Gilligan's Island Nearly Replaced A Castaway With Elvira Actress Cassandra Peterson

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Cassandra Peterson's Elvira tends to be associated with crypts and other spooky places, but before she played the Mistress of the Dark, Peterson nearly plied her trade in a very different setting: The Kansas native was primed to play one of the castaways in the third "Gilligan's Island" TV movie, 1981's "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island."

In the TV show, which aired on CBS from 1964 to 1967, Tina Louise played the island's resident movie star, Ginger Grant. "Gilligan's Island" was unexpectedly cancelled by CBS after three seasons, but the sitcom's lasting popularity led to three TV movie sequels. However, Louise (who is the only surviving original "Gilligan's Island" cast member) didn't reprise her role for the films.

This meant that 1978's "Rescue from Gilligan's Island," the first of the franchise's TV movies, needed a new Ginger. Actress Judith Baldwin stepped in to fill the role, and she played Ginger again the following year in 1979's "The Castaways on Gilligan's Island." For "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island," execs wanted a fresh face — and that face was supposed to be Peterson's.

In Peterson's autobiography, she recalled how she'd been privately assured the part was hers. Ginger had been her favorite character as a kid, but, as she wrote, "it was too good to be true." Days before she was supposed to fly to Hawaii, "Gilligan's Island" creator Sherwood Schwartz told her the network had pivoted to Constance Forslund, who played Marilyn Monroe in the 1980 TV movie "This Year's Blonde."

Cassandra Peterson was "beyond devastated" when she found out she'd lost the part of Ginger Grant. In her book, "Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark," she wrote that she ran into Sherwood Schwartz at a party years later. Schwartz told her that she had lost the part because a network executive had seen her perform with the improv troupe The Groundlings and didn't like that she played a patient in a gynecologist's office in one of the sketches.

According to this version of events, the executive in question told Schwartz that the network didn't need "that kind of element" associated with "Gilligan's Island." However, Peterson has a different theory. "I, on the other hand, believe the job went south because, years before, I'd lost my s*** when I walked in on the same network exec in bed with my boyfriend, Matt," she wrote. "Guess we'll never know for sure."

Whatever the reason, it worked out for Peterson in the end, as "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island" underwhelmed. Peterson described it as a "bomb" in her book, noting that there had been talk of a rebooted series that never came to pass, so she didn't miss out on much. She made her debut as Elvira, the host of "Movie Macabre," that very same year and has reprised the role several times since, most notably in the 1988 film "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark."