Gilligan's Planet was an animated series produced by Filmation, running for 13 episodes from 1982 to 1983. It was a spin-off cum sequel to the earlier Filmation series The New Adventures Of Gilligan, and was likewise an animated spin-off to the original 1960s comedy Gilligan's Island.
Set up as a sequel to The New Adventures of Gilligan, the premise of Gilligan's Planet was that the Professor eventually hit upon the plan of creating a rocket ship to transport the castaways back to civilization. And it worked... too well. One disastrous bout of mishandled steering later, and the rocket ship had crashed on a strange alien world, forcing the castaways to once again resume foraging for survival whilst trying to repair the rocket so they could get back to earth.
This series includes examples of:
- Adaptation Dye-Job: As in The New Adventures, Ginger Grant is presented as a platinum blonde rather than a redhead.
- Benevolent Genie: The very first episode, "I Dream of Genie", has Gilligan rescue an alien robot named Wizzard, who proceeds to grant Gilligan's every wish out of gratitude. Then Mr. Howell becomes its master and mistreats it until it leaves, squandering a chance to get rescued.
- Expository Theme Tune: As with its precursor, Gilligan's Planet used a spoken poem voice-over of the intro credits that explained how the castaways built their rocket and got stranded on an alien planet, homaging the famous intro song of Gilligan's Island as best Filmation could when they couldn't get the rights to it.
- Gone Horribly Right: The Professor built the rocket ship the S.S. Minnow as part of a plan to escape Gilligan's Island. He succeeded... and then the Skipper got them stranded on Gilligan's Planet instead.
- Just Eat Gilligan: The intro credits literally show that the castaways crashing was Gilligan's fault, as he blinded the Skipper with a carelessly tossed banana peel.
- Shout-Out:
- The first episode's title, "I Dream of Genie", is a clear homage to I Dream of Jeannie.
- The finale episode features an alien drill sergeant who looks like Darth Vader, and his commanding officer... who looks like Groucho Marx.
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The Other Darrin: As in The New Adventures, Tina Louise refused to return to voice act Ginger Grant, wanting nothing to do with the series. But, as Dawn Wells had returned from the acting job that had made her unavailable for The New Adventures, she not only took up her iconic role as Mary Ann's voice actor, but she also took over as Ginger Grant's voice actor — displacing Jane Webb, who had voice-acted both characters in The New Adventures.
