Love. Exciting and new.
Come aboard. We're expecting you.
Love, life's sweetest reward.
Let it flow. It floats back to yooooooooooou.
The Love Boat! Soon will be making another run!
The Love Boat! Promises something for everyone!
Set a course for adventure, your mind on a new romance.
And love...
Won't hurt anymore.
It's an open smile, on a friendly shore.
Yes, love!
It's love!
Welcome aboard, it's loooooooooooove!

Oh, it's the same alright. Nothing's changed on the "Love Boat" this sophomore season except the guest passenger list and the ever-morphing rationalizations for the rampant sexual harassment plaguing the Pacific Princess. And aren't you glad they left it alone? Paramount has released The Love Boat - Season Two, Volume One, splitting up the series' 1978-1979 season into two parts, with 13 episodes gathered here for your love/sea sick approval. Cripes, seemingly everybody in old and new late '70s Hollywood answered the ship-to-shore call to appear on creators Aaron Spelling's and Douglas Cramer's The Love Boat, so those who love to play the "Who's That Legend/Up-and-Comer/Flash-in-the-Pan/Has-Been/Never-Was?" game will no doubt respond to the bright, chipper romantic comedy machinations of this classic 70s and 80s Saturday night staple. So dock your dinghies (sure I wrote that) and come aboard!

After having written two spirited (read: "insane" to those who hate this show) defenses of The Love Boat's first season (you can read Volume One here, and Volume Two here), I'm not going to delve again too deeply into the show's aesthetics or structure (because frankly, I can't take the hate mail). And if any series from the late 1970s stayed resolutely the same from season to season, it was The Love Boat. Sure, tweaks to the format were coming (ominously, Captain Stubing's daughter Vicki, played by Jill Whelan, shows up briefly in this volume...and lets not even bring up The Love Boat Mermaids in the final season), but by and large, Cramer's and Spelling's formula wasn't tampered with over the nine-year run. Fashioned like an episode from Love, American Style (ABC's earlier romantic comedy anthology hit) set at sea, the premise for the series was quite simple and therefore, comfortably predictable week after week. The crew of the Pacific Princess, docked in Los Angeles, welcomed aboard six hundred passengers every week for a three-day cruise down to Mexico (usually Puerto Vallarta). And among those six hundred passengers, the TV audience would get to know about half a dozen or so, featured (usually) in three subplots during the hour-long episode, linked by the crew members' sequences. The ship's crew oftentimes were featured prominently within these subplots (particularly Julie, whose romantic life was fodder for many episodes), where they interacted with the passengers as well as having stories centered around their jobs and lives aboard the Pacific Princess.

Cruise Director Julie McCoy was the incredibly perky, corn-fed, blue-eyed beauty who was responsible for making sure everyone on board had a good time (and if that included hooking up two lonely passengers, Julie didn't seem to mind the implications of that particular job duty), aided frequently in her efforts by good-natured goof Yeoman Purser Burl "Gopher" Smith (Fred Grandy). Isaac Washington (Ted Lange), the head bartender on the Pacific Princess, always had a ready smile for the passengers, while Ship's Doctor (and resident Lothario) Adam Bricker (Bernie Kopell) always had a ready bed for any gorgeous girl who happened to cross his path (and there were plenty of them). Overseeing this energetic, happy crew was the stern, fatherly Captain Merrill Stubing (Gavin MacLeod) who often had to warn his eager, rambunctious crew to stay in line and maintain the dignity expected of them on board ship. But often, Captain Stubing would let down his guard and show the crew that he was human, and capable of sharing in their fun.

On second thought, after reconsidering the "spectacular" two-hour season opener here, Marooned/The Search/Isaac's Holiday, perhaps I was a bit hasty in writing that the formula was rarely tweaked - because this episode includes a rather bizarre little side trip to a deserted island for the crew (all except Isaac) and some select passengers. Deserted, that is, save for crazed hermit John Astin (I'm not making this up) who holds everyone hostage until they throw him...a surprise birthday party. Reading that back, I'm not surprised that The Love Boat suffered a bit of a drop in ratings this second season; poor even by Love Boat standards, this ridiculous retread of a Gilligan's Island episode, for chrissakes (and I love Gilligan, so don't email), is about as far a field of The Love Boat formula as you can get. Granted, seeing Barbie Benton in her prime without a bra on is a small but notable pleasure, but watching Avery Schreiber and Edie Adams have the most bizarre fight in The Minnow's community hut while a hurricane rages outside (!) seems to miss the point of the series entirely. It doesn't help that the mood of this particular piece is all over the place, going from slapstick to angry drama to tense medical drama (?) as Gopher is in critical condition after a palm tree falls on his head (why did the Captain tell Gopher to go outside in the hurricane to check on the roof...when the roof inside the hut was fine? Because he wanted to kill Gopher. That's why). I've written before about season opener episodes, and how important they can be in setting the expectation mood for loyal fans of a series (as well as in their efforts to snag new viewers); anyone tuning into this waterlogged mishmash must have wondered if The Love Boat formula had run aground.

