For many kids of my generation, an introduction to Shakespeare did not come in the classroom. It happened after school, watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” on TV.

And we didn’t even know we were learning something as we drank Kool-Aid and snuck Oreos from the cookie jar.

For starters, for anyone who doesn’t know, “Gilligan’s Island” was about a group of folks – first mate Gilligan, the Skipper, the millionaires Thurston and Lovie Howell, movie star Ginger, girl next door Mary Ann and the Professor – who are stranded on a deserted island after a three-hour tour. Each week, they tried getting off the island and usually their efforts were foiled by the bumbling Gilligan.

The show regularly featured guest stars who managed to escape the island after a half hour but did not take the castaways with them.

On the episode “The Producer,” Phil Silvers plays Harold Hecuba, a producer who crash lands near the island during an international talent search. Ginger sees it as a chance to get off the island and return to the silver screen but Harold Hecuba tells her she’s all washed up.

To help the crushed Ginger, the castaways decide to mount a production of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a musical set mostly to tunes from Georges Bizet’s opera, “Carmen.”

Harold Hecuba awakes while the castaways are rehearsing. He takes over rehearsals then escapes from the island while stealing the castaways’ musical idea.

With “Gilligan’s Island” reruns playing every afternoon for years, at a time when there were only three or four TV channels, almost every person my age, even the most erudite and cultured, likely can’t hear the music of “Carmen” without almost immediately being able to repeat a few lines that Gilligan sung as Hamlet to the “Habanera (aria).”

“I ask to be or not to be / A rogue or peasant slave is what you see / A boy who loves his mother’s knee / And so I ask to be or not to be / So here’s my plea / I beg of thee / And say you see a little hope for me / To fight or flee / To fight or flee / I ask myself to be or not to be …”

The Howells as Claudius and Gertrude join Gilligan’s Hamlet to continue the song.

Ginger is Ophelia and performs the arguably least-known song from Gilligan’s “Hamlet,” to the “Barcarolle” from Jacques Offenbach’s final opera “The Tales of Hoffman,” with lines such as “… Hamlet dear your problem is clear / Avenging thy father’s death / You seek to harm your uncle and mom / But you’re scaring me to death / While I die and sigh and cry / That love is everything / You’re content to try to catch / The conscience of the king …”

And possibly the most remembered song from Gilligan’s musical Hamlet is set to “Carmen’s “Toreador Song,” where the Skipper is Polonius sharing advice with Mary Ann’s Laertes before being joined by the entire cast to sing it again: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be / Do not forget / Stay out of debt / Think twice and take this good advice from me / Guard the old solvency / There’s just one other thing / You ought to do / To thine own self be true.”

At roughly five minutes, an entire generation of kids were introduced to the basic set-up of Hamlet. We also became familiar with “Carmen” though we don’t realize that until we unexpectedly encounter the music and most folks my age aren’t thinking about a French opera about a gypsy but about Gilligan as Hamlet when hearing it.

A friend recently mentioned Gilligan’s “Hamlet” in a Facebook post. He noted: “Gilligan, along with millions of other kids, was my introduction to Shakespeare …”

I know exactly what he means.

Those Gilligan/Hamlet lyrics still rattle around in my brain and occasionally make their way to my lips as I’m piddling around the house.

The entire little musical is available online. The whole segment is easy to find on YouTube.

So, if you are of a certain age and you have five minutes for YouTube, just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale … a tale of Shakespeare and Gilligan.

Dean Poling is a former editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and Tifton Gazette.