User Reviews

This is another one with a cast that just gets me excited. I mean, you've got Monty Hall, legendary game show host. (Let's Make a Deal aired on ABC from 1968 to 1976.) Then you've got Lynda Day George, wife of Christopher, who made her own mark in films. I mean, who can forget Lynda and Chris in Pieces? You know you can't. I'm a big, big fan of Lynda. Oh, and Leslie Neilsen is back again after 11 episodes. Oh, and most exciting, we've got Elaine Joyce, longtime Match Game panelist. Oh, and she was in Motel Hell too. Joyce does it for me, I gotta say. She plays the bubbleheaded blonde, but on the slightly more intelligent side. Here, she's a showgirl turned nurse. Isaac and Gopher are immediately all over her. Doc may win the prize. Check out Monty Hall's jacket when he comes on board. Holy cow. That pattern could break your television tube. Monty has a son, and they've brought him on the cruise in order to find him a lady. In real life, Leslie Neilsen was 18 years older than Lynda Day George. Here, they're considering getting married, but she might be a little young for him. A woman even mistakes him for her father. As much as Neilsen became famous for comedy, he's a reassuring dramatic actor and perfect for this kind of melodrama. Oh yeah, and Joe E. Ross is here, doing his Joe E. Ross thing. I was always a big fan of the man. He wants some attention from the nurse. He gets her to bend over the filing cabinet and he has to stifle his trademark 'Ooh! Ooh!' Later, they all go to Mexican Fiesta Night. Gopher plays the Matador of Love. On Kafka's Love Boat Scale, this gets 3 1/2 * out of a possible 4 *.

I've always remembered this episode for one reference made by Lynda Day George, who is a young woman marrying an older man (Leslie Neilsen).

When Neilsen is reminiscing with a woman 'closer to his age' and they are singing "I'll Be Seeing You" (the old WWII song), Lynda Day is supposed to be out of the loop and quips "Donny and Marie, right?" Okay, it was '78. Can't off the top of my head recall who was it then, but it was NOT Donny and Marie, not music-wise anyway, and certainly not for a woman Lynda's age (even if she was supposed to be perceived as younger than her thirty-plus years).

"I'll Be Seeing You" if I am not mistaken, is played in a Peanuts cartoon (during one of Snoopy's WWII adventures, of course), so kids my age knew that song without having to think Donny and Marie (I am over 20 years younger than Day George).

As well as the song is neither country nor rock'n'roll. Please! Another episode of Love Boat, with Jimmy Baio and Melissa Gilbert, likewise makes a reference to Donny Osmond being a phenomenal singer. Not in the late seventies, whatever he managed to do in the early seventies.

Still I suppose it was really one ABC show promoting another, no doubt. But I have just never forgotten it.

By the time I was Lynda Day George's age, I was completely unaware as to who the hip, up-to-date younger crowd singers were.