• The journey to creating Gullah Gullah Island took the team involved nearly a decade before the show’s 1994 premiere
• In a series of TikToks, Natalie Daise reminisces about taking the show from a friend’s idea to a look at her family and culture
• TikTokers are tuning in for new installments of Daise’s stories, which include beautiful and nostalgic details

Bright sunny weather is bringing back memories of Gullah Gullah Island.

Natalie Daise, who starred on the beloved Nickelodeon children’s show that aired from 1994 to 1998, has joined TikTok. Daise decided to start sharing the story of how the show came to be on TikTok last week, uploading one or two videos a day.

She begins by clarifying that she and her husband Ron Daise are not the creators of Gullah Gullah Island, but were “stars and consultants for Gullah Gullah Island.”

“Gullah Gullah Island was indeed a show based around our lives in our real lives and community, and our real family life. But Crescent Productions created and produced Gullah Gullah Island. I’m going to tell you the story of how it started,” she says.

Daise explains she grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and moved to Beaufort, S.C., as a young woman after a “violent interaction that involved my person and was very scary.” There, she moved in with her grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins.

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It was shortly after moving that Daise met Ron through her cousin.

“My cousin Marvin was a musician. He sang, he wrote music. And he said to me, within a few weeks of my arrival, that he was singing at church with this guy and this guy had a great voice that I needed to come and hear this guy sing,” she recalls.

Though she didn’t initially think much of it, she was ultimately taken aback by watching them perform together. At one point, Ron was invited back to the family’s home for a big dinner they’d host with other family members and friends.

As she got to know Ron, she joined the music group, making them a trio called Encouragement, who sang contemporary Christian music. Later, her cousin would drop out. Shortly after Daise and Ron became a couple, they became a musical duo.

The two went on to get married in 1985 and later welcomed daughter Sara and son Simeon. It was while she was pregnant with Simeon that Daise and Ron would meet some of the people who would put them on the path to Gullah Gullah Island.

“We eventually quit our jobs and began to travel around the country, singing old songs and telling stories of the Gullah Geechee community, but we called it, at that time, the Sea Island community,” she explains.

From there, she met Gloria Naylor, whose book, Mama Day was being made into a movie. When she arrived in South Carolina, it was with the film’s producer, Maria Perez, and the director, Laurence Fishburne. The Daises met them and as they chatted, children’s television came up.

“I talked about what my children watch and how I wish there was something my children, or I only had the one child, I wish there was TV with people that would look like her. Perez said she and her partner had been pitching shows to Nickelodeon. She had a few pitches that hadn’t gone on well, but she was thinking about doing a show about a magical island,” Daise recalls.

They didn’t expect much from the conversation until Perez started to get things in order to make the show a reality.

“We don’t know anything about TV. We don’t have an agent. We don’t have a lawyer. We don’t have a manager. We don’t have none of that. It’s always good to have some of those things, we learned, but at that time, it was just, ‘Wow this is great,’ ” Daise continues.

They were preparing to shoot the pilot when Daise started noticing differences in her daughter, Sara.

“I send her into a room to get dressed. She says she can’t pull her shirt on … She’ll fall and say, ‘Pick me up,’ ” she shares. “The elders in my community, they say, ‘She’s just doing that because you’ve got the new baby and giving him all this attention. She wants the attention. Don’t play into that.’ ”

When she came home from daycare with a rash, the mom’s concern grew. Doctors assured her it was eczema, but the falls continued also. After consulting a number of pediatricians, Daise learned Sara has dermatomyositis, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks healthy skin and muscle.

“The day after we got the diagnosis was the day we were to drive down to Orlando to shoot the pilot for the show. It was very shortly before we told the producers what was going on, and we didn’t know if she was going to survive this. The guilt I felt … I don’t know if I can explain to you how I felt.”

After the pilot, it was determined Sara wouldn’t be able to play the couple’s daughter on the show. Shaina Freeman was hired instead.

“Suffice to say that my daughter went into remissions within a year and we were very, very grateful,” Daise says.

In other moments of real life brought to screen, members of the community shown in the series were members of the Daises’ real-life Beaufort community.

“Mr. Bradley was really a shipman. My husband really grew up next door to him … Miss City was actually the midwife who delivered Simeon … My girlfriend who sold Mary Kay was the makeup artist … Anytime you saw a van, it was our van. As a matter of fact, the very first publicity photo was taken on our back porch,” she says.

“Ranger Mike was really the park naturalist at Hunting Island State Park. They called them naturalists before the show. We called them rangers and what was fun is that the whole state park system changed their titles from naturalists to rangers,” Daise reveals.

As for the show’s beloved frog character, Binyah Binyah, the animal was inspired by frogs Perez remembered from Puerto Rico, called coquis. Ron came up with the name, a Gullah word from the Creole-based language, from the culture’s way of saying “been here.”

Production agreed and thought saying the name twice would be fun, as they ended up doing with the show’s title. It also mirrored the culture’s way of putting emphasis on a word by repeating it twice.

“Gullah Gullah Island was a magical island. It could have a frog with origins in Puerto Rico, because it’s all part of the diaspora, the African diaspora that influenced many of these cultures,” Daise shares.

The signature voice was the work of actor Philip Garcia and his speech-pathologist wife. “That way of talking on an in-drawn breath was a technique they used sometimes for people with particular diagnoses, so he simply developed it,” Daise says.

Philip played the character until his untimely death in a car accident at the end of the show’s third season.

“My son Simeon grew up on set and to him, Binyah Binyah was real,” Daise says. “I remember once, he went into the dressing room, Philip’s dressing room, but he had taken the head and put it on a stand. As soon as [Simeon] walked in and saw it, [he was shocked.]”

Philip and Simeon became friends after that, and Daise had to make sure that Justin Campbell, who took over the role, could maintain that relationship.

“I remember talking to him and saying, ‘Justin, I need you to understand that Binyah Binyah is Simeon’s friend and so he’s going to expect Binyah Binyah would still be his friend.’ Justin just — as Binyah Binyah and as Justin — he was his friend, absolutely. And I love him for that.”

In her TikToks, Daise is sure to acknowledge other members of the cast as well.

“Shaina moved away in the third season and Tristan Mays came in to play Shaina. She was 7 years old and just bright and shining. She did really well stepping into a role that had been played by another child, just an amazingly talented little girl,” she shares.

Of Vanessa Baden, who played Vanessa, Daise says, “Vanessa, who was not initially hired as a permanent cast member but was so amazing and so great that she became our niece Vanessa.”