In “Fantasy Island,” viewers were transported to a luxurious, tropical paradise where host Mr. Roarke (Ricardo Montalban) and his trusty sidekick, Tattoo (Hervé Villechaize), fulfilled the wildest dreams of their wealthy guests. But there are two different origin stories on how the 1978 ABC drama came to be, as co-creators Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg don’t quite see eye-to-eye on who delivered the pitch.
According to Goldberg, the magic moment happened when he got caught daydreaming by network suits. In his version of the story, the idea sparked following sarcastic response from his very own lips. “What happened was one day we’re sitting around Aaron’s office: a couple of guys from ABC, a couple of executives …” Goldberg recalled during a 2004 interview with the Television Academy. “And I guess I wasn’t paying attention. I was looking out the window and I was caught by the ABC vice president of programming who said to me, ‘Are we boring you?’ And I said, ‘A little bit.’ ‘Well, where would you rather be?’ I said, ‘I’d rather be on a desert island with Charlie’s Angels.’
Goldberg goes on to explain that — after a long pause — everyone looked at each other and said, ‘Wait a minute, I bet a lot of people have fantasies,’ and that’s how the show began. Spelling, however, remembered the birth of the show a bit differently, placing himself at the center of the breakthrough while trying to please the late ABC executive Brandon Stoddard with TV movie pitches.
In his memoir, Aaron Spelling said that an argument is what led to the idea of Fantasy Island
“We must have pitched six ideas. He turned them all down,” Spelling explained to the Television Academy in 1999. “As a joke, I said, ‘Oh, so what do you want? This great island people can go to and all their sexual fantasies will be realized?” He said, ‘Yeah! I love that!’ This is true … It was just a joke. I was just kidding, Brandon. Because we never did the sexual things on the island, but that’s how sometimes these things happen.”
But this wasn’t the first time Spelling explained the show’s origin story. In his 1996 memoir, “Aaron Spelling: A Prime-Time Life,” the father of “90120” star Tori Spelling shares stories from his life and brings up “Fantasy Island,” saying it “began as an argument,” per MeTV. “The execs kept telling us they didn’t want ‘soft’ stories, but ones with ‘heat.'”
Frustrated by their “best” ideas being rejected, Spelling fired back: “You don’t want something with characters or a plot or a story. You just want to have some sort of an island, where you can go and act out all your dumb fantasies … And that was when they started jumping up and down and shouting, ‘Do it, do it.’ Regardless of who came up with the idea, “Fantasy Island” — which started out with two made-for-TV movies released in 1977 and 1978 — went on to be a success and aired for seven seasons until it finally wrapped its run in 1984. “Fantasy Island” also got a 2011 reboot starring Roselyn Sanchez as Elena Roarke, a descendant of Montalban’s Mr. Roarke from the original series.