The Hilarious Reason The Gilligan’s Island Boat Is Named S.S. Minnow

As the theme song of “Gilligan’s Island” reminds us before every episode, five passengers set sail on a charter boat from Hawaii for what should have been a three-hour tour. Of course, that three-hour tour eventually turned into three seasons of Gilligan, his captain, and the passengers being stranded on an “uncharted desert isle,” where their boat, the S.S. Minnow, ran aground.

The ship seen stranded on the sands of the South Pacific island in the opening credits was actually a real boat, which was destroyed especially for “Gilligan’s Island,” mystifying a local man in the process. But Sherwood Schwartz’s sitcom actually used several different models for the S.S. Minnow, which was revisited throughout the CBS series as the castaways attempted to fix it on various occasions. Alas, the small vessel was never fully restored, even after a valiant effort from the Professor (Russell Johnson) to glue the damaged ship together in the season 1 episode “Goodbye Island,” which resulted in the ship falling apart again after the glue turned out to be temporary.

All of which is interesting enough for fans of the series, but the inspiration for the ship’s name is perhaps the most interesting tidbit about the great S.S. Minnow.

Minnows are, of course, small freshwater fish, which seem as good an inspiration as any for the name of the “Gilligan’s Island” boat. But these fish are not, in fact, the real reason why the S.S. Minnow is named as such. As an archived post on the website of the University of Texas School of Law explains, Sherwood Schwartz actually named the boat after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Newton Minow, who in 1961 delivered a speech at the 39th Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). In that speech, Minow decried the industry for creating a TV landscape that he dubbed a “vast wasteland,” and implored networks to strive for higher-quality programming — which they dutifully did.

For Schwartz, however, this capitulation to Minow’s demands robbed individual creators of their independence as networks were all too happy to adhere to the demands of the Federal Communications Commission Chairman. The “Gilligan’s Island” creator said, “The year [that I began working on ‘Gilligan’s Island’] was 1963, and the three networks [ABC, CBS, and NBC] were already beginning to use the dictatorial power Newton Minow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had handed to them.” Schwartz’s response was to name the doomed vessel on his sitcom after Minow, with one crew member being quoted as saying:

“No one can say ‘Gilligan’s Island’ was without hidden meaning. I was surprised to find out recently from Sherwood Schwartz that our shipwrecked vessel, the S.S. Minnow, was actually named for someone. It was so christened in dubious honor of the man who, Sherwood insists, ‘ruined television.'”

The Professor actor Russell Johnson also wrote about the naming of the S.S. Minnow in his book “Here on Gilligan’s Isle” (via MeTV), confirming that Sherwood Schwartz did indeed name the vessel after Newton Minow. Meanwhile, the show creator spoke to the Television Academy Foundation, revealing that CBS, on which “Gilligan’s Island” aired, had tried to manipulate the series behind his back, adding additional footage to the pilot — which Schwartz had already endured great pain to write — and yielding poor audience testing as a result. Schwartz explained:

“[CBS] tested it because they had added footage without making me aware of it, because I had resisted anything except the song to open. Hunt Stromberg [then head of CBS programming] had hired other writers without my knowledge to write scenes where they were packing, all the different people packing to go on this little boat […] and I was furious […] it was really terrible.”

Schwartz ties this experience directly to Newton Minow, whose urging for networks to exert more control allowed CBS to treat “Gilligan’s Island” in this way. “That’s network control for you,” said the show creator, “which they never used to have before Mr. Minow, who the boat is named after by the way.” Schwartz details how he named the S.S. Minnow after the FCC chairman himself, who he says is “the one who gave control of television to the networks.” He continued:

“That’s where you got the name. It’s not named after the fish, no. It’s spelled differently, his name. I spelled it like the fish because I couldn’t spell it with his name. His name only has one ‘n’ in it, S.S. Minnow has two ‘n’s but that’s what it’s named after.”