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Even when “Gilligan’s Island” ended its three-season run on CBS in 1967, Bob Denver, who played the titular castaway, soon found himself playing another character who was stranded and trying to get home. In 1975, Denver played a janitor who accidentally got blasted into space in the short-lived children’s series “Far Out Space Nuts.”
The CBS series was created by Sid Krofft and the late Marty Krofft, the same duo behind other ’70s kids shows like “H.R. Pufnstuf,” “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,” and “Land of the Lost.” As the title sequence with its charmingly cheesy theme song explains, Denver’s Junior and Chuck McCann’s Barney are janitors for NASA. When doing maintenance on a rocket, Junior mishears Barney’s desire for “lunch” as “launch” and presses the corresponding button.
Each episode would have the duo and their traveling companion, a furry extra-terrestrial named Honk who was played by Patty Maloney, encounter some aliens for a half-hour of mischief. There were monsters aplenty and the special effects, while goofy, were decent for what the show was. On his now-defunct website, Denver said “Far Out Space Nuts” was “meant to be a Saturday morning show with live actors rather than a cartoon. Sometimes it was a little hard to tell the difference.”
Denver kept getting stranded after “Gilligan’s Island” ended. In addition to “Far Out Space Nuts,” he was also the lead in “Dusty’s Trail,” a short-lived 1973-1974 Western with basically the same premise as “Gilligan’s Island.”
Far Out Space Nuts was canceled after one season but survived in syndication
Although Bob Denver and Chuck McCann had a nice Laurel and Hardy-esque pattern and there were guest stars like John Carradine — who delivered a line with such skill that Bob Denver recalls being awed to the point of blowing a take — “Far Out Space Nuts” was not a massive hit. In the book “Sid and Marty Krofft: A Critical Study of Saturday Morning Children’s Television, 1969–1993,” author Hal Erickson wondered if the humor was geared more toward parents than the kiddie target audience.
It lost in the ratings to animated shows “Speed Buggy” and “Return of the Planet of the Apes,” and was canceled in September 1976. The replacement series, “Ark II,” was a bigger hit with kids. “Far Out Space Nuts” would eventually find an audience when the series was repackaged and syndicated as part of “Krofft Super Stars” package along with six other Krofft series from 1978 until 1985.
