Brooke Shields was just 14 years old when she filmed The Blue Lagoon, the infamously sexy and slightly salacious island-set romance that capitalized on burgeoning hormones in a big way. The film was shocking when it debuted on July 5, 1980—but even 40 years later, it can still make jaws drop. Here’s a look at some of its more compelling tidbits, complete with undiscovered iguanas and a nifty trick to cover up nudity.
1. The Blue Lagoon is based on a trilogy of books by Henry De Vere Stacpoole.
Although the film closely follows the events of the first book in Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s series, also called The Blue Lagoon, the film’s sequel (1991’s Return to the Blue Lagoon) breaks with the storyline presented in the 1920s-era trilogy to essentially re-tell the original story (read: more tanned teens falling in love on a tropical island). Stacpoole’s books were far more concerned with the culture of the South Seas population, particularly as it was being further influenced by the arrival of European cultures.
2. The Blue Lagoon was adapted into a film twice before.
In 1923, director W. Bowden crafted a silent version of the story. More than a quarter-century later, British filmmaker Frank Launder made a very well-received version for the big screen in 1949, starring Jean Simmons and Donald Houston. The film was immensely popular, becoming the seventh-highest grossing domestic film at the U.K. box office that year.
3. The Blue Lagoon‘s costume team came up with a clever trick to keep Brooke Shields covered up.
Brooke Shields was just 14 years old when she filmed The Blue Lagoon, which led to some challenges for the production team, especially as Shields’s Emmeline is frequently topless. So the costume designers hatched an ingenious (and, really, just kind of obvious) way to keep her covered up at all times: they glued her long-haired wig to her body.
4. Brooke Shields’s age was an issue for a long time.
Even after The Blue Lagoon was long wrapped, completed, and released into theaters, issues related to Shields’s age at the time of filming still lingered. Years later, Shields testified before a U.S. Congressional inquiry that body doubles—of legal age—were used throughout filming.
5. The Blue Lagoon was nominated for an Oscar.
Cinematographer Néstor Almendros was nominated for his work on The Blue Lagoon. And while he lost out to Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet for Tess, he already had one Oscar at home for his contributions to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). The skilled DP, who passed away in 1992, was also nominated for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Sophie’s Choice (1982).
6. A new species of iguana was discovered when it appeared in The Blue Lagoon.
Parts of the film were lensed on a private island that is part of Fiji, one of the habitats of the now-critically endangered Fiji crested iguana. The iguana appeared throughout the film, and when herpetologist John Gibbons caught an early screening of the feature, he realized that the animal that kept popping up on the big screen wasn’t a familiar one. So he traveled to Fiji (specifically, to the island of Nanuya Levu), where he discovered the Fiji crested iguana, an entirely new Fijian native.
7. The Blue Lagoon won a Razzie.
Despite its stellar source material and Oscar-nominated camerawork, The Blue Lagoon wasn’t beloved by everyone: The Razzies foisted a Worst Actress award on Shields. The actress won (lost? hard to tell?) over an extremely mixed bag of other nominees that somehow also included Shelley Duvall for The Shining. Come on, Razzies.
8. The Blue Lagoon director Randal Kleiser hatched a plan to get his stars to like each other.
Because the chemistry between the two leads was vital to the success of The Blue Lagoon, director Randal Kleiser (who also directed Grease) came up with the idea to get star Christopher Atkins feeling a little lovestruck with Shields by putting a picture of the young starlet over Atkins’s bed. Staring at Shields every night apparently did rouse some feelings in Atkins; the duo had a brief romance while filming. “Brooke and I had a little bit of a romantic, innocent sort of romance in the very beginning of the film,” Atkins told HuffPost. “It was very nice—we were very, very close friends.”
9. Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins’s affection didn’t last for long.
Despite their early attachment, Shields and Atkins soon began bickering nonstop. “Brooke got tired of me,” Atkins told People in 1980. “She thought I took acting too seriously. I was always trying to get into a mood while she would be skipping off to joke with the crew.” Still, Kleiser even capitalized on that, using the tension to fuel the more frustrated scenes, lensing the tough stuff while his leads were tussling.
10. The Blue Lagoon‘s film shoot basically took place on a desert island.
Kleiser was desperate to capture authenticity for the film, going so far as to live like his characters while making it. “To shoot this kind of story, I wanted to get as close to nature as possible and have our crew live almost like the characters,” Kleiser said. “We found an island in Fiji that had no roads, water, or electricity, but beautiful beaches. We built a village of tents for the crew to live in and had a small ship anchored in the lagoon for our camera equipment and supplies. This filming approach was quite unusual, but it just seemed right for this project.”
This story has been updated for 2020.
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Tom Petty’s Favorite (and Least Favorite) Tom Petty Songs
The legend’s top pick from his catalog was not one of his biggest hits.
ByLogan DeLoye|Oct 18, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT
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Tom Petty met Elvis Presley when he was just 10 years old, got his first guitar two years later, and the rest is (music) history.
His songwriting was so prolific that millions of listeners found themselves free fallin’, wandering through wildflowers, and dancing with Mary Jane across his catalog. Generations of fans admire the rock ‘n’ roll icon for his talent, collaborative spirit, and his undeniably chill approach to stardom.
