Mary Ann Was Not in the Original ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Script

Gilligan’s Island fans likely can’t imagine a scenario in which Mary Ann wasn’t part of the group stranded on a deserted island. Mary Ann, played by Dawn Wells, stole the hearts of fans for all three seasons of the original series and in multiple T.V. movies. Mary Ann, however, was not originally part of the plan and neither was Wells. The character did not appear in the original pilot. Instead, a character named Bunny, rounded out the cast. 

Mary Ann was not part of the original ‘Gilligan’s Island’ plot

Dawn Wells was not originally part of the Gilligan’s Island cast but appeared in the second episode. That second episode, “Two on a Raft,” is the episode most people consider the series’s pilot. Still, there was one test pilot filmed before that. In the original pilot, the cast looked a bit different. Namely, Wells was not Mary Ann. Instead, a different passenger named Bunny appeared. 

Bunny, in the pilot, was a coworker of Ginger Grant. According to Me TV, Ginger was played by a different actor, and her backstory was substantially different in the original pilot, too. She wasn’t a movie star in the pilot. Instead, Ginger was a secretary, and Bunny was her coworker. After filming the original pilot, Sherwood Schwartz, the show’s creator, retooled the concept to make things more interesting. In doing so, he dumped the character of Bunny entirely, added Mary Ann, and changed Ginger from a secretary to a movie star. The changes were clearly fortuitous. The series became a fan favorite and a cult classic in the years since it originally aired. 

What was Mary Ann’s backstory? 

Mary Ann Summers was a young woman from Kansas who jumped aboard the S.S. Minnow for a three-hour tour. Mary Ann joined the tour after she won the trip in a radio contest. Before being shipwrecked with the rest of the crew, Mary Ann worked on a farm and served as a clerk at a general store in her small hometown. It is never explained if Mary Ann won the entire trip or just the three-hour tour from the radio contest. Since Mary Ann hailed from Kansas, a landlocked state, she had to have somehow gotten to Hawaii, where the S.S. Minnow set sail from. 

Mary Ann originally told her fellow shipmates that she was involved in a relationship before the group landed on a deserted island. Later, she admitted that the boyfriend she had been writing to was not a boyfriend but a man she knew of from back home. They were not romantically involved, and she didn’t like him at all. In a glaring continuity error, it was later revealed that Mary Ann had a fiance who had waited for her while she was stranded. 

Dawn Wells, the actor who portrayed Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island, died in 2020 from complications of the coronavirus (COVID-19). She was 82.