Deserted Island

There's plenty of fish and lots of flora and fauna here to sustain you until the next ship passes by...in a decade or two.

A smallish island, off the shipping lanes. It is completely uninhabited, and hence devoid of Story, until the protagonists arrive.

These islands come in several main varieties.

• "Far Side" Island: A circular island approximately ten feet in diameter, with a single palm tree situated near the center — the stock setting for many cartoons, with many comedic uses (including Meat-O-Vision). As this is a subtrope, examples of it go on its own page.
• Castaway Island: A larger island with enough flora and fauna for Robinson Crusoe and his marooned imitators to figure out a way to find food and make clothes.
• Treasure Island: The favourite spot for Pirates to bury their treasure, usually found by means of following a hidden map. Yarrr!
• Monster Island: The abode of hungry monsters. If it's a Lost World, the heroes might escape with a dinosaur to show off (if it doesn't eat them); if it's covered in Eldritch Ruins, they'll be lucky to escape with their sanity intact.^note Also, despite the name, it's actually a peninsula.
• Island of Mystery: An island containing monsters, mad scientists, castaways, ancient temples, ruins and other mysterious phenomena.

The typical Deserted Island is full of Jungle Japes, involving bamboo devices, coconuts and parrots.

Often found on The Spanish Main, spectacularly uncharted as it is.

In past centuries such islands could be found in every ocean, but these days it takes loads of Phlebotinum to keep them hidden. Note, however, that even though in this day and age about any island you can set foot upon was probably already visited by a human being, that doesn't mean you'll find any signs of human presence left on it. There are absolutely tons of islands that hardly ever see anybody visit them for a variety of reasons: maybe they're just too far away from the nearest inhabited place, maybe there's just nothing interesting on them to find. In fact, the very name "deserted" implies that somebody must have been there to desert it in the first place. At any rate, while your chances of finding yourself on one of them are minuscule compared to, say, the 18th century sailors, it's still possible and does happen every once in a while.

In Science Fiction, a deserted moon or planet makes an acceptable substitute. Leaving these closed circles is often made difficult.

Grammatical note: these are more classically referred to as desert islands (see definition 2). This does not, in fact, imply that they are dry places, although the misinterpretation means they are sometimes depicted as such.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Battle Royale, and therefore Survival of the Fittest, take place on deserted islands where classes of high school students are dumped with explosive collars and forced to kill each other until only one is left. Two still survive in Battle Royale, but nobody has escaped a game yet in Survival of the Fittest.
• The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.: "The Saiko Conglomerate's Luxurious Cruise" episode begins with Saiko inviting Saiki's friends to an extravagant cruise, but the ship gets wrecked and they all wake up on a Deserted Island. The next episodes follow their exploits and their means for survival on the island till a rescue team arrives.
• In Hetalia: Axis Powers, the deserted island scenes are pleasant enough to be Beach Episodes. One time ("We're Shipwrecked") is the Axis Powers just there in no rush to be rescued, another time ("We're Shipwrecked Too") has America and England having a difficult time trying to deal with the island and each other. The Drama CD version has the entire up-until-then cast, in a combination of the two strips.
• This is where the characters of Let's Lagoon end up though it's not so much spatially as temporally displaced from the main ship routes.
• "Two characters from different sides of the war get stranded together in a desert island, character development and bonding issue" seems to be a common plot point for Sunrise mecha shows, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, Code Geass and Buddy Complex all have an episode with such premise.
• In the Turning Red spinoff 4★Town 4★Real, the members of 4*Town are asked which one of their bandmates they would prefer to be stuck on a deserted island with.

Comic Books

• Frequently used in old adventure strips in The Beano, a good example being the strip The Shipwrecked Circus.
• Tintin has multiple desert islands, all of which fit one or more tropes to a T:
  • The Monster Island in Tintin: The Shooting Star is a sinking asteroid of bare rock full of giant mushrooms & scaled-up animals;
  • The Treasure Island in Tintin: Red Rackham's Treasure is jungly and piratey;
  • The Castaway Island in Tintin: Flight 714 is an Alien Landing Strip hidden in a volcano!
  • Island of Mystery in Tintin: The Black Island, which is the location of the long-abandoned ruins of the castle of Benmoor, rumored to be the home of a supernatural monster that devours anyone who sets foot on the island. It's actually a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax perpetrated by the evil Dr. Mueller, to hide his counterfeiting scheme.

