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In the Victorian period, two young children-Richard Lestrange (Glenn Kohan) and his cousin Emmeline (Elva Josephson)-along with galley cook Paddy Button (Leo McKern) are marooned on an isolated tropical island in the South Pacific when their boat, on its way to San Francisco, goes down in a fire and their lifeboat is separated from the lifeboat containing Richard's father Arthur (William Daniels). In order to survive on the island, Paddy teaches the children fishing, hunting and building but, as the years pass and following Paddy's death, Richard (Christopher Atkins) and Emmeline (Brooke Shields) grow into teenagers and must deal with their sexual maturity with no adults to guide them.

The Blue Lagoon (1908) was written by Irish author Henry De Vere Stacpoole. The novel was adapted for the screen by American screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart. A sequel, Return to the Blue Lagoon (1991) was released in 1991. There are three other movie versions of The Blue Lagoon based on Stacpoole's novel: The Blue Lagoon (1923), The Blue Lagoon (1949), and Blue Lagoon: The Awakening (2012).

Shields was born in 1965, and the movie was released in 1980, making her about 14 to 15 years old at the time. In the commentary track, she shares that a body double was used for the nude shots.

Emmeline stepped on a stonefish, considered the most poisonous fish in the world. If stepped on, the venom in their dorsal fin spines causes intense pain, swelling, and can lead to death.

Richard, Emmeline and Little Paddy (Bradley Pryce), stuck in their rowboat without oars and a shark circling around them, begin drifting away from the island. After drifting overnight, Paddy gets hungry and eats some of the never-wake-up berries he tossed on the boat. Believing that Paddy is going to die, Richard and Emmeline divide up the remaining berries, ingest them, and kiss each other one last time. In the final scene, a schooner carrying Richard's father pulls up alongside the rowboat. "Are they dead?", Arthur asks the ship's captain, who climbed aboard the rowboat. "No sir," he replies, "They're asleep."

In the book, the berries are identified as arita berries, which appear to be made up for the story, as there are no known botanical plants or berries referred to as "arita". The berries are described as some kind of powerful narcotic. The berries shown in the movie appear to be rosary peas, which are poisonous enough that a single seed can kill an adult if chewed. If eaten whole, they can pass through without poisoning. The plant in the movie does not look like a rosary pea. While it is possible, the seed pods were attached to an existing plant as a prop, the plant does have a habit of climbing shrubs and it can be found in Polynesia, so it may never be staged.