The Worst Episode Of Gilligan’s Island, According To IMDb

In the “Gilligan’s Island” episode “Forward March” (February 17, 1966), the castaways find themselves unexpectedly under attack. Grenades begin flying at them from the bushes, thrown by an unseen assailant. The explosions activate the war trauma of Mr. Howell (Jim Backus), and he immediately appoints himself a General, taking charge of the castaways and organizing a slapstick counterstrike. The castaways search the island and find that they are being attacked by a gorilla (Janos Prohaska), who has been living in a nearby cave. The gorilla has a machine gun and boxes upon boxes of hand grenades, presumably left over from World War II. The Professor (Russell Johnson) figures that the gorilla was merely imitating the soldiers it once observed, decades earlier. 

Gilligan (Bob Denver) manages to stare the gorilla down, and eventually trains it to throw its explosives out into the nearby lagoon, where no one will be hurt. The gorilla eventually runs out of ammo, and the day is saved. There are two final jokes. The gorilla also has a mysterious red disk that it throws like a Frisbee. It seems that it was a nuclear device of some kind and explodes in a massive mushroom cloud (no one is hurt). Then the gorilla grabs one of Mary Ann’s pies and gives Gilligan a pie to the face. Yuk yuk. 

From its earliest broadcasts, “Gilligan’s Island” was dismissed as being cartoonish and silly, and that’s certainly true of “Forward March.” Some may find the sight of a man in a gorilla costume to be instantly kitschy, but fake apes are also a dated comedy trope that, I suspect, no one ever found terribly funny. At least not ironically. It may be the gorilla that has earned “Forward March” the unique distinction of being the worst-rated episode of the series on IMDb. Based on 206 reviews, it has a mere 6.5 out of 10. 

Given how broadly silly “Gilligan’s Island” is in general, how did “Forward March” become targeted by the show’s fans? To be fair, 37 of the reviewers on IMDb have the episode a 10 out of 10, and 49 of them gave it a seven, so it’s not entirely hated. But over 40% of the reviewers gave it a six or lower. I suspect that it’s the gorilla that did it, as guys in gorilla suits were a dated and limp way to get a cheap laugh, even in 1966. What’s next, a flapping dickey? And gorillas continued to be milked for years. Anyone who has seen the 1975 sitcom “The Ghost Busters” likely has a form of war trauma after witnessing the show’s staggeringly unfunny gorilla character. 

But something deeper may be at work. Show creator Sherwood Schwartz once announced that his favorite episode of the series was “The Little Dictator” (September 30, 1965), which, he felt exemplified the core values of the series. Schwartz, you see, didn’t just create a lightweight, puffball series, but what he saw as a cross-section of America. Seven random Americans, all from different classes, were forced to live on a desert island together, and they managed to get along and thrive. There was no war, and conflicts never went beyond someone being hit with a hat. 

A big part of “Forward March” features the castaways, while under attack, becoming a military force under the embattled militarism of Mr. Howell (Jim Backus). They all begin to dress in army greens, Howell promotes himself to General, and all the castaways’ interactions become formal and shouty. The castaways are clearly all merely humoring Mr. Howell’s military fantasy, but it is an odd sight to see the castaways suddenly abandoning their otherwise pacifistic, democratic natures just because a rich, emotionally wounded demagogue told them to. 

Perhaps the series was distressingly prescient.