Home Sweet Hut

In "Home Sweet Hut," the castaways (despite Gilligan's bumbling efforts) manage to build a community hut to house all seven of them for the approaching monsoon season, with our first glimpse of twin hammocks for the Skipper and Gilligan. One argument started by the Howells and everyone insists on privacy and starts building their own huts. In no time at all Gilligan, the 'one man disaster area,' manages to topple every single one, until a second community hut is conceived to ward off the next storm. We find out that Mr. Howell sleeps with a teddy bear, with a priceless aside from dependable Jim Backus: "nana!" By the episode's end everybody returns to building their own huts, Ginger makes her first successful seduction of the always compliant Gilligan, and we also hear the final announcement over the radio that the search for the missing Minnow has ended. To balance the seriousness of survival in the wild with well executed slapstick was the most challenging aspect of the series, but even this early Sherwood Schwartz proves to be a genius. Using the silent screen technique of sped up photography to enhance the humor, Bob Denver and Alan Hale evoke memories of not just Laurel and Hardy but also the verbal antics of Abbott and Costello. Viewers unfamiliar with those comedy teams received a literal crash course by watching GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. At one point the Skipper quotes his father: "hurried work is worried work" and "a job not well done is not a well done job," and we can't help but smile to remember that the actor's lookalike father, Alan Hale, actually worked in Laurel and Hardy's 1936 feature "Our Relations."