Fortunately, no other major deviations to the show's format occur - at least not in these first 13 episodes, although the introduction of Captain Stubing's daughter into the mix will certainly, in the future, test the patience of those who found her character just a tad...icky. No doubt brought on board when the network suits recognized that families were watching The Love Boat together on Saturday nights (even more so this second season, when it was moved from its 10:00pm spot to 9:00pm), her character was designed to appeal to the small fry out there while offering lead star MacLeod's character room to grow, with more story options, too, as Captain Stubing discovered that "parenting" a crew was quite a different thing than being an actual parent. As I wrote before, ratings took a bit of a dip this sophomore season, as The Love Boat went from 14th to 17th in the Nielsen ratings. Not having a good, solid opening hour didn't exactly help matters (8:30pm's Apple Pie was quickly canceled, with 8:00pm's inexplicable Carter Country moved up, and fast-fading Welcome Back, Kotter taking its place), while CBS's 9-11:00pm movie block (after American Girls was cancelled and Dallas moved to Sundays) ate into The Love Boat's demos (CHiPs, one of only four NBC hits in the Top Thirty that year, did quite well at the Saturday 8:00pm spot, but a series of rotating "specials" at 9-11:00pm offered little opposition to Spelling's series). Despite this and next season's further drop (down ominously to 24th place), the series managed to come back spectacularly in the ratings (as we'll see in later seasons), eventually enjoying a healthy nine-year run.

Here are the 13, one-hour episodes of the four-disc set, The Love Boat: Season Two, Volume One. A brief note: in very small type on the back of the DVD box, it states: "Some episodes may be edited from their original network versions" (my italics). If you're at all familiar with TV on DVD, you know, then, that this issue of edited TV episodes is probably the most hotly-debated discussion concerning the DVD format (with some people believing that the studios put this disclaimer on all vintage TV sets to cover any potential lawsuit). There is no indication of what the cuts might be (I noted the word "music" weren't included - which usually is to cover licensing problems), with the episodes timing out to around 50 minutes each, which seems about right for these 1978 run times (minus the commercials):

DISC ONE

Marooned / The Search / Isaac's Holiday
Donna Mills discovers her long-lost mother Laraine Day is also David Birney's mom...after she's slept with him! Barbie Benton looks good in a red one-piece, and Lola Falana makes a date with Isaac. Audra Lindley is dying...and yet still has enough sense to fall in love with deranged hermit John Astin, while Edie Adams can't get along with Avery Schreiber. Norm Crosby serves up some drinks and strangely, no malapropisms.

Rocky / Julie's Dilemma / Who's Who?
Jimmy Baio and Melissa Gilbert manage to mention every hit currently running on ABC; James Coco falls in love with prudish TV censor Dody Goodman, while Julie's parents, Norman Fell and Betty Garrett, take one last cruise together before they divorce (thanks, Mom and Dad, for coming to my place of work to tell me that...so I can watch you fight for three days).

The Man Who Loved Women / A Different Girl / Oh, My Aching Brother
Charlie's Angles' Bosley (David Doyle) manages to make Soap's Cathryn Damon, Brett Somers and Jo Ann Pflug fall in love with him simultaneously...and not get mad at him when they find out the truth. Sonny Bono and Marty Ingels (possibly the worst-looking duo to ever hit the Pacific Princess) work up a slip-and-fall scam...until Judy Landers catches Sonny's eye, while Grant Goodeve and Bess Armstrong ignite zero sparks as a boring couple with a boring problem. Or something.

DISC TWO

Julie's Aunt / Where is it Written? / The Big Deal The parade of the crews' relatives coming onboard continues unabated with Captain Stubing's uncle, Red Buttons, actively, systematically, and rather uncomfortably harassing Julie for sex...until Gopher dresses up in drag as her "Aunt Phoebe." Publisher Gene Barry is more interested in getting Richard Mulligan's final book chapter than seeing the danger signs popping up between the lothario author and Gene's neglected wife, Hope Lange. And Alan Ludden, desperate for a corporate merger, almost pimps out his daughter Mackenzie Phillips to businessman Sam Groom for a very different kind of merger - one that Mackenzie already had with Erik Estrada.

Mike and Ike / The Witness / The Kissing Bandit
Billy Crystal...puts a mask on and a white tuxedo and goes around kissing women...women who seem to enjoy it (even Nancy Kulp and Pat Carroll). Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. have moved up in the world, and they don't want Isaac teaching doo-wop to their son, Todd Bridges, while Robert Reed (in a typically good performance) is quite effective as a reluctant witness to the murder of Toni Tennille's brother.

Ship of Ghouls
Vincent Price (that's right!), along with his wife Joan Blondell, is onboard, hypnotizing everyone into thinking they're seeing the strangest things, while Mary Ann Mobley and Gary Collins can't figure out why their kid keeps lying to people. Oh, and it's Halloween.

DISC THREE

A Time for Everything / The Song is Ended / Accidental Cruise / Anoushka
One of the most truly bizarre episodes in the series. I'm not kidding: Loretta Swit is a Commie from Russia, in charge of her country's cruise ships (?). She's onboard the Pacific Princess to learn how those Yankee capitalist pigs run a successful cruise line, while extolling the virtues of the gender-blind Soviet Union, where jobs - and plenty of them! - are given to people based on their skills. And she falls in love with Doc. Meanwhile, Jo Anne Worley is chasing a reluctant Soupy Sales, while Richard Dawