Gilligan’s Island Star Alan Hale Jr. Put His Safety On The Line To Play The Skipper – SlashFilm

The old axiom states that the show must go on, and if you’ve ever participated in even a school play, you probably know why it applies. When you’re bopping around hastily crafted sets (or sturdily built backdrops), it’s not uncommon to get a splinter or two. You might sustain a mild head injury by walking straight into a low-hanging metal girder or sprain your ankle by tripping up over a cable protector where someone forgot to place glow tape. (These aren’t oddly specific because they happened to me — so far as you know.) These are unfortunate occurrences, but unless you’re fancy enough to have an understudy, you’ve got to suck it up and show up for the next performance.

Obviously, there are certain extreme maladies that can shut you down for a while. Harrison Ford was out of commission for five weeks on “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” thanks to a back injury, and missed a month of shooting when he broke his leg on the set of “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens.”

Somewhere in the middle is Alan Hale Jr., who achieved television immortality as the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island.” Hale was a big fellow who had to do his share of pratfalls on the sitcom, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he took more than his share of lumps. But according to his co-star Russell Johnson, who played the decidedly less bumbling Professor Roy Hinkley, he could work through injuries that might’ve left some asking if the show could maybe go a day or possibly even a week without them.

In the actor’s memoir “Here on Gilligan’s Isle,” Johnson recalled Hale being “undaunted” in his service to “Gilligan’s Island,” writing, “He would do just about anything to assist in its health.” Just how far would he go? As Johnson noted in his book:

“This is a guy who took a fall from a palm tree and broke his wrist but told no one. There were two more episodes to film that season before we scattered on hiatus, and Alan didn’t want to disturb the course of events. He never took a day off and never complained.

At our wrap party celebrating the close of the first season, Sherwood Schwartz took Alan aside and asked him why his wrist looked painfully swollen. Alan told him about the accident. None of us knew until then. When Alan finally went to his doctor, he was fitted with a cast from wrist to elbow.”

That’s not all! According to Johnson, there’s one episode where you can see the Skipper sporting a bandage over his ear. This is because, while performing a pratfall through the rungs of a bamboo ladder, one of the sticks snapped incorrectly and sliced open his ear. Once again, the man they called Skipper was undeterred from his task. He got patched up, and got swiftly back to action.

So, if you’re ever left aching or, god forbid, bleeding from an on-set or backstage mishap, just think to yourself: “What would Alan Hale Jr. do?”