Who’s Who?”

Posted on March 1, 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, Julie’s parents set sail on The Love Boat!

Episode 2.3 “Rocky/Julie’s Dilemma/Who’s Who?”

(Dir by Allen Baron and Roger Duchowny, originally aired on September 23rd, 1978)

After last week’s hurricane and hostage situation, things calm down a bit for this week’s episode of The Love Boat.

Julie is super-excited because her parents, Bill (Norman Fell) and Martha (Betty Garrett), are going to be on this cruise. Her parents, meanwhile, are only slightly excited about seeing where Julie works and getting to see all of the members of the crew. They would perhaps be more excited if not for the fact that they’re planning on getting a divorce as soon as the cruise is over. They haven’t told Julie, of course. In fact, they tell Captain Stubing before they tell Julie. Why would they tell someone whom they’ve only know for ten minutes before they would tell their own daughter? What awful parents!

When they do eventually tell Julie, she has an emotional breakdown and runs through the corridors of the ship, sobbing. Listen, I’ve been there. When my parents told me that they were getting divorced, I had a difficult time with it as well. Of course, I was twelve years old, whereas Julie is in her late 20s. Still, it’s never easy. Fortunately, Julie realizes that her parents still love each other so she just sets them up with different people on the boat so that they can get jealous and fall back in love. And it works! Julie’s parents get back together….

Which is nice, I guess. I mean, one doesn’t watch The Love Boat because one wants to see a realistic story about the complexities of love and marriage. Still, the show made it look so simple that it got on my nerves. It’s not that simple and any actual child of divorce can tell you that. Again, it’s The Love Boat so perhaps I shouldn’t judge too harshly but I would have had so much more respect for the show if Bill and Martha had told Julie that they were still getting a divorce at the end of the cruise. It would have been a lot more honest than presenting a story where a marriage can be saved by wishful thinking.

While Julie was trying to save her parent’s marriage and prevent several years of awkward holidays, a young girl named Rocky (Melissa Gilbert) was developing her first crush on a boy named Norman (Jimmy Baio). It was actually a sweet little story and both Melissa Gilbert and Jimmy Baio gave likable performances. When Rocky learned that her family would be moving after the cruise, she was upset until she learned that their new home would be in El Paso, which was also where Norman and his family lived. Again, it was simple but sweet. And it went along well with the divorce storyline. While one relationship nearly ended, another began.

Finally, in the silliest story of the week, TV network censor Pat (Dody Goodman) boards the ship and is told that she will be sharing a cabin with Marion Atkins. That’s fine with Pat. Her main concern is making sure that nothing shocking or sordid happens on the cruise. However, it turns out that Marion Atkins (played by James Coco) is actually a guy! Fortunately, Marion turns out to be just as puritanical as Pat. He even brings a bunch of pamphlets on chastity with him for the cruise. Pat and Marion first meet while wandering around the ship and they fall very chastely in love. Since their morals forbid them from following each other to their cabin, they somehow manage to go nearly the entire cruise without realizing that they are living together. When they do realize that they’re cabinmates, they resolve to get married as soon as the boat docks. This whole story was just incredibly dumb and not in a fun way either. Obviously, The Love Boat was taking a swipe at the same network censors who probably insisted that the show be relatively discreet about what was going on behind the closed doors of the ship’s cabins. But Pat and Marion were both so incredibly clueless that it was hard to care about them one way or the other.

This was a bit of uneven episode but, in the end, the boat still looked like a fun place on which to hang out and work. And really, that’s the important thing.

Lifetime Christmas Movie Review: Hometown Christmas (dir by Emily Moss Wilson)

Posted on December 22, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

If there’s any lesson to be learned from Lifetime (and, for that matter, Hallmark) Christmas movies, it’s that no one should leave their hometown.

Seriously, everything’s always better in your hometown. You might find success in the big city. You might own a nice car. You might find a huge apartment. You might even have a well-paying job. But you’ll never have what you had when you’re living in a small town with good, honest people, some of whom were related to you.

Admittedly, it’s easy for snarky critics like me to poke fun at this idea and the way that it shows up in every single Lifetime Christmas film. But you know what? These films have a point. Every Christmas, my sisters and I get together and we pretty much stay together until the new year. That’s our Christmas tradition and it’s one that I look forward to every year. I always know that no matter what’s going on in our own individual lives, we’re all going to be together with the holidays and everything is going to be right with the world.

That’s certainly what I was thinking about as I watched Hometown Christmas, a Lifetime film in which Noelle (Beverly Mitchell) returns to her hometown in Louisiana for the holidays. There’s not a lot of conflict to be found in Hometown Christmas, but that’s okay. This is a film in which the nicest people in the world gather in the nicest town in the world and proceed to have the nicest holiday in the world and that’s why the film works. Save the horror for Halloween. Save the conflict for …. well, whenever the next election is. This is a Christmas movie and Christmas movies should make you feel good and happy.