Fairy Tales

• A princess and an ambassador flee to an island in the fairy tale "The Princess Mayblossom". The island is full of plants and animals that offer food to the princess. However, the ambassador is desperate to get food - and the princess must keep her food gifts away from him. But when she does, the ambassador decides to eat the princess, which results in the princess murdering him in self-defense. She does get off the island and gets her Happily Ever After. Unlike most examples, this island seems to be in a temperate climate.
• In "The Elf Maiden", the main character finds himself stranded in a lonely island. He quickly makes a bow, takes up residence in an abandoned hut and manages to survive for several months until a group of elves arrive at the island, and he meets the titular maiden.

Fan Works

• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has the family get stranded on their camping destination in "Camping Trip Part 1".
• One serves as the setting for the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction Mother of Invention.
• My Dream Is Yours: Oona, who is sick with Dream-Transfer-itis and suffering from Sleep Deprivation like the other victims, has the recurring dream of her being on a deserted island, with nothing but a smoothie, a lawn chair, and some soft music playing somewhere in the distance. To her, it's a nightmare because she can't take a Busman's Holiday on a deserted island with no gadgets to repair or build, and when Olympia states otherwise she goes off on her.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines's sidestory Laramie Gaiden takes place in one. It's of the Castaway Island variety, and it follows Leeroy Laramie (grandfather of Lara Laramie) as he tries to survive along with a Pokémon Ranger named Jenkins Jackrum (they were the only survivors of their respective battleships, which shortly before getting stranded had been engaged in combat in open sea).
• Soul Eater: Troubled Souls has one of its Story Arcs set on a deserted island named Cobra Island. The protagonists were lured there by Medusa as part of a scheme to eliminate them while Shaula ambushes Death City.
• In The Institute Saga, an artificial desert island is created via Holodeck-style technology and is used to help rehabilitate X-23. It is later used to help Wanda Maximoff learn to control her powers.
• In the second arc of Hellsister Trilogy, Kal and Kara find themselves exploring a deserted island with their respective suitors when the war against Darkseid breaks out.
• The Castle fic Solid Ground depicts Castle, Beckett, and various OCs being stuck on a desert island after a plane crash, with the two of them establishing themselves as the leader of the survivors while dealing with an agent of Senator Bracken who survived the crash and was trying to take Beckett out.
• Trapped In A Island With Josh Hutcherson is naturally set on (in?) such an island.

Films — Animated

• Treasure Planet, B.E.N. is Marooned on a desert planet. It's actually a Big Dumb Object.

Films — Live-Action

• ABCs of Death 2: "E is for Equilibrium" features two castaways on a deserted island whose friendship is jeopardized when a woman washes up on the beach.
• In Cast Away, Tom Hanks's character washes up on one.
• Castaways: Cara and Emily wash up on one after surviving the boat they were onboard sinking. It has plenty of fresh water, fish they can catch and fruit though so it's pretty comfortable.
• The protagonist in Castaway on the Moon winds up on an unusual example. It's deserted all right, and it is an island — but it's right in the middle of Seoul, under a bridge spanning the Han River. The protagonist winds up getting stuck there for months, because after all, who's looking for people on an island under a bridge? (See Concrete Island, in Literature, for a grittier take on this.)
• The protagonists of Deep Rising end up on one in the ending, only to hear the roar of yet another monster somewhere inside.
• The Little Hut involves three people — husband, wife, husband's buddy who desperately wants sex with the wife — washing up on a deserted island when their yacht sinks. Comic merriment ensues.
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl has Jack and Elizabeth marooned on a desert island.
  • The titular Dead Man's Chest of the second film is housed on another.
• In Siren (2010), the island where the protagonists discover Silka has no one on it aside from her.
• This is Silva's hideout in Skyfall and where James Bond first meets him.
• Superman Returns: Lex Luthor and Kitty Kowalski end the film stranded on a tiny island when the helicopter they were escaping in runs out of fuel.
• The corporate team of Welcome to the Jungle are sent to one for their wilderness team-building retreat. Subverted in that they later find a deserted bunker, indicating there was, at some time, people.
• Swept Away: The rich lady Amber Leighton (Madonna) and the sailor Giuseppe Esposito (Adriano Giannini) are shipwrecked on a small desert island in the Mediterranean due to engine problems on the boat they were using. The film is a remake of the 1974 Italian film by Lina Wertmüller which has the same plot

