Tina Louise

[raritan17]

Not the porn star, the "original" Tina Louise. Some of you in your 40s will only remember her from Gilligan's Island but those of us that go back a long way wil remember when, in the late 1950s, it seemed as though there wasn't month when her picture wasn't featured on the cover of SOME magazine. Her pictures were literally everywhere, super-famous (athough only at a "B" sarlet level) when she got on the TV show, and in that sense Gilligan's Island type-casting really did ruin her career.
But that's not our problem.
Since there are topics dedicated to every imaginable B-movie or TV wank-off fodder from Loni Anderson to Dawn Wells to Sue Ane Langdon to Annette Funicello to Linda Carter, it seems amazing no one has yet started a thread for Tina Louise, who was surely the inspiration for more late-adolescent tug-pulls in the 50s and 60s than all the other above-named starlets put together.


The role that first made her famous: Appassionata Von Climax in Broadway's "Li'l Abner". She debuted along with Julie Newmar. Unfortunately for us all, when they made the movie, Tina refused to be in it because they had cut out her solo song during the Broadway run and decided they wouldn't re-insert it in the movie. Stella Stevens got the part instead, so there was still eye candy, and while Tina Louise was a good singer, Stevens wasn't, so she wouldn't have argued that the song be restored. But Tina Louise could do things with a push-up bra that few women could, so it's a real shame we haven't got a technicolor movie of her in her Appassionata costume...
We can sigh over the stills, though...