Nothing great happened from episode to episode and it was hokey as those fake anthuriums placed randomly on every bush and tree, but it was enough to give pleasure to fans of the show.
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For a time, everything that producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg touched turned to gold. Seventies' gold—which makes it open-shirt, heavy-link, neck-chain gold, meaning Spelling and Goldberg managed to tap into the viewing public's penchant for kitschy melodrama infused with a heavy-metal dose of camp. They straddled the one-hour drama and half-hour comedy genres, turning out "Starsky and Hutch" (1975), "Charlie's Angels" (1976), "The Love Boat" (1977), and "Fantasy Island" (1978) in rapid succession.
The year that "Fantasy Island" debuted, "Charlie's Angels" finished #4 in the Nielsens, while "The Love Boat" cruised in at #14 with Mr. Roark and Tattoo following in their wake at #17—the highest the show would place.
Though "Fantasy Island" was popular for a time—Consider how many can still visualize little person Hervé Villechaize pointing to the sky and shouting, "Da plane! Da plane!"—Villechaize's departure from the show and the writers' pandering to the public's sense that Fantasy Island host Mr. Roark (Ricardo Montalban) had a dark side eventually led to a ratings drop and the show's demise. It also hurt that the producers kept reusing the same stars, so that their characters and performances seemed even more difficult to believe.
Like "The Love Boat," and before that, "Love, American Style," the format called for several plots to be showcased in a single episode. The 1977 two-hour pilot interwove three different plots involving a hunter who wants to be the hunted, a WWII vet who wants to relive a two-day wartime romance, and a corporate head who wants to be a fly on the wall at her own funeral. A quick follow-up, "Return to Fantasy Island," featured the same three-plot weave. But when the show officially became a mid-season replacement, the producers scaled back to two plotlines for the remaining 14 episodes.
It was pure "Gilligan's Island" mind-numbing escapism, with plane after plane of B-list celebrities visiting the island to have their wildest fantasies fulfilled. That was part of the fun, in fact, seeing who would turn up on the set. But the moral was always "be careful what you wish for," because once a fantasy was set in motion, Mr. Roarke's disclaimer was that he could not be responsible for the way things played out. "Do you still want to do this?" he'd ask every guest whose fantasy had a dangerous element to it. The plots resolved themselves way too quickly most of the time, so it felt like the kind of fantasy you have in a dream that you barely remember. Guests kept turning up again in different roles, and the same fantasies started to be reused (in an extra, Goldberg remarks that they did the male/female wanting to be attractive to the opposite sex at least 38 times). But it kept audiences coming back for four years, and you have to wonder if watching Tattoo dressed like a miniature version of Mr. Roark in his white vest, pants, and coat didn't inspire Mike Meyers to create Mini-Me for the Austin Powers series.
Here's the rundown on the 16 episodes:
1) "Fantasy Island" (extended pilot)—Bill Bixby stars as a WWII vet who wants to relive a romance with a young woman he met in London (Sandra Dee), while Hugh O'Brien plays a big-game hunter who wants to be hunted and gets more than he bargained for when his "date" for the night before things begin (Victoria Principal, "Dallas") ends up hand-cuffed to him. The third thread involves a corporate head (Eleanor Parker) who stages her own funeral to see how her husband (Peter Lawford), secretary, brother (Dick Sargent, "Bewitched"), and sister (Carol Lynley).
2) "Return to Fantasy Island" (extended follow-up movie)—George Chakiris ("West Side Story") stars as an assistant who wants to get to know his career-woman boss (Adrienne Barbeau, "Maude") better. Meanwhile, an infertile couple (Joseph Campanella and Pat Crowley) wants to see what happened to the child they put up for adoption a dozen years before, and a woman (Karen Valentine, "Room 222") who lost her memory on the night of her honeymoon wants to relive the night to get everything back.
3) "Escape/Cinderella Girls"—Bert Convy ("Win, Lose or Draw") stars as a magician who wants to perform the world's greatest escape . . . and Mr. Roarke puts him in a recreation of Devil's Island. Robert Clary ("Hogan's Heroes") also appears. Meanwhile, Diana Canova and Georgia Engel ("The Mary Tyler Moore Show") are working-class women who want to be jet-setters for the weekend.
4) "Bet a Million/Mr. Irresistible"—Henry Gibson ("Laugh-In") and Jane Powell ("Growing Pains") are a couple wanting to gamble to win the money to build a dream hotel, and an average guy (John Schuck, "McMillan and Wife") wants to be irresistible to women.
5) "The Prince/The Sheriff"—Ed Begely, Jr. ("Columbo") and Dack Rambo star in an episode about a nobleman who wants to be loved for himself rather than his wealth, while Harry Guardino ("The Love Boat") and Sheree North ("Archie Bunker's Place") star in an episode where a NYC detective wants to find the men who killed his partner.
6) "Family Reunion/Voodoo"—Juliet Mills, John Gavin, and David Hedison ("Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea") star in an episode about two children who bring their parents to the island hoping they'll reconcile, while Mr. Roark trots out the voodoo that will happen more often in later seasons in an episode about an amnesiac hoping to regain her memory. Gary Collins ("The Wackiest Ship in the Army"), Marjorie Lord ("Make Room for Daddy"), Howard Duff, and Lauren Tewes ("The Love Boat") star.
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