like in the Beverly Hillbillies.)
It did, however, break down sometime around 1969. In the first TV movie, the Skipper (I think) remarked that it hadn’t worked in ten years, so they missed things like the first Moon landing and Watergate.
There was an episode involving a woman trying to fly around the world solo; Gilligan does fix the transmitter by slapping the top of it and manages to contact her, but when the Professor asks how he fixed it, Gilligan hits it again, and the inside falls out through the back, presumably breaking most, if not all, of the tubes.
They didn’t have any nails. The Professor tried to make his own, but they never worked. Gilligan discovered a “super glue” from tree sap one day, only to discover that it only lasted a few days, and when the Skipper and Professor used it on the boat, pretty much the entire boat came apart - which is why you never see the remains of the boat anywhere after the first few episodes.
Nobody who got off the island had any exact idea where it was! There was an episode where one of the Gabors played a rich socialite, and she did tell everybody that she had found them, but when asked exactly where they were, she replied something like, “It’s all in my journal, in plain English…translated from Hungarian.”
On the other hand, in the episode where they make the movie that ends up winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes, apparently it never occurred to anybody to put down the latitude and longitude of the island, or that they were deserted there. Then again, it’s hard to believe that the film was screened at Cannes and nobody recognized either movie star Ginger Grant or millionaire Thurston Howell III in it…
The Professor said it, I think, when he described that the item Gilligan found enabled him to determine that a storm that would engulf the island was coming.
Of course I didn’t think of it when I was little. But when I was older I thought, 'Why don’t they just write a rescue message on the chalkboard? Show the boat, show the survivors, write the coordinates, write ‘Please rescue us!’
The last two points tie together. The professor isn’t an idiot. His only competition as eligible bachelor is Ernie and Bert and he’s on an island with a smoking hot farm girl and a famous actress. Would you be inclined to rush to fix the boat?