Petty rose to fame in 1976 with his debut album, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Throughout his career, he gifted the world 16 studio albums, 13 with his band and three solo projects. His 1981 collaboration with Stevie Nicks landed them near the top of the Billboard charts with “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” four years after his first top 10 hit, “Don’t Do Me Like That.” “Free Fallin’” was the band’s last top 10 hit in 1989.
In the late 1980s, Petty joined the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys alongside Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison, penning classics like “Handle With Care,” “End of the Line,” “Last Night,” and “Congratulations.”
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 and passed away in 2017 at 66.
The world loves his music, but what were Tom Petty’s favorite (and least favorite) Tom Petty tracks?
“Southern Accents”
In 2002, Petty spoke with the Los Angeles Times about his catalog and named “Southern Accents,” the title track from his 1985 album, as his favorite, citing its connection to his southern roots.
“That may be my favorite among my songs, just in terms of a piece of pure writing. I remember writing it very vividly. It was in the middle of the night, and I was playing it on the piano at home in Encino. I was just singing into my cassette recorder, and suddenly these words came out. I was at the point in my career where I was very much trying to find some new ground. I thought I had used up what I had started with, and I wanted a new direction.”
He also explained how the song tied into his childhood and family life.
“We had lived in California for about 10 years at that point, and I started thinking about growing up in northern Florida, which is a lot different from Miami Beach. It’s close to Georgia, and I came from a real Southern family, and I wanted to address that world. Once I came up with this song, I decided to write an entire album about the theme.”
“Make It Better (Forget About Me)”
Before his passing, Petty sat down with author Paul Zollo for a series of in-depth conversations published in Conversations With Tom Petty in 2020. In one of those chats, Petty was very honest about a song he “hated,” calling it “trash.”
“I hate that song; it’s just trash,” he said, referring to “Make It Better (Forget About Me).” “It was Dave just trying to get me to knock a song out—just write a song for the sake of writing one—and I think that’s what it sounds like to me.”
The track, written in the ‘80s and featured on Southern Accents, only reached number 54 on the Billboard Hot 100.
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Quiz: Which ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Character Are You?
Find out which pioneer best matches your personality with this eight-question quiz!
ByNitya Rao|Jul 18, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT
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Before we had the “tradwife” trend, we had Little House on the Prairie, where living off the land was the norm rather than the niche lifestyle it is today. The sweeping plains of Independence, Kansas, from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original novel to the 2026 Netflix adaptation, remain the same. Yet, somehow, the world was an entirely different place. It was a world where survival required just as much pluck as it did positivity.
In the series premiere, Pa tells Laura that “hope is everything,” a profound sentiment she eventually echoes back to him by the season finale. And while the unpredictability of life on the prairie probably calls for a prayer or two, Ma reminds us that it isn’t always a bad thing. In Episode 4, she insists that “an uncertain life is full of possibilities.”
Maybe you relate to Ma’s realism, or perhaps you’re more like Pa, rose-colored glasses and all. Then there are the Lauras of the world who would rather be traipsing through the tallgrass than thinking about the perplexities of pioneering. Dr. George Tann’s charisma, Mary’s perfectionism, and John Edwards’ mysteriousness fill in the blanks. We may have evolved from bonnets to baseball caps, but each of us has an inner pioneer personality that persists.
Are you ready to find your place within the covered wagon? Take this quiz to discover which Little House on the Prairie character captures your true colors.
Which pioneer mirrors your personality the most? Each and every member of the community is resilient, passionate, and inspiring in their own way. Share this personality quiz with your family and friends to find out if you’re the same Little House on the Prairie character, or if you have the perfect balance of traits to brave the frontier together!
The Evolution of the Little House Legacy
If you were raised on Little House reruns, odds are you have a favorite memory of life on the prairie. But before it became the next big thing to stream, Little House on the Prairie was a product of pen, paper, and fuzzy frontier flashbacks. That was roughly the recipe that Laura Ingalls Wilder used to craft the autobiographical book Little House in the Big Woods in 1932.
It was this coming-of-age tale that gave readers a tiny taste of the family’s cozy yet chaotic world of handcrafted log cabins and homemade maple sugar. Much like the staple pioneer sweet, one bite—and book—simply wasn’t enough. Over nearly a century, that opening chapter spawned eight more original novels, a 1970s TV series, and, most recently, a Netflix series offering a visually richer, realistic take on frontier life.
Along the way, generations of fans hitched their wagons to Laura’s fiery spirit and Mary’s quiet strength, while looking to Ma and Pa as the blueprint for making a house a home. From the page to the screen, this timeline traces the Little House on the Prairie legacy, showing how each installment puts its own spin on the Ingalls saga:
The Original Book Series
Little House in the Big Woods (1932)
Farmer Boy (1933)
Little House on the Prairie (1935)
On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937)
By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939)
The Long Winter (1940)
Little Town on the Prairie (1941)
These Happy Golden Years (1943)
The First Four Years (1971)
The Screen Adaptations
Little House on the Prairie, NBC Series (1974–1983)
Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder, CBS Movies (2000-2002)
Little House on the Prairie, Disney Miniseries (2005)
Little House on the Prairie, Netflix Series (2026)
We might swap out the actors or change the cinematography, but the heart of the Ingalls family never fails. We keep coming back to them because watchable resilience is rare, whether they’re braving a brutal blizzard or just fighting to keep a roof over their heads. Every reimagining reflects the respective era it was made in, but the overarching theme of holding onto hope through hardship is timeless.
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