96 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
96 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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date: 2023-01-25
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title: "The Love Boat s02e10"
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---
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I'm still watching The Love Boat.
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I find it interesting that this is easier for me to stick with than Doctor Who.
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# Season 02, Episode 10
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It's thanksgiving on board the Pacific Princess!
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And presumably off-board too.
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At least, in the United States.
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## Tony's Family
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The ship engineer called in sick,
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so they ask Tony to stay on another shift,
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but he's mad because he was going to spend the holiday with his family.
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So they're like, well, just bring them on board.
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Womp womp, turns out he has six people in his family.
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And Tony's mom brought a chicken.
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Batten down the hatches, here come the immigrant jokes!
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Actually, aside from the chicken thing,
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this wasn't as bad as I expected.
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Maybe I'm getting normalized to 1978 suburban America,
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but I felt like most of the gags fell into two categories:
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1. The chicken
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2. Struggling to keep six people hidden from the captain
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Anyway, they get discovered,
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and the captain says they have to pay their fares,
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so the crew offers to pool their money together to pay $1500 for everyone.
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But then the young boy gives a dollar to a gambler from another story,
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and God descends from the machinery.
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The gambler returns with about $75 in coins from the slot machine,
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and gives it to the family,
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who uses it to pay off their $1500 debt in entirety.
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## The Minister and the Stripper
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A lady gets upset that her minister,
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the captain from Airplane!,
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falls for a stripper on the cruise,
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and threatens to have him kicked out by the trustees or the board or something.
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That means they're Presbyterian, I think?
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I never could remember the intricacies of all the protestant governance structures.
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Her husband threatens to leave her,
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and she sees the errors of her ways,
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deciding to use her influence in the governance body to defend the minister's decision.
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Then the husband gambles a broke kid's last dollar,
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turning it into about $75.
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Costuming must have had fun with these two:
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This one struck me as actually still relevant today.
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And the captain from Airplane! did a believable job as a minister.
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I heard they cast well-known actors to "play it straight" in the Airplane! movies,
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and boy howdy, this guy was a good casting decision.
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## Her Own Two Feet
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A newly-blind lady doesn't want to admit she's blind.
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The ship's doctor convinces her husband that his doting and excuses
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are making it difficult for her to face reality.
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The husband abandons her in their room with a cane,
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telling her he'll be in the lounge and he hopes she comes to meet him.
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She steels her resolve and gets herself down the hall on her own.
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I'll admit it: this one made me cry.
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An episode of The Love Boat made me cry.
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What the heck is wrong with me?
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---
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This show had a habit of hiring Hollywood stars from the 30s and 40s,
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who weren't getting a lot of work due to their age.
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They got some pretty impressive performances this way.
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The "blind" lady was played by June Allyson:
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a headliner, judging by posters from the films she starred in.
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Her husband was played by Van Johnson, her frequent co-star.
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(A previous release of this confused Van Johnson with Alan Young.)
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Here's Van expressing... grief? asphyxiation?
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I've decided to call it "the eyeroll of despair".
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{{<video src="eyeroll-of-despair.mp4" text="A man has a distraught woman in his arms, in a comforting hold. His brow is furrowed, he is rolling his eyes, and his mouth is hanging open.">}}
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I wonder how many takes they did of this?
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