Literature

• The Baby-Sitters Club: The island in Super Special 4: Baby-sitters' Island Adventure is somewhere off the coast of Connecticut.
• In the novel Beyond this is subverted. The island they encounter is populated by castaways.
• The setting for the first part of Walter Farley's The Black Stallion. Only the boy and the horse inhabit this Castaway Island.
• Henry De Vere Stacpoole's original novel The Blue Lagoon, also the novella Primordial/Three Laws & the Golden Rule that inspired it, were just two of a type of story popular in Victorian times: "strand innocent toddlers on a Crusoe-type Deserted Island and see how they live, with plenty of resources but without parents or culture". Tarzan and The Jungle Book are probably the two best known versions of this.
• H. P. Lovecraft: R'lyeh, when above water, as in "The Call of Cthulhu".
• J.G. Ballard's 1974 novel Concrete Island has Robert, a rich architect, stranded on the terrain below intersecting freeways after his car plunges off a bridge. It's frustrating because he can see his office building from here, he tries to flag down passing cars for help but he's so messed up from the crash they assume he's just some homeless guy, so he starts living off the leftovers they throw out the window and figuring out a way to escape. He discovers the remains of one of the many small towns / city districts that were destroyed to build the freeways in the first place, with a few other people living there. Does he really want to leave, or is it like one of the other people says, was he on an 'island' long before the crash?
• The Coral Island, an 1857 novel about three plucky British boys stranded on a tropical island. Lord of the Flies was a Take That! to it; Robert A. Heinlein's book Tunnel in the Sky was a take that to Lord of the Flies

• Dr. Franklin's Island appears to be this when the protagonists get to shore. They call each other "prisoners in paradise" and struggle to survive. As the title suggests, though, it does belong to someone, who waits until people stop looking for them.

• Justified in the Harry Potter stories, as islands populated by magical creatures are sometimes made Unplottable as part of The Masquerade.
• The Invention Of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, in which a nameless narrator falls in love with a holographic woman on a deserted island and is slowly driven mad by the machinery that is creating the holograms. Supposedly one of the inspirations for Lost.
• Island of the Blue Dolphins. The protagonist is accidentally left behind on her home island after the rest of her people emigrate.
• In Bryan Miranda's The Journey to Atlantis, the main characters end up on one when their ship sinks. It's actually not deserted, in two fashions. There is one other human that they meet, a boy who has been living there for three years. And also Loki, a malicious deity in the form of a red wolf, who scours the island causing trouble for Mickello, and also the others when they arrive.

