Seoul Mates”

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986! The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

This week’s cruise is actually a pretty good one.

Episode 3.22 “Not So Fast, Gopher/Haven’t We Met Before?/Seoul Mates”

(Dir by Gordon Farr, originally aired on February 9th, 1980)

This week’s episode opens with Gopher in a panic. His mother, Roz (Ethel Merman), is going to be on the cruise. It’s her first big trip after the death of Gopher’s father and Gopher wants her to have fun because she’s been so depressed. However, when Roz boards the ship, Gopher is stunned to see her laughing, singing, and hanging out with a male passenger named Lyle (Gene Rayburn). Roz seems so happy that Gopher starts to worry that she didn’t love his father.

Of course, the opposite is true. Roz is miserable but she doesn’t want Gopher to know how sad she’s feeling. She doesn’t want Gopher to worry about her and she also doesn’t want to make Gopher feel any worse about losing his father.

This storyline handled loss and sadness with an intelligence and a maturity that I don’t think most people would ever expect to see on the show like The Love Boat, with both Fred Grandy and Ethel Merman giving sensitive performances as two people struggling to come to terms with their grief. Gopher comes to realize that he’s been focusing on Roz’s grief so he’ll have an excuse to not think about his own and Roz comes to realize that she’s been doing the same thing to Gopher.

Now, of course, this is still The Love Boat so, of course, Roz ends up performing during the ship’s Passenger Talent Show. And, yes, Gopher doe show up at the last minute and, in order to let her know that he now understands her feelings, sings a duet with her. It’s a bit of goofy ending for an otherwise poignant story but, in its way, it definitely works. It’s a sweet scene.

The Gopher/Roz storyline is so poignant and so well-handled that it pretty much overshadows everything else that happens on the boat.

Korean comic Jimmy Kim (Johnny Yune) finds romance with a reporter named Kendall Park (Momo Yashima) but Kendall is offended by Jimmy’s act (which is full of jokes about life in Korea). However, after Roz talks about how much she enjoyed Jimmy’s humor, Kendall changes her mind and she and Jimmy leave the ship as a couple. This was an interesting story to watch and consider in the midst of our current, scolding, “That’s not funny” culture of 2023. If anything, it showed that debates about what one can or should joke about are hardly new to this century. But it just felt strange that it took a white woman appreciating Jimmy’s humor for Kendall to no longer be offended by jokes about Korea. If anything it would seem that Roz saying that she enjoyed hearing jokes about Korea would leave Kendall feeling even more offended by Jimmy’s act. I’m just glad that all of this didn’t lead to Captain Stubing doing his “I see you’ve been reading about your history” speech again.

Meanwhile, four blue collars friends board the ship. Three of them (played by the Hudson Brothers) announce that they’re going to pretend to be wealthy professionals. However, Paul Stockwood (Nicholas Hammond) announces that he is not going to pretend to be anything than the waiter that he is. That’s before Paul realizes that the wealthy Leila Stanhope (Haley Mills) is on the boat. Paul has waited on Leila several times at the Manhattan restaurant in which he works. When Leila tells Paul that he seems familiar, Paul lies and says that he’s a wealthy writer.

It all seems to be working well, until Paul decides to bring Leila breakfast. The sight of Paul carrying a tray of food is all it takes for Leila to remember who he is. At first, Paul calls Leila a snob and Leila calls Paul a liar. But then they fall in love anyway, which means that Paul will probably never have to work as a waiter again. Yay! Unfortunately, this storyline was hampered by the lack of chemistry between Nicholas Hammond and Hayley Mills. They were both attractive but they were also difficult to buy as a couple.

Even though two of the storylines were somewhat flawed, the story about Gopher and his mother elevated this entire episode and it made it one of the best episodes of The Love Boat that I’ve watched so far. This was a cruise to remember!

Retro Television Reviews: Gidget’s Summer Reunion (dir by Bruce Bilson)

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1985’s Gidget’s Summer Reunion! It can be viewed on Tubi!

Back in the 1970s, when the rest of the country was worrying about political corruption, inflation, and an out-of-touch president with an embarrassing family, Gidget, Jeff, and their friends were carefree California teenagers who spent all of their time either hanging out on the beach or running into the ocean with a surfboard. It was a time when they had not a care in the world and, obviously, it couldn’t last forever.

Nearly 10 years later, Gidget (Caryn Richman) and Jeff (Dean Butler) are now married and their surfboards have been safely stored away in the garage. Jeff works as an architect and it’s obvious that his new boss, Anne (Mary Frann), wants to make their professional relationship into something personal. Gidget, meanwhile, owns her own travel agency and, apparently, it’s a success even though Gidget rarely seems to spend much time at the office. Gidget is hyperactive and a bit self-absorbed and, as such, she usually only shows up at work long enough to tell her employees about her latest problems before then running out of the office in an impulsive attempt to fix everything.