When your name is Noelle, it’s perhaps to be expected that your life is going to revolve around Christmas. That certainly seems to be the case with the character that Beverly Mitchell plays in this film. One of the nice things about Hometown Christmas is that it never suggests that Noelle had to return to her hometown because she was miserable outside of it. Instead, Noelle returns because she wants to return. To be specific, Noelle has returned to stage the live Nativity, a town tradition that was started by her late mother. Of course, as soon as Noelle returns home, she runs into her old high school boyfriend, Nick (Stephen Colletti). Nick was going to be a star baseball player but injuries put an end to that. Things are a little bit awkward between Nick and Noelle at first but it’s not long before they’re working on the Nativity and Nick is proving that he’s grown up a lot since he and Noelle last saw each other. It’s a sweet relationship.

(Actually, there’s more than just one love story that unfolds over the course of Hometown Christmas. While Nick and Noelle are getting reacquainted, Noelle’s father (Brian McNamara) is falling for Nick’s mother (Melissa Gilbert). Meanwhile, Noelle’s brother is newly engaged.)

It was a pleasant Christmas love story and I enjoyed it. Hometown Christmas is full of the holiday spirit, as any hometown Christmas should be.

Music Video of the Day: Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. (1984, dir. Ivan Reitman)

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

I wish the literal video for this was still up. Oh, well.

All these years later, I still don’t have any idea why she goes into that house. I guess we are supposed to believe she lives there with these two kids that miss their cue?

These other kids nail it.

Despite finding lists of all the celebrities in this video, I have no idea who this guy is that Ray Parker Jr. becomes for this bit.

I also wonder why she didn’t see him while turning away from the moving table to go to the window.

In the window is footage of the movie that has aged horribly. Parker Jr. is blue screened in there for this famous shot.

He ain’t afraid of no ghost. A lawsuit on the other the hand, that’s a different matter. I hope this music video doesn’t remind me of a Huey Lewis & The News video as well.

Now Ray Parker Jr. stands creepily outside of her window.

This is looking familiar.

Chevy Chase can call Ghostbusters if he has a ghost problem…

but what about if he gets stuck in Benji again?

Who can he call then?

I knew this looked familiar.

Do You Believe In Love by Huey Lewis & The News (1982)

I’m sure it’s a coincidence. I just find it humorous to see that considering the lawsuit saying that this song ripped off, to one extent or another, the Huey Lewis & The News song I Want A New Drug. The scene above is from the video that helped kick off their career on MTV and set the tone for their future videos since it was such a success despite being ridiculous. Is the riff in You Crack Me Up…

sound like the same riff from Johnny And Mary by Robert Palmer?

Or is it just me?

What a feeling. Thanks for making that one easy, Irene Cara.

Something tells me that Cindy Harrell was hired by someone who saw the movie Model Behavior (1982), which she was in.

Model Behavior (1982, dir. Bud Gardner)

From what I’ve read, they just showed up on the set of a movie Candy was shooting to try and get him to make this cameo appearance.

Ray Parker Jr. rising from the top of the stairs like he’s Michael Myers come to kill her. Why?

Or at least scare her. It’s probably a reference to Gozer.

Melissa Gilbert. I have no idea what she’s doing here. I’ve only seen an episode or two of Little House On The Prairie, so I guess there could have been some episodes with ghosts. Some of these cameos feel like they happened because the celebrities were involved with NBC.

Speaking of cameos I can’t explain, it’s former baseball player Ollie Brown.

Boundaries!

I do like that for the majority of the shot it looks like she should be falling over but isn’t.

More people that Parker can summon for some reason.

Don’t worry about them.

Pose for the featured image of this post.

Thank you.

Jeffrey Tambor.

Is it 555-5555…

or 555-2368 as you showed earlier?

George Wendt apparently got in trouble with the Screen Actors Guild for his appearance in this video. I’ll link to the article with that information at the end.

Senator Al Franken.

Now we get a series of confusing cameos.

Danny DeVito. I think this is only the second music video he has ever been in. The other one was for the song Billy Ocean did for The Jewel Of The Nile (1985).

Carly Simon for some reason. She would go on to do the theme song to Working Girl (1988) with Sigourney Weaver. Maybe they were friends. I don’t know.

Umm…one more thing. Have you tried calling the Ghostbusters? No clue as to why Peter Falk is here.

The breakdancing was improvised. So was Parker Jr. pushing Bill Murray around.

I think Teri Garr has one of the best cameos.

Don’t swallow that cigarette, Chevy.

Fun fact: In European and other non-US markets, the “no” sign was flipped.

If you want to read some more information about the video, then follow this link over to ScreenCrush where they have a write-up on the video with information from people who worked on the video.

According to mvdbase, Ivan Reitman directed, Keith Williams wrote the script, Jeff Abelson produced it, Daniel Pearl shot it, and Peter Lippman was the production manager.

If you ever get a chance to watch the literal music video for this, then do so. I doubt it will surface again though seeing as this music video almost didn’t get an official release because of the issues surrounding all the cameos.

Enjoy!