Remember "Fantasy Island?" I do, obviously. When I was a kid, it was on after Aaron Spelling's other weekly offering, "The Love Boat."

Like Love Boat, Fantasy Island used the technique of intercutting several different plots. If one was lame, perhaps the viewer would like the other. And you could use two or three plots which would have been less interesting (or completely lame) on their own, but somehow seemed more palatable when jumbled in with the others.

Unlike Love Boat, however, Fantasy Island had fewer plots (two verses three), had fewer recognizable guess stars (no offense to Ed Begley, Jr.), lacked a colorful cast of regulars (including your Senator Yeoman Purser), and nor could it boast a groovy theme song written by Paul Williams. (Nice waterfall, though.)

But what Fantasy Island lacked in the theme song department, it more than made up for in predictability. For those too young to have been exposed to (and perhaps damaged by) this show, the basic idea was that Mr. Roarke (Ricardo Montalban) and his pet dwarf, Tattoo (Herve Villechaize) (which, translated, means "evil loungechair") welcome wealthy guests to the island, guests who have paid $50,000 each to live out some fantasy of theirs. And, like clockwork, no matter how mundane the fantasy, each fantasy would go horrifyingly wrong. It was all so predictably unpredictable.

"And that is Mr. Wallace Goodman," Roarke would tell Tatoo as nondescript, middle-aged Mr. Goodman, uh, "deplained" (sorry, pun entirely intentional) and got lei'd by some grass-skirted extra. "He worked his entire life as a biology teacher until a rich relative died and left him a sizeable sum of money. His fantasy is to feed small, cute bunnies a daily dose of food." Mr. Roarke would then sternly warn Mr. Goodman that he cannot guarantee his safety, should something go wrong.

And, of course, before the end of the hour Mr. Goodman will be running, screaming, through the jungle, cowering behind plastic prop vegetation, because the bunnies have mutated into huge, ravenous, bloodthirsty beasts who seek vengence for every single animal his biology students ever dissected.

Well, just kidding on that one. It wouldn't have been done because it would have required special effects. But you get the drift: Even the nicest, most predictable fantasy would go completely awry. And in the end, we'd learn the Very Important Moral Lesson: Don't wish your life was different. Even if that just meant feeding cute bunnies.

After viewing a few episodes, you understood why Mr. Roarke had gotten his own island: Lawyers would have sued this guy out of existence on the mainland. And rightfully so, I might add:

"Your honor, my client simply wanted to live out a fantasy of being a showgirl. She didn't expect to be kidnapped and brutally assaulted by a gang of thugs who were in the employ of Mr. Roarke. She paid $50,000 to have this happen to her. Not to mention the reconstructive surgery and associated medical costs..."

And, invariably, at some point during the episode Mr. Roarke or Tatoo would appear to the hapless victim and either give guidance of some sort ("try being nicer to the bunnies!") and (if I recall correctly) either (a) offer to abort the "fantasy" ("nightmare") and return the hapless victim's money, or (b) explain there was no possible way to abort the fantasy, and that the person could even die. Which option was offered seemed to be chosen on plot needs (much like transporter failures in Star Trek) -- or perhaps Mr. Roarke was just a sadist liked to torture his guests by offering them only the option he knows they won't choose.

"Great vacation! Thanks, Mr. Roarke!"

One question this raises is: how did Mr. Roarke keep getting more customers? I mean, imagine the conversations stateside: Bob: "I just wanted to talk to my deceased wife again. She tried to kill me!" Ted: "Oh yeah, well wait to you hear what that jerk did to me: I wanted to be popular in high school. And I ended up in traction because I finally got on the football team!" Stuart, who has been listening intently: "Cool! Where do I sign up?"

(I secretly suspect the island existed to fulfill Mr. Roarke's fantasy: To have a permanent job torturing newly-rich people who felt somehow incomplete. Perhaps he'd grown up poor and resented those with wealth? Who knows!)

One also wonders how Rourke assembled the huge number of people apparently needed to fulfill each fantasy: Did he keep a huge troupe of trained actors on the island? Was he a front man for a group of mad scientists, tucked away on the other half of the island perhaps, who had discovered time travel and alternate-reality portals and were looking for a way to test them in a regulation-free environment? Or were his victims actually under heavy sedation, being mentally imprinted with a narrative read by Rouke's unseen henchmen? Had Mr. Roarke struck a deal with the devil? Or was he, suavity and all, an incarnation of old Scratch himself?

Of course, you all know how the series ended: The people of earth, upon learning the horrible things which occured on Mr. Roarke's property, took him and his fellow mad scientists, hula girls, henchmen, and actors, loaded them onto a spaceship and sent them to another planet where they seethed for eons, plotting, working out, and putting on latex-like muscle, until they could get a chance to torture a hapless starship captain named "Kirk." Eventually, Mr. Roarke unleashed on Kirk his ultimate weapon: the phrase "Revenge is a dish best served cold."

This was undoubtedly the guiding theme behind his earlier "Fantasy Island" project.