• Former Child Prodigy Barbara Newhall Follett, who continued to write as an adult while working as a clerk-typist in New York, wrote Lost Island A Romance in 1934. It's about an adventurous clerk-typist in New York who takes a trip on an old schooner^note Barbara had actually done this as a teenager and ends up shipwrecked on a beautiful island with a friend. When they're "rescued" she ends up back in New York, restless and miserable.
• In The Midnight Folk, Kay's sea-captain grandfather was hired to transport a great treasure, then lost it when his crew mutinied, stole the ship and treasure, and stranded him on a deserted island. While tracing the subsequent history of the treasure, Kay learns that shortly afterward the crew mutinied again and stranded the ring-leader of the first mutiny on another, even more bleak and inhospitable, island.
• In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Monster Men, Professor Maxon chooses one to restart his experiments. (Conveniently away from the law.)
  • Burroughs reused the trick with Ras Thavas, who lives on a solid patch of land in the Great Toolnolian Swamp in the John Carter of Mars novels The Master Mind of Mars and Synthetic Men of Mars. Guess what he's doing in the latter (or, more accurately, just before the latter actually starts).
• Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island appears to be deserted, but the resident castaways eventually learn that Captain Nemo has retired there.
• The titular Nim's Island. It's portrayed as a kid-friendly paradise. Most of the time.
• Ibn Tufail's Arabic novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan (also known as Philosophus Autodidactus) from the 12th century is possibly the Ur-Example, about a boy abandoned on a deserted island and raised by an animal.
  • A spiritual successor was Ibn al-Nafis' Arabic novel Theologus Autodidactus from the 13th century.
• Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the Trope Codifier.
• The Isles of Syren in Septimus Heap, which also double as Islands with a Dark Secret.
• Lampshaded quite cleverly in The End, final book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, which takes place on an island where "everything eventually washes up on the shores"(its coastal shelf is very cluttered), including a whole band of castaways with names alluding to stories of this genre.
• Sirena:
  • The titular mermaid originally lives with nine of her sisters near Anthemöessa, a small, rocky island with no plant life besides lilies and no inhabitants besides the three vultures who are the mermaids' guardian birds. The mermaids use their enchanted voices to sink two ships, planning to seduce the men but instead committing Accidental Murder, as most of the men can't swim and the survivors die of thirst on the barren island.
  • To avoid killing any other men, Sirena travels to the waters near Lemnos, a much larger island that was once inhabited but is now deserted. It has a freshwater stream and enough plant and animal life to keep Philoctetes alive after the other soldiers abandon him there, but it's far enough out of the way that ten years pass before Philoctetes and Sirena see another ship.
• In Jim Butcher's Small Favor and Turn Coat, we have the island that Harry Dresden names "Demonreach". It was not only abandoned decades ago, but removed from government records, and Harry says he'd bet that no flight lanes pass within 5 miles of the place. This island, to be clear, is on Lake Michigan, within relatively easy reach of Chicago if you know how to avoid rocky shoals or something. Its desertedness is justified by magic, namely the fact it's a Genius Loci and isn't very friendly.
  • Cold Days establishes that the Genius Loci psychically broadcasts an inexplicable feeling of overwhelming dread that increases the closer you get to the island, effectively causing anyone who might stumble across the island to steer well clear of it without ever knowing that they're doing so, or why.
• Johann Wyss' The Swiss Family Robinson, explicitly named after Robinson Crusoe, takes place on a rather lush and serviceable desert island.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow. Lian Yu is introduced this way in the pilot episode, when Oliver Queen is rescued after five years marooned there. However the following episodes reveal that not only was the island not deserted, Oliver is also not telling the truth about being marooned there the entire time.
