Gullah Gullah Island
Ron and Natalie Daise, their kids, a huge yellow polliwog named Binyah Binyah, and singalongs on a Sea Island where everybody was welcome. Gullah Gullah Island was Nickelodeon's highest-rated preschool show of the mid-90s — and it was built from a real culture, the Gullah people of coastal South Carolina, that most of its viewers had never heard of.
Ron Daise grew up on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, one of the Sea Islands, home of the Gullah — descendants of West Africans enslaved along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. In 1987 he published Reminiscences of Sea Island Heritage, and with his wife Natalie, a New York-born performer, he built a touring two-person show, Sea Island Montage, from the book and from the oral histories of the island's elders. The couple tell the next part differently — Natalie remembers a Nickelodeon executive producer coming up after a performance and saying, "We could do a show with you guys!"; Ron remembers a lunch with a producer visiting the island, who then spent three days in their home watching the family. Either way, creator Maria Perez-Brown had been planning a multicultural preschool show set on a "magical island," and the Daises gave that island a real culture. "That show is our life, but we did not create it," Ron later said.
Gullah Gullah Island premiered on the Nick Jr. block on October 24, 1994, and it was the first show of its kind to star an African-American family set in an indigenously black community. The Daises played Ron and Natalie Alston, with kids James, Vanessa, Shaina, Simeon and Sara — Simeon and Sara were their own children — and a huge yellow full-body frog puppet, Binyah Binyah Polliwog. It was a sing-along, half-hour live-action show, shot in Orlando, whose theme song invited you in: "Let's All Go to Gullah Gullah Island." Ron admitted the family had been apprehensive about the name. "We wanted to make sure the portrayal was positive and didn't in any way poke fun at the culture or the community."
During its original run it was Nickelodeon's highest-rated preschool show, averaging more than 750,000 viewers an episode. TV Guide named it one of the 10 best children's shows in 1996, and it was nominated for a Daytime Emmy in 1997 and repeatedly for an NAACP Image Award. The praise was for its "vividly colored sets, infectious sing-alongs, unique character accents and quirky humor."
Production wrapped in 1998 after four seasons — a year more than Nickelodeon's usual three for a successful preschool show, Ron noted at the time — and the show kept airing on Nick Jr. into 2000. Paramount+ added the whole series in 2021, including a "lost" episode, "Shake, Rattle and Roll."
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