An ‘A’ for Gopher”

Posted on April 30, 2025 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, Ted Lange presents three stories of cruise ship love.

Episode 5.26 “Pal-I-Mony-O-Mine/Does Father Know Best?/An ‘A’ for Gopher”

(Dir by Ted Lange, originally aired on April 10th, 1982)

Dr. John Hanson (Ben Vereen) boards the ship with his new girlfriend, attorney Jenny Brooks (Denise Nicholas). John is shocked to discover that his former girlfriend, Ellen (Lynne Moody), is also on the cruise. Jenny befriends Ellen and, after listening to all the details of how Jenny supported John while he was going through medical school, she suggests that Ellen should sue John for palimony. Jenny even offers to help Ellen and John figure out how much John owes her. John agrees. As he and Ellen itemize their former relationship, they come to realize that they’re still in love. Sorry, Jenny! Jenny leaves the boat alone. John and Ellen leave the boat engaged. (Jenny does give them a bill for her legal services. John and Ellen have a good laugh.)

WOW! That’s not the type of story that you regularly see on The Love Boat. It’s rare for a passenger to leave as angry as Jenny did. What’s surprising is that neither Ellen nor John seemed to feel that bad about Jenny getting her heart broken. Then again, what was Jenny thinking when she invited Ellen back into their lives to begin with? This is why you’re never friendly with your significant other’s exes. I don’t care how nice they seem or act. They’re all potential enemies! I don’t care how polite they are when they approach you outside the Dallas Museum of Art and start speaking in their fakeass British accent, don’t trust them …. well, anyway, let’s move on.

Gopher is super-excited when his junior high English teacher, Susan Wilkham (Susan Strasberg), boards the ship. Gopher explains that he’s always had a crush on her and, now that Gopher is an adult, Susan appears to also now have a crush on him. (Don’t freak out, she doesn’t even realize he was a former student until he specifically mentions that he was in her class.) Except …. oh no! Captain Stubing has a crush on her as well! Well, don’t worry. Things work out for Gopher. While Vicki does not get a stepmother, Gopher gets a girlfriend who we will probably never hear about again. Fred Grandy and Susan Strasberg made for a surprisingly cute couple. (It helped that they both appeared to be the same age, despite the show’s effort to cast her as being “the older woman.”) Good for Gopher, it’s about time something good happened to him.

Finally, a father (Lloyd Bochner) encourages his nerdy son (Kevin Brophy) to hit on a beautiful but snobbish blonde (Kristina Wayborn). The son prefers the blonde’s shy best friend (Patty Freedman). On every episode of The Love Boat, there’s one story that doesn’t amount too much and that what this story was.

Hey, this episode was directed by Isaac Washington himself, Mr. Ted Lange! Obviously, The Love Boat isn’t really a show that demands or even allows an auteurist approach but I will say that this was one of the better acted episodes that I’ve seen. Vereen and Moody, Grandy and Strasberg, they all had plenty of chemistry. This was a truly pleasant cruise, despite Jenny’s anger.

The Oklahoma City Dolls (1981, directed by E.W. Swackhamer)

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

At an Oklahoma manufacturing plant, the women are always expected to put in extra hours while their male co-workers practice as a part of the company’s football team. Shop steward Sally Jo (Susan Blakely) files a complaint with the EEOC. John Miller (Robert Hooks) pays a visit to the plant and says that the women have to be given the same opportunities and benefits as the man, including recreation time. The plant’s foreman, J.D. Hines (David Huddleston), agrees. The woman can have recreation time as long as they’re doing what the men are doing and that’s playing football. Determined to show up Hines and all of her sexist co-workers (and her boyfriend, played by Waylon Jennings), Sally Jo puts together a football team and even gets a broken-down former NFL coach (Eddie Albert) to serve as their trainer.

There actually was a woman’s football team called The Oklahoma City Dolls. They played in the National Women’s Football League and they won the league’s championship three times. However, they don’t appear to have anything to do with this movie, which is as much about Sally Jo trying to get a fair treatment for the workers as it is about hitting the field and running it in for a touchdown. There are some parts of the movie that work. I liked Eddie Albert’s performance as the alcoholic coach and the scene where he discovered that his community service would include coaching a group of women who had never played football before. Folk singer Ronee Blakley was good as the team’s emotionally fragile wide receiver. I even liked that the women didn’t all automatically become the world’s best football players. The movie’s main weakness was that Susan Blakely just wasn’t believable as someone who lived in a trailer park, used “ain’t” in every sentence, and spent her time organizing a union. She was too glamorous for the role and her scenes with Waylon Jennings all felt overwritten and overacted. The story couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a drama about working in a factory or a football comedy and it was pretty uneven as a result. The good thing is that the movie’s heart was in the right place, even if it didn’t always score a touchdown.

