Fantasy Island
Fantasy Island is an American fantasy drama television series created by Gene Levitt. It aired on ABC from 1977 to 1984. The series starred Ricardo Montalbán as the mysterious Mr. Roarke and Hervé Villechaize as his assistant, Tattoo. Guests were granted so-called "fantasies" on the island for a price.
A one-season revival of the series aired in 1998, and a horror-themed prequel film was released on February 14, 2020. The same year, it was announced that a sequel of the series was being produced at Fox; it premiered on August 10, 2021 and was canceled in May 2023 after two seasons.
Background
Before it became a television series, Fantasy Island was introduced to viewers in 1977 and 1978 through two made-for-television films. Airing from 1978 to 1984, the original series starred Ricardo Montalbán as Mr. Roarke, the enigmatic overseer of a mysterious island somewhere near Devil's Island, French Guiana, in the Atlantic Ocean, where people from all walks of life could come and live out their fantasies—for a price.Roarke is known for his white suit and cultured demeanor, and he was initially accompanied by an energetic midget sidekick, Tattoo, played by Hervé Villechaize. Tattoo ran up the main bell tower to ring the bell and shout "De plane! De plane!" to announce the arrival of a new set of guests at the beginning of each episode. This line, shown at the beginning of the series' credits, became a catchphrase because of Villechaize's spirited delivery and French accent. In later seasons, he arrives in his personal go-kart, sized for him, and recklessly drives to join Roarke for the visitor reception while the staff scramble out of his way. From 1981 to 1982, Wendy Schaal joined the cast as an assistant named Julie; in the season five story "The Case Against Mr. Roarke", Roarke says Julie is his goddaughter. The producers dismissed Villechaize from the series before the 1983–84 season, its last, and Tattoo was replaced by a more sedate butler type named Lawrence, played by Christopher Hewett, who presses an electronic button to ring the bell rather than climb the tower.
A Grumman Widgeon aircraft was used for the series. Just before guests alight from the plane, Mr. Roarke addresses his assembling employees with the phrase "Smiles, everyone! Smiles!" As each visitor disembarks, Roarke tells Tattoo the nature of their fantasy, usually with a cryptic comment, suggesting the person's fantasy will not turn out as they expect. Roarke then welcomes his guests by lifting his glass and saying: "My dear guests, I am Mr. Roarke, your host. Welcome to Fantasy Island." The toast is usually followed by a warm smile, but sometimes—depending on the nature of a guest or their fantasy—his eyes show concern or worry for a guest's safety.
Mr. Roarke's age is unclear. In the pilot film, he says the guests who come to his island are "so mortal", and there are hints throughout the series that Roarke may be immortal. In "Elizabeth", a woman from Roarke's past appears, but it is revealed that she died over 300 years ago. Other episodes suggest that he was friends with Helen of Troy and Cleopatra. Roarke is also shown to know many seemingly immortal beings over his time on Earth, including ghosts, a genie, the mermaid Princess Nyah, the goddess Aphrodite, and Uriel the Angel of Death. In "The Devil and Mandy Breem" and "The Devil and Mr. Roarke", Roarke faces the Devil, who has come to the island to challenge him for either a guest's immortal soul or his. It is mentioned this is not the first time that they have confronted each other and Mr. Roarke has always been the winner. In the second story, the Devil was one of the island's guests, claiming that he was only there to relax and had no interest in Roarke's soul, but this turned out to be a ruse.
Roarke has a strong moral code, and is always merciful. He usually tries to teach his guests important life lessons through the medium of their fantasies, often in a manner that exposes the errors of their ways, and on occasions when the island hosts terminally ill guests he allows them to live out one last wish. Roarke's fantasies are not without peril, but the greatest danger usually comes from the guests themselves. In some cases, people are killed due to their own negligence, aggression, or arrogance. Roarke intervenes when the fantasy became dangerous to the guest:
- In one episode when Tattoo was given his own fantasy as a birthday gift, which ended up with him being chased by hostile natives in canoes, Mr. Roarke suddenly appeared in a motorboat, snared Tattoo's canoe with a grappling hook and towed it away at high speed to help him escape.
- In the 1979 episode "The Mermaid; The Victim", a female guest seeking to fall in love with her dream man ends up as one of his sex slaves. When she and her fellow slaves manage to get free, they are saved by Mr. Roarke and Tattoo who have arrived with the police who then arrest the two men responsible.
- In the 1980 episode "With Affection, Jack the Ripper; Gigolo", a female guest intent on researching Jack the Ripper's crimes was sent back in time to 1888 London, and would have become one of the Ripper's victims had Mr. Roarke not physically intervened.
In later seasons, there were often supernatural overtones. Roarke also seemed to have his own supernatural powers of some sort, although it was never explained how this came to be. In the episodes "Reprisal" and "The Power" he temporarily gave the guest psychokinetic abilities and in "Terrors of the Mind" the power to see into the future. In one episode, when a guest says "Thank God things worked out well", Roarke and Tattoo share an odd look and Roarke says in a cryptic way "Thank God, indeed." In the same episode, Roarke uses some mysterious powers to help Tattoo with his magic act. Ricardo Montalbán would claim in interviews that he had a definite opinion in mind regarding the mystery of Mr. Roarke, and how he accomplished his fantasies, but he would never publicly state what it was. Years after the series was off the air, in an interview with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Montalbán finally revealed that his motivation was imagining Roarke as a fallen angel whose sin was pride and that Fantasy Island was Purgatory.
Each episode would alternate between two or three independent storylines as the guests experienced their fantasies and interacted with Roarke. When reruns of the series went into syndication, a half-hour version was offered, in which each hour-long original show was split to two separate half-hour shows in which only one guest's story was told in each half-hour episode. This made it obvious that the original episodes had been planned in such a way that each guest or family got off the plane separately, did not interact with the other guest or family, and was given almost exactly half the time of the original episode.
The typical episodes on the series' regular timeslot focus on adult guests with fantasies geared for them. However, there were two episodes aired in Season 2 that were broadcast on early Sunday night called, Fantasy Island Sunday Special. In these variant episodes, kids arrive at the island on a hot-air balloon to have fantasies provided by Mr. Roarke that are designed for their age.
Often the fantasies would turn out to be morality lessons for the guests, sometimes to the point of putting their lives at risk, only to have Roarke step in at the last minute and reveal the deception. For example, one episode featured a couple who clamored for the "good old days" being taken back to the Salem witch trials. It is mentioned a few times that a condition of visiting Fantasy Island is that guests never reveal what goes on there. A small number of guests decided to make the irrevocable choice to stay permanently, living out their fantasy until death; one such person was an actor who had been in a Tarzan-type television series called "Jungle Man" in the 1960s. Aside from a clip show the only episode with a single storyline was "The Wedding", in which terminally ill Helena Marsh returned to Fantasy Island to spend her last days as Roarke's wife.
Another episode, "Nurses' Night Out" was the only episode where all of the fantasies, while separate, were linked by one thread. In this case, a mysterious and wealthy guest inviting three nurses to live out each of their fantasies on the island.
The fantasy
Cost
In the first film, Fantasy Island, it was noted that each guest had paid $50,000 in advance for the fulfillment of their fantasies and that Fantasy Island was a business. In the second film, Return to Fantasy Island, Roarke told Tattoo that he sometimes dropped the price when a guest could not afford the usual fee because he believed that everyone should be given a chance to have their fantasies fulfilled. Afterwards, it became clear that the price a guest paid was substantial to them, and for one little girl whose father was one of Roarke's guests, she had emptied her piggy bank to have her fantasy with her father fulfilled. On numerous occasions, a guest had not paid for the trip at all, but instead won it as a result of a contest. Those who came by winning contests were usually the unknowing beneficiaries of rigged contests in order to disguise to them and others the real reason for their coming as part of someone else's fantasy.Nature
The nature of a fantasy varied from story to story and was typically very personal to each guest on some level. They could be as harmless as wanting to be reunited with a lost love to something more dangerous like tracking down a cold-blooded killer who murdered someone close to the guest. Usually, the fantasy would take an unexpected turn and proceed down a quite different path than the guest expected. Some resolve in "The Monkey's Paw" style. They would then leave with some new revelation or renewed interest about themselves or someone close to them. Many times, Roarke would reveal in the end that someone they met during the course of their fantasy was another guest living a fantasy of their own. Both guests often left the island together. However, in one episode, one guest had no particular fantasy and was simply there to relax and enjoy himself. In another episode, the fantasy of one guest was to play the part of a private investigator. At the end of the episode, he discovers that his "suspects" were actually a company of actors who had asked Mr. Roarke to act out their whodunnit play in a realistic setting.Although some fantasies were rooted in the real world, many others involved supernatural or mythological elements. Time travel was often a required element, if not a specific request, to fulfill one's fantasy.