Gilligan's Island Spawned A Western Knock-Off, But It Was A Huge Flop

Sherwood Schwartz's "The Brady Bunch" was entering its Cousin Oliver death throes when the bankable television producer unveiled what he hoped would be his next sitcom smash in "Dusty's Trail." He had good reason to be upbeat. The zany Western series was a reunion with his "Gilligan's Island" star Bob Denver, who'd become a household name thanks to the syndication success of that critically derided, yet ridiculously watchable 1960s show. If couch potatoes were content to gorge on reruns of their previous collaboration, surely they'd have an appetite for Denver playing an equally inept coachman bumbling his way west to California.

There were, however, warning signs ahead of the series' September 1973 debut. For starters, Schwartz's efforts to revive "Gilligan's Island" based on the strength of its syndication popularity had proven fruitless (he would ultimately settle for the Saturday morning ABC cartoon "The New Adventures of Gilligan," which, despite most of the original cast returning to voice their characters, fizzled out after one season). Meanwhile, the networks simply weren't interested in another go-round with Schwartz and Denver, which forced the producer and his producing partner/brother Elroy to take the series directly to syndication.

And then there was the premise, which probably wound up being the fatal flaw of "Dusty's Trail." The problem wasn't that the concept was unworkable; it's just that it was embarrassingly familiar.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. "Dusty's Trail" stars Bob Denver and Forrest Tucker as a couple of stagecoach guides who inadvertently get separated from their wagon train and find themselves lost in the frontier. This is bad news for their passengers, which include two wealthy Easterners (Ivor Francis and Lynn Wood), a brainy civil engineer (Bill Cort), a capable farm girl (Lori Saunders), and a glamorous showgirl (Jeannine Riley).

Yep, it's "Gilligan Goes West" (with a theme song that's nowhere near as catchy as the original series' singalong classic).

That the series earned scathing reviews from television critics was expected. Schwartz didn't make shows for discriminating viewers (or the executives who begrudgingly greenlit his shows); he targeted younger viewers who, parents willing, parked themselves in front of the television for hours at a time.

When the first season of "Dusty's Trail" failed to catch on with Gilligan heads, the series was canceled and repackaged as a feature film titled "The Wackiest Wagon Train in the West." This slapdash effort, which spliced together elements of four "Dusty's Trail" episodes, failed to generate renewed interest in the series, thus becoming the end of the line for Schwartz and Denver's derivative folly. But if you happen to be a "Gilligan's Island" completist, you can watch the public domain movie (and just about every episode of the show) on YouTube any time you want. Why you'd want to is your own unsettling business.