As for the real life Oklahoma City Dolls, they were active from 1976 to 1979. An attempt to revive the team in 1982 failed when their financial backers pulled out at the last seconds. The National Women’s Football League folded in 1988.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Scream Blacula Scream (dir by Bob Kelljan)

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Am I correct in assuming that everyone knows who Blacula was?

Blacula is often described as being the black Dracula but actually, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. In life, he was an African prince named Mamuwalde who, in 1780, went to Dracula’s castle and asked for the count’s help in suppressing the slave trade. Dracula turned him into a vampire instead and, after declaring that Mamuwalde would forever be known as Blacula, he proceeded to lock Mamuwalde in a coffin. That’s where Mamuwalde remained for 290 years, until he managed to escape. By that point, his coffin had been relocated from Transylvania to Los Angeles.

All of that was revealed in the 1972 film, Blacula. Blacula, which starred a distinguished Shakespearean actor named William Marshall in the lead role, was a surprise hit so, of course, Mamuwalde (played again by Marshall) returned the following year in a sequel. It didn’t matter that the first Blacula ended with Mamuwalde deliberately ending his existence by walking out into the sunlight. Blacula would return!

It also didn’t matter if anyone in the audience for Scream, Blacula, Scream had somehow missed seeing the first movie. Scream, Blacula, Scream features lengthy flashbacks to the first film. It makes sense, really. Why waste money on all new footage when you can just pad the sequel with scenes from its predecessor?

I’m disappointed to say that Scream, Blacula, Scream did not feature any disco action. When I saw that this movie would be airing on TCM Underground, I decided to watch it specifically because I figured there would be at least one scene of Blacula dancing underneath a spinning disco ball. I mean, it was a movie from the 70s, right? Honestly, I think that if Scream, Blacula, Scream had been made later in the decade, it would have featured at least one disco dance scene.

What the film did have was a lot of voodoo. Judging from this movie, Live and Let Die, and the House on Skull Mountain, it would appear that people in the early 70s were really obsessed with voodoo. When the movie opens, a voodoo priestess named Mama Loa is dying and she’s just named her apprentice, Lisa (Pam Grier), as the new head of the cult. Mama Loa’s son, Willis (Richard Lawson), isn’t happy about this decision so, for some reason, he decides that it would be a good idea to bring Blacula back to life.

Willis apparently thought that the revived Blacula would be his servant but it doesn’t work out like that. First off, Blacula was perfectly happy being dead. Secondly, he is no one’s servant. Blacula promptly bites Willis on the neck and then proceeds to vampirize nearly everyone that he comes across. Soon, Blacula has an army of vampires but all he wants is to be human again.

And who can help him reach that goal?

How about the city’s newest voodoo priestess, Lisa?

Now, I will say this about Scream, Blacula, Blacula. The main character is named Lisa and that automatically makes it an above average movie. The entire movie features people saying, “Lisa” over and over again and you know I loved listening to that.

Other than that, though, the movie was kind of a mess. It was obviously written and filmed in a hurry and, as a result, a lot of the action felt like padding. For a subplot that wasn’t that interesting to begin with, the voodoo cult power struggle got way too much screen time. On the plus side, William Marshall and Pam Grier were both a hundred times better than the material that they had to work with. Regardless of how ludicrous the dialogue was, Marshall delivered it with dignity and just the right hint of ennui.

Scream, Blacula, Scream is not a particularly good film but it’s worth seeing for Marshall and Grier.

Horror on the Lens: House of Evil (dir by Gus Trikonis)

Posted on October 17, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s horror on the lens in 1978’s House of Evil!

When Richard Crenna buys a new house, he recruits a few friends to help him fix it up. Unfortunately, it turns out that the house is haunted by the devil himself. House of Evil — which is also known as The Evil — is an entertaining little time waster. If the idea of being in a house with the devil doesn’t scare you, just check out some of those the 1970s fashion choices!