Hello everyone, I was going to talk about my holiday weekend, but while surfing around I stumbled upon some sad news of one of my favorite old TV shows The following is quoted from the Web.
"Bob Denver, TV's Gilligan, Dies at Age 70:
Bob Denver, the bumbling namesake of "Gilligan's Island" who embarked on what was supposed to be a three-hour tour and endeared himself to generations of TV fans, has died at age 70.
He died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agent said on Tuesday. "He was my everything and I will love him forever," wife Dreama Denver said.
Denver's signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 he was already widely known to TV audiences for another iconic character, Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman's Dobie in the "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963.
Krebs, whose only desire was to play the bongos and hang out at coffee houses, would shriek every time the word "work" was mentioned in his presence.
Gilligan on the other hand was industrious but inept. And his character was as lovable as he was inept. Viewers embraced the skinny kid in the Buster Brown haircut and white sailor hat. So did the skipper, who was played by Alan Hale Jr. and who always referred to his first mate affectionately as "little buddy."
It was an affection that carried over into real life, the show's creator, Sherwood Schwartz, and several of Denver's surviving castmates said Tuesday.
"I found him to be a dear, sweet generous, loving man," said Russell Johnson, who played the professor on "Gilligan's Island."
Hickman said the two remained lifelong friends although they were as different in real life as their characters had been in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."
"I just loved him. He was wonderful. One of my dear, dear friends. I feel like a part of me died," Hickman said.
Denver went on to star in other TV series, including "The Good Guys" and "Dusty's Trail," as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows.
But he never escaped the role of Gilligan, so much so that in one of "Late Show" host David Letterman's top 10 lists things that would make the studio audience applaud one of the items Letterman announced was Denver's presence. The actor's brief appearance yielded a raucous response.
The show's success, according to Schwartz, was rooted in the fact that seven people of entirely different backgrounds were thrown together each week in a comedic setting.
He also credited Denver's acting talent with helping drive the series.
"He was a complex man. He was not a guy who just slipped on banana peels," Schwartz said Tuesday. "He knew most people thought of him as a funny guy who could do funny things. But he was really an intellectual at heart."
TV critics saw the show as anything but intellectual, dismissing the idea of a group of tourists being stranded on an uncharted desert island as inane. After it was canceled by CBS in 1967, "Gilligan's Island" found new audiences over and over in syndicated reruns and reunion films. "
My favorite question has always been why where the three bachelor men not going crazy about the beautiful movie star and the midwestern beauty queen. Issues like that would never come up until the 70s, I guess. So Rest in Peace Giligan and thank you for all the laughs!
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