What Might've Been: Scamps (1982)

 After three Gilligan's Island reunion movies, Bob Denver might've been forgiven if he had felt indebted to Sherwood Schwartz, because his last two TV projects were also Schwartz's swan song.

You know about the reimagining of The Invisible Woman. Knowing that Denver had some modest success with a domestic sitcom (The Good Guys lasted two seasons for CBS, 1968-70), Schwartz decided to take that tack, with a side order of reimagining Hal Roach's Our Gang, aka The Little Rascals.

Scamps aired just once, on NBC in June 1982. Oliver Hopkins (Denver) is a struggling writer who takes in a group of kids to turn his home into a day care center. Bob is joined by wife Dreama, Dena Detrich (aka Mother Nature from those Chiffon ads in the 70's), and a young Joey Lawrence, who'd later score as a teenager in Blossom.

There is just this short excerpt, as the complete show seems to have been lost to the mists of time.

NBC burned off the pilot, and that was it. Gilligan was in syndication at the time, and that fall, Denver would return to CBS with the animated Gilligan's Planet, which bombed. We'll give him credit for trying something different, but he just couldn't shake the typecasting that came with Gilligan.

No rating.