If Stacy was Mary Anne, then who would be Ginger?

Today is the 73rd anniversary of the birth of comedy actor Bob Denver, who played Gilligan on some TV show from the 1960s whose name escapes me, but it had to do with an island. The real Bob Denver is at right, flanked by two of the show's leading ladies, and Kevin Thompson is dressed as Gilligan in an alter ego at left. Funny, I guess there really is a resemblance between the two. Weird.

Kevin is holding a coconut with a straw in it, which is a pretty typical prop from the original show, which I used to watch when it wasn't in reruns. I was in elementary school then. There were dinosaurs around too, I recall.

You would be surprised, perhaps (or perhaps not, knowing this fandom), at the number of Daria tales having to do with Gilligan, or at least how many stories mention him. In no special order:

• Survivor
• The Hunt for Daria Morgendorffer
• The Idiocy
• It's a Nutty, Nutty, Nutty Coincidence
• The Generic Action Tale
  
• The Many Loves of Thalia Gillis (actually a crossover with The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a long-ago TV show on which Bob Denver also starred)

and, most importantly,

• Outcast Castaways, which nails it. Congratulations to Robert Nowall for this crossover triumph.
  

Wanna hear something really weird? The character that Bob Denver played on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was named Maynard G. Krebs, a shaggy-looking beatnik. It has been reported that the character Shaggy Rogers, from the Scooby-Doo franchise, was created from Maynard G. Krebs. If that is true, then the Daria background character Shaggy (who was apparently based on the Scooby-Doo Shaggy) was ultimately derived from Bob Denver's long-ago character.

In other words, the man who gave us Gilligan also gave us Shaggy.

Small planet, isn't it?