What problems do Gidget and Jeff have? Well, for one thing, they live in a giant house despite the fact that they’re nearly broke. They’re both workaholics and, as a result, they don’t spend as much time together as they used to. They got married and then they became strangers. It’s been years since they last went down to the beach. When Gidget’s niece, Kim (Allison Barron), wants to learn how to surf, it doesn’t even occur to her to ask her aunt or her uncle. Instead, she ends up hanging out with a sleazy, beer-drinking surfer named Mickey (Vincent Van Patten).

Fear not! Gidget has a plan! Jeff’s birthday is coming up and Gidget decides that it would be a great idea to use her travel agent powers to get the entire gang back together again. She wants to bring all of the old surfers back to help celebrate Jeff’s big day. The only problem is that the old gang isn’t entirely easy to find. Plus, one of Gidget’s tour guides has to drop out of leading a tour in Hawaii. Gidget is forced to go in his place. Can she get back from Hawaii in time to save Jeff from Anne and Kim from Mickey? And even more importantly, will she ever be able to track down the old gang? Will the movie end with a bunch of balding guys surfing while the Beach Boys play on the soundtrack? Can you guess the answer?

The best thing that can be said about Gidget’s Summer Reunion is that the beach looked nice and the Hawaii scenes reminded me of the wonderful summer that my family and I spent in Hawaii. And the film is correct when it points out that adulthood is never as easy as we expected it to be when we were teenagers. However, the film suffers from the fact that a lot of Gidget’s problems could have been solved by Gidget actually taking a few minutes to think before acting. It’s one thing to be free-spirited and impulsive. It’s another thing to totally lack common sense. For instance, Gidget and Jeff’s old surfboards are stolen out of the back of Gidget’s convertible and, while you can certainly feel bad for Gidget’s loss, you do have to wonder what she was expecting when she basically just left them out in the open, where anyone could get their hands on them. Jeff isn’t off the hook either, as it was pretty much obvious to everyone but him that Anne was trying to get him to cheat on his wife. Gidget and Jeff are a cute couple but they don’t seem to have a brain cell between them.

Oh well. At least the beach looked nice!

A Movie A Day #6: The Cannonball Run (1981, directed by Hal Needham)

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

A legendary Hollywood stuntman, Hal Needham moved into directing in the 1970s and proved that all he required to make a successful film were willing stuntmen, fast cars, Coors beer, and Burt Reynolds. Following that logic, The Cannonball Run may very well be the ultimate Hal Needham movie.

The Cannonball Run follows several teams of racers as they compete to see who can be the first to reach California from Connecticut. Trying to stop them is Arthur J. Foyt (George Furth), who represents the Safety Enforcement Unit and who believes that cars are a menace. However, Foyt is no match for these racers, who include:

J.J. (Burt Reynolds), who is racing in memory of his father, and his mechanic Victor (Dom DeLuise), who turns into Captain Choas whenever he is feeling threatened. J.J. and Victor are driving an ambulance and are accompanied by crazy Dr. Van Helsing (Jack Elam) and a fake “patient” (Farrah Fawcett),
Bradford Compton (Bert Convy) who is riding a motorcycle and who, because of the weight of his mechanic, has to pop a wheelie for the entire race,
An Arab oil sheik (Jamie Farr) who is racing for “the glory of Islam” and who would probably not be in the movie if it were made today,
Sidney Goldfarb (Roger Moore), the heir to a mattress fortune who has had extensive plastic surgery to make himself look like Roger Moore,
Jackie Chan and Michael Hui, called “The Japanese team” even though they both speak Cantonese throughout the entire movie,
Terry Bradsahw and Mel Tillis because why the Hell not?,
Marcie (Adrienne Barbeau) and Jill (Tara Buckman), using their cleavage to get out of speeding tickets, or at least they do until they’re pulled over by Valerie Perrine,
And Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., pretending to be priests and apparently drunk throughout filming.

Based on a real life (and very illegal) cross-country race that was held four times in the 1970s, The Cannonball Run is profoundly stupid movie that, if you’re in the right mood for it, is also profoundly fun. It’s a movie that really has no plot but it does have a lot of cars, a lot of stunts, a lot of cleavage, and a lot of politically incorrect humor, some of which has not aged well. Despite being hated by the critics, The Cannonball Run was a huge box office hit and it still remains a nostalgic guilty pleasure for a lot of people, myself included. One person who did not like The Cannonball Run was Burt Reynolds who, in an interview with the New York Times, once said, “”I did that film for all the wrong reasons. I never liked it. I did it to help out a friend of mine, Hal Needham. And I also felt it was immoral to turn down that kind of money. I suppose I sold out so I couldn’t really object to what people wrote about me.”

Burt has a point but, in defense of The Cannonball Run, what other movie actually features Jackie Chan beating up Peter Fonda?