Filming The Pilot Of Gilligan's Island Came With Piles Of Frogs

Popular early TV comedy "Gilligan's Island" faced some obstacles throughout its 3 season run, from a cast that changed between pilot and series to a bad response to the initial pitch to a planned fourth season that was cut short when the show was seen as getting in the way of "Gunsmoke." But one of the first problems the series' creator had to deal with on the show had nothing to do with network expectations, and in fact sounds a bit like a plot from the series itself. Before the show ever went to air, its Hawaiian production area was swarmed with a seemingly endless army of frogs.

Series creator Sherwood Schwartz once told the Television Academy that the pilot shoot for the series involved a daily slog through a sea of frogs that piled up outside his door in Hawaii. "We shot it in the same place where they did 'South Pacific,' and there's a series of huts — not real huts, they were nice accommodations — up a hill that went to the main house," Schwartz, who died in 2011, explained. "So they gave each of us our own facility and I didn't know, but at night in Hawaii, at least over there, millions of frogs piled up outside our door."

"Millions" surely feels like hyperbole here, but Schwartz expanded on this story in his memoir, "Inside Gilligan's Island," and it's obvious that there really were buckets worth of frogs to contend with around the hotel where the crew was staying. Schwartz's book reveals Hanalei Plantation, an area near the north shore of Kauai, as the place where he and the rest of the crew stayed.

He noted that executive and cast cottages were downhill from the main building where the rest of the crew stayed, and the area was so steep that Jeeps were needed to get from one spot to another. But "there was another problem," Schwartz wrote. "Frogs. Every night frogs would gather by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, outside the door to our cottage."

The deluge of amphibians made nailing down last-minute rewrites of the episode tough, especially since, in 1963, there were only a few ways to send a draft to the team without showing up in person. When Schwartz tried to call his secretary Lottie, whose lodgings were on the opposite side of the grounds as his own, she didn't answer her phone (she was confused by the newfangled Swedish phone system, apparently). Thus, Schwartz had to hike up the hill several times in one day to deliver new additions to the script, and in the book, he describes the pile of frogs in an increasingly hilarious way each time.

"I pushed open the door to our cottage, scattering frogs in all directions," Schwartz says in one paragraph, and in a later one, "frogs flew everywhere as I opened the door." In his interview with the Academy, the writer-producer noted that just opening the door to get in or out was almost impossible, as the frogs seemed perfectly happy to make the spot in front of it their home. "You couldn't even open the door. You had to push all these frogs away!" he recalled, noting that his in both versions of the story that his wife was repulsed by the whole situation.

At one point in his book, Schwartz describes the frogs as playing Leap Frog outside his door, while another time he says that they seemed to re-materialize even when he was away a short while. "When I got to the cottage a new group of frogs was piled up at the door," he wrote, "or maybe they were the old group regrouped."

Half a century later, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what type of frog plagued the production of "Gilligan's Island" season 1, or why. These days, the Coqui frog, a species native to Puerto Rico, is an invasive species on Hawaiian islands according to the Kaua'i Invasive Species Committee. There are as many as 55,000 of them per hectare in some areas of Hawaii, and a 2011 article in the Seattle Times explains that residents and tourists are sometimes kept up at night by the sound of "thousands of male coqui simultaneously [summoning] partners — a mating chorus some say can be as loud as a jet airplane." Curiously, though, Coqui frogs are thought to have only been introduced into Hawaii in the '80s, so they couldn't have been the culprits of the froggy landslide outside Schwartz's door. 

At any rate, it was a funny start to a show that would keep audiences laughing for the next three years. Plus, all of that amphibious exposure might have affected the "Gilligan's Island" team on a subconscious level: the show would later be credited as the first-ever usage of the frog croak descriptive word "ribbit."