• General Hospital. In the summer of 1992, teens Jason and Karen went out for a boat ride (with Jagger, Jason's rival for Karen's affections, stowing away below deck), got caught in a storm, and ended up on one of these (implausibly in the middle of either Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, given GH's upstate New York setting).
• Gilligan's Island takes place on one such island, and many episodes involve attempts to leave. Unfortunately, many of these are screwed up by Gilligan himself.
• Good Eats has a special on tropical cuisine in which Alton Brown is stranded on a deserted island. He's in Hawaii and stumbles across a pineapple farm among other signs of life, until finally running into a surfer on vacation.
• The Kids in the Hall — the flamboyant Buddy Cole, musing on his three 'desert island picks', finds himself on one with his favorite book, record, and person - Oscar Wilde, who quickly gets shunned when his wit isn't up to scratch.
• At the start of La familia P. Luche's second season, it's revealed that the plane the family was traveling in had crashed and they spent the last few years stranded on a deserted island. However, it turns out they were actually in Cancún, and they were just a short walk away from civilization but didn't found out until then. They never let Ludovico live that one down afterwards.
• Lost takes place on a "deserted" island that's about as deserted as New York City.
• Magnum, P.I. "Operation Silent Night" has Magnum & friends stranded on one that the Navy uses for gunnery practice. But they're not gonna do that on Christmas Eve... right? Higgins' first survival step is to weave a sun-hat out of palm fronds. He also has some clever ideas for how to leave the island if TC can't fix the radio. Meanwhile Rick is convinced he's going to die in quicksand and imagines his own funeral, and Tom is determined to play Santa for his friends no matter what.
• MythBusters had an episode ("Duct Tape Island") which used this plot as a setting to test various survival methods using Duct Tape for Everything. (The episode itself had several obvious signs that the island was far from deserted; these were lampshaded by the hosts. As they admitted in their Aftershow—and as could be deduced by depictions of the island in their animated 'blueprint drawings'—the actual setting was a beach on the island of Oahu, the most populated island in the Hawaiian chain. They also admitted that most of their nights, they'd slept in a hotel. The builds themselves were all real, though.)
• Rome. In "Pharsalus", Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo survive the sinking of an entire fleet and struggle ashore, only for a Reveal Shot to show they've actually washed up in a tiny island with no food, water or shelter. However as they wait to die, Vorenus notices that the corpses of the other victims have become bloated from the gasses of decomposition and so float easily, so they use them to construct an improvised raft that carries them to the mainland.
• Rough Science, a British television special where five scientists from different fields are stranded in a hostile environment and are required to make advanced devices out of natural materials and miscellaneous scrap, has several episodes take place on deserted islands.
• Escape From Scorpion Island, a British-Australian children's game show had teams of children engaging in challenges to escape the titular desert island.
• Parodied in Saturday Night Live (of course), a Christmas special with guest star Paul Simon.
  • The "Captain Jim and Pedro" sketches show the aftermath of this with the titular pair trying to readjust to society after escaping from one. Captain Jim seems to be adjusting well, but Pedro seems to have been driven crazy.
• The third season finale of Scorpion has the team trapped on an island and work on ways to escape. They finally do after three weeks.
• In Smallville's Season 3 premier, Lex Luthor has been trapped on a remote Caribbean for nearly three months, following his private jet crashing on the way to his honeymoon. He's originally under the impression that he is sharing the island with another castaway, Lewis, who is quickly becoming malevolent. However, the climax reveals Lewis is actually his Imaginary Friend, and the trauma of the whole ordeal has done a number on Lex's sanity.
• Many seasons of the Reality Show Survivor have used this setting, and it has come to be associated with the series.

Music

• "Message In a Bottle" by The Police is about someone stuck on one and slowly going insane from isolation...unless the island is a metaphor for loneliness in general.

Radio

• Crops up in Bleak Expectations as one of many tropes it parodies when Pip Bin washes up on one. He starts to Go Mad from the Isolation after a few days until he finds a "primitive" human^note who turns out to be his best friend in need of a bath who saves him from starving by revealing it is a dessert island and the beach is made of apple crumble. There it veers into Robinsonade until the Big Bad, Gently Benevolent, turns up with an army of dinosaurs and calls it a Lost World.
• Though not technically a fictional series, Desert Island Discs uses the hypothetical scenario of the guest (some notable person) being stranded on a desert island and being asked, if they were allowed to take so many records with them (along with other items like a book and a luxury) which they would pick. (It's meant as a way of them describing themselves and their life.)

Theatre

• In Philoctetes, the eponymous character was stranded by Odysseus on one of these for years. Others did anchor off of it from time to time, but no one would take Philoctetes off the island in spite and because of the fact that he was crippled.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons is located on a one and Tom Nook has convinced the Player and some of the villagers to purchase some land there. It's a castaway island and can either stay that way or become more civilized if the player so chooses. Unlike many other deserted island stories, there is an easy way off with a sea plane.
• In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Edward Kenway and Charles Vain get stranded this way when one of Vain's men betrays him.
• Banjo-Kazooie features a tropical island surrounded by shark-filled waters as its second world. Far away from the main area lies a small rocky islet with nothing near it except for an extra life. Its name? Sharkfood Island.
• Dyscourse has the player character and five other plane crash survivors on a fairly typical Castaway Island. Whether they make it off the island depends on how you deal with clashing personalities and various events.
• The first game in the Geneforge series. The island's also a Forbidden Zone — since it's not that near anywhere, it was used for scientific research until something went horribly wrong and the entire place was abandoned. Naturally, you're about to find out why it was abandoned.
• Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness has your character stranded there with a few other survivors. In a bit of a subversion, other ships DO find them, and there are, in fact, at least two other people already living on the island. The main point of the game is to fix the island up so that it can become populated.
• All of these are present in the Monkey Island series.
• Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) has a map called the Deserted Island. Subverted, in that it's supposed to be devoid of human life, but still has a spot of civilization, Moga Village, thriving on it. This is because during the events of that game and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, the village received an order to evacuate the island due to a series of earthquakes threatening to level the village, but the village's inhabitants refused to leave, instead sending out the Player Character to hunt and defeat the source of the earthquake, which as it turns out is a massive underwater Elder Dragon. The map remains named such in Monster Hunter Generations and its rerelease Generations Ultimate despite taking place chronologically after 3, with several returning characters explicitly stating they're visiting from Moga, but the name was presumably kept for nostalgia or Guild bureaucracy purposes.
• Myst V: End of Ages has one on the Age of Laki'ahn, which once served as a Treasure Island to the Age's inhabitants, according to Esher, and now holds part of the Bahro Keep.
• Pirates of the Caribbean Online has numerous "wild islands" scattered across the sea. These islands have few, if any, human inhabitants on them, and are mostly used as either weapon training grounds for new pirates or as a hotspot for certain quests.
• Pokémon Emerald has Faraway Island, a deserted island in the middle of the ocean that has nothing of interest, except for Mew.
• The Sims 2 has a spin-off called Castaways revolving round the player's sim getting stranded in such an island. The mobile phone version is essentially the same.
• Indie game Stranded Deep puts the player in the role of the sole survivor of a plane crash, who winds up in an archipelago of small islands and must find a way to survive.
• Subnautica: The predicament the player character finds themselves in at the start of the game, sitting in a small Escape Pod floating in the ocean on an alien planet, is pretty much a sci-fi spin on the "Far Side" Island variant. There's a more literal example that you find and journey to later on.
• During one of his world travels, Uncle Albert from Uncle Albert's Adventures got stranded on a deserted island. While he found proof that it used to be inhabited, there was no one there anymore when he got here.
• Vacation Story has the players that survived the plane crash end up on a large, but mostly empty, island to explore.
• Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana takes place on a large, uncharted island when the ship Adol is on gets pulled in by a kraken. At first it starts off as a castaway island, but as the plot goes on, it turns to a monster island.

Web Comics

• Parodied in Adventurers!; after Khrima accidentally shatters the Crystal of the Kildracks, Ardam and Karn end up on one of these. Ardam mentions that he'd often thought about being on a deserted island, but he always hoped it would be one without Karn. He also makes a fishing rod to give Karn something to do, but Karn sees it as a minigame and nearly covers the island in fish. But soon enough it turns out it wasn't an island, just a movie set of an island, but the movie set part was Behind the Black, which just ticks Ardam off.

Web Original

• Manga Room: After Sana knocked out Shota after he gave her bread, they both found themselves on an deserted island and are forced to work together to survive. It is later revealed that it was all an test by Sana's grandfather to see if Sana is fit to run the family company after her father passed away.
• Manga Turtle Mangamé: Kengo found himself trapped on a deserted island along with Mika. It turned out the whole thing was a ploy by Mika's classmates to get the two to hook up.
• Played straight and discussed in the Scott The Woz episode "Desert Island Gaming". Scott ended up on one after getting into a freak train crash, with barely any supplies with him, and then the first thing he does is thinking about ordering some games to play, and then passing out from heatstroke. His inner monologue then proceeds to talk about games he'd play if he was stranded on a deserted island.

