Today my wife surprised the family by renting a DVD of Gilligan's Island episodes from Netflix. I hadn't seen any of these shows for decades--they originally ran from 1964-1967 on CBS. Not that I forgot that the show was goofy. How long did it take to write one of those episodes, 30 minutes? Yet watching two of the episodes tonight did remind me that Gilligan's Island strongly imprinted its images upon the young version of me, perhaps more strongly than anything I remember from back then (I was 8 years old when it originally ran). The characters looked exactly how I remembered them, and the plots were embarrassingly predictable, just how I remembered them as a child. I'd like to say that viewing these episodes served as some sort of time travel, but I simply can't. And the series continues to live on in syndication and DVD rentals, with new generations being exposed to it. Gilligan's Island is a world-class meme, a meme that allowed millions of people to put up their feet to have a bit of mindless fun once each week. And today I was reassured that Mary Ann was as gorgeous as I remembered her. Yes, I far preferred Mary Ann over Ginger. I always did, even as a pre-pubescent viewer. And I was not alone in my preference. On several occasions over the years, I have found myself in discussions where someone raises the concern that too many of today's children waste valuable time that they should be spending exposing themselves to more intellectually rigorous activities. Inevitably, some high-accomplished person in the room then reminds the rest of us about the huge number of hours that most of us spent watching Gilligan's Island when we were children, the original runs and the re-runs. Yet many of us turned out OK. Or at least that is the argument.