HAPPY SUMMERWEEN! A three-hour tour?

(click to embiggen)

Always trying to come up with group costumes for the Pines’ Summerween. Gilligan’s Island would have first aired when the Stans were in their early teens; but it also stayed running in syndication for a really long time. I watched all of it multiple times as a kid. There are parts of it that are just worn into grooves in my memory.



The choices for the main four were fairly obvious. (I assume Professor Ford’s bamboo and coconut antenna booster for the radio really works… to do… something.) Soos and Melody being a couple made a good fit for the Howells. And while Wendy is absolutely the last person I would associate with Ginger, she does have the red hair, and what the heck – sometimes wearing a costume is about trying out something really different. I went with Soos’ boat for the S.S. Minnow; his original S.S. Cool Dude was destroyed by the Gobblewonker, but a different-looking boat was docked next to the little Stan o’ War in NWHS, so I adapted that as the S.S. Cool Dude II.

(The refs I looked at were mostly to figure out the costumes. I was surprised by how many outfits Ginger and Mary Ann wore. Obviously, one of the often-discussed absurdities of the show was how many different sets of clothes the Howells brought with them for what was only supposed to be a 3-hour tour on a small boat; but apparently so did Ginger and Mary Ann. It was actually hard to find full-figure shots of everyone, and I didn’t actually find an image from the show with Mary Ann in the costume I have Mabel wearing; but all of the stock Mary Ann costumes you can buy for Halloween are variations on this, so at least my memory isn’t playing tricks on me.)