Western Animation

• The 101 Dalmatians: The Series episode "Shipwrecked" has Lucky and Scorch end up on one after falling overboard on a cruise.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius used this plot for shipping between Jimmy and Cindy. The pair argue whether there is an actual line around the equator or not, so they go to check in the hover car... cue falling off of it and ending up on a deserted island and growing closer to each other. By the end of the episode Cindy didn't even want to leave the island and suggested she and Jimmy stay there forever.
• American Dad!:
  • In Choosy Wives Choose Smith Stan accidentally strands himself on a deserted island while he is trying to test Francine's faithfulness.
  • In one episode it's revealed that Stan kidnaps his mother's boyfriends and maroons them on an uncharted island to prevent anyone from getting close to her.
• An episode of Family Guy has Peter, Joe, Cleveland, and Quagmire become stranded on a lone island after being shipwrecked, causing their friends and family back home to believe they had died in the storm. The guys pass the time by playing the "who would you rather do" game and at one point, try to start an orgy to satisfy their sexual urges. Naturally, a cruise liner passes by when this happens and everyone stops to take a look as if it was part of the tour.
• The Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet episode "Fallen Angels" saw Destiny and two other pilots Die Hard on a Deserted Island after being shot down.
• One shows up in the Jem episode "Island of Deception".
• The Dethklok Home for Wayward Kittens is populated only by handicapped mutants. "RELEASE THE KITTENS!"
• The Simpsons has the episode of Das Bus, which has Bart, Lisa, Milhouse, Nelson, Martin and others stranded on a deserted island. It's a takeoff on Lord of the Flies, of course.
  • Parodied with the episode of Lisa On Ice, where Lisa imagines being sentenced to "Monster Island" for having failed gym class in the second grade.
    • Luckily, Monster Island is a Non-Indicative Name. It's really a peninsula.
• In the Superman: The Animated Series episode "Where There's Smoke", after Volcana is defeated, Superman decides a normal prison wouldn't be able to hold her, so he strands her on an island instead. He regularly visits and gives provisions. She is grateful and treats it like a Gilded Cage. Later, she manages to escape.
• In the Time Squad episode "Hate and Let Hate", Otto gets stranded on an island that had previously been inhabited by Hermando De Soto and his health spa after Tuddrussel and Larry accidentally forget about him after the mission was complete.
• Originally Dinobot Island in Transformers: Animated, to give the Dinobots somewhere to live away from civilization. By Season 3, it's gotten rather crowded, now home to Meltdown's labs, Blackarachnia until she teleported somewhere, and Scrapper. The other Constructicons are probably around somewhere too.
• On The Wild Thornberrys, the family gets stranded on an uncharted island after Nigel accidentally locks them out of the Comvee with a security system he designed.
• Done in the Woody Woodpecker short Fair Weather Fiends.

Real Life

• These can often be found. Unlike fictional islands, the climate of desert islands can vary since some of them can be found near the polar regions.
  • And survival on a deserted island is generally even more problematic than it is made out. Most islands that people can survive on already have people living on them.
• Several people have created Youtube videos showing how exactly to survive on a deserted island. (Protip: Water, shelter, fire, in that order.)
• Rottumerplaat is a tiny island off the coast of the Netherlands — off limits to the general public. In 1971, two authors stayed on the island one week each (the island has a small living quarter). Each day they had a short contact by radio with the main land (this contact was broadcasted). One author, Jan Wolkers, absolutely loved it. The other, Godfried Bomans, went almost mad. The stay may have contributed to the decline of his health; Godfried Bomans passed away less than half a year later, aged 58. (Jan Wolkers would live on for another 36 years, reaching the age of 81).
• The Galapagos Islands were never permanently settled by Pacific or South American peoples, and qualified as this trope until the 16th century. It is for this reason that they, unlike other islands such as Hawaii, New Zealand, and Madagascar, have kept all of their native wildlife up to the present day. Today, some of the smaller isles have been declared off-limits to everyone except the occasional researcher, to protect their unique native species.
• The largest uninhabited island is Devon Island. It has been inhabited before, but by no more than a couple of hundred people at a time as it is so close to the North Pole.
• The isle of Queimada Grande, aka Snake Island, off the coasts of São Paulo, Brazil. The reason it's a deserted island? It's home to the only colony of Bothrops insularis (golden lancehead pit viper), one of the most lethal venomous snakes in the world. The only humans who are allowed to set foot on the island are some scientists and a specially trained team that performs maintenance of the isle's automated lighthouse once per year.
• Any island freshly emerging from the water due to volcanism or sea level shifts will be this trope by default.

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