5 posts tagged “the love boat”

It was great seeing the brilliant Bernie Kopell again, even if his voice is a little hoarse. He tells some great stories about Sinatra, Martin and the Rat Pack, and his days on Get Smart.

Some cheese for today. The Love Boat theme in arrangements you might never have heard before! I assume this is The Lawrence Welk Show, which ran from 1955 to 1982.

I’ve been talking about all these remakes of late, but one I forgot to mention is a biggie: that time the Germans remade The Love Boat. There are a few differences: Das Traumschiff (it is not called Das Love Boot as The Simpsons once parodied) has been going since 1981 and it has never, unlike the original American version, been shot in a studio. Each season is short because of the lavish location filming—trust the Germans to take a formula and improve on it no end. I think they also managed to keep the cruise director off cocaine.
   The title sequence from the below 2007 special in San Francisco (found on YouTube) is awful, and set in the very un-German Arial Rounded, but even the late Aaron Spelling didn’t beat the money that has been poured in to the 50-plus episodes since the 1980s.
   The Germans’ approach to state TV is: if it works, and it pulls in viewers week after week, then don’t tinker and ruin it. Tatort has been going for God knows how long.
   I prefer my Alarm für Cobra 11, still the perfect car-chase cop show.

Remember this series? It’s nice to know there are opening-title nerds on YouTube who collect these, and we can also examine how the graphic design has changed over the years for The Love Boat.

   This was from the TV series (post-TV movies) in 1977. Note the Futura Black for the guest stars was computer-generated, while the titles for the cast was probably properly typeset. Then, someone had the idea to put the guest stars’ faces into the centre of the screen for the second season, and the guests’ typeface now matches the rest of the cast’s:

A little longer, though this length was not standard, but to accommodate the large guest cast, which must have been a fashion special.
   Thirdly, by 1981, the cast had grown by one, but the German version of this two-parter has been butchered. The titles are different from what was seen in the original American prints. They have taken footage that is new for Gavin MacLeod and Lauren Tewes, hastily cut in Jill Whelan (as Vicki), and used the 1977 shots for the rest of the cast (Ted Lange’s afro is the giveaway):
   Here is the 1982 version, for the Anglophone market, and after the Sydney two-parter from the 1981 season, Lauren Tewes stands in front of the Harbour Bridge:    Finally, there are three reasons you know a show is nearing an end. First, the song gets rejigged (Jack Jones is replaced by Dionne Warwick). Second, the titles get rejigged, this time with News Gothic replacing a very retro 1970s Futura Black, more in keeping with current typographic trends. Anything that seemed naff ’70s is replaced by things that were au courant, and naff ’80s now: the more advanced graphics marking it in its era. Third, Ted McGinley is in the cast (but then, so is Teri Hatcher as a Love Boat Mermaid). The problem here is that this is the German version again, and while Anglo prints had a matching News Gothic for the main cast, it’s replaced here with a very unsuitable Antique Olive Bold. Why the change is this severe is anyone’s guess, and there is no credit for the cruise director, probably again due to odd editing.    That was not the end, for The Love Boat came back for The Next Wave: one episode even saw Vicki Stubing finally getting married. And Gavin MacLeod looked exactly the same. These titles are from the first season of the revival series, starring Robert Urich, with Joan Severance as the Sun Princess’s head of security and a potential romantic interest for the captain: Typographically, it is on a par with Melrose Place in terms of resolution: a light serif, in this case Goudy Oldstyle, mixed with Times. But gone are the fussy graphics of the 1970s and 1980s, replaced with something simpler—and the sex appeal of female bodies in swimsuits. This is the Baywatch era, after all.
   Robert Urich, sadly, passed away, and there were no more Love Boats. Then, these shows can always come back … Set it in the Nordic countries and we might want to see Scandily clad ladies.

[Cross-posted] As blogged at Vox, my friend and Lucire colleague Caleigh Cheung (pictured on the left, with Alistair Kwun, on the real Shortland Street) made her prime-time acting début as Lily Choi in episode 3,701 of Shortland Street, New Zealand’s prime-time network medical soap opera.
   There was no mention of soap and there was certainly no opera being played, but it looks like Caleigh’s role will go on to greater things. She tells me her accent is relevant to the plot.
   Fans will hate me when I say my watching Caleigh has brought my sum total of Shortland Street-watching to 15 minutes. I caught 10 minutes of it in 2000 in a skiing scene with actress Claire Chitham. I accidentally watched it while giving a university lecture, while I had given the students a snack break after the first hour.
   I have probably met more Street stars than most people. The difference is that I did not know who they were. I kept looking out for Sister Scott and Dr Albert, and realized I had the wrong show. The last TV doctor whose fictional exploits I followed was one Dr O’Neill on The Love Boat, then he transformed himself from looking like Dick van Patten to looking like Bernie Kopell by the second cruise, then changed his name to Adam Bricker in the third. Now, come on, that’s fascinating.
   It’s going to be a good year for Cal, with another series being filmed where she is the lead actress.
   Some of us are geared to watching soaps and some of us are not. I’m afraid I am one of the latter, who prefers things concluded in self-contained episodes. Life, to me, is far more interesting a soap to watch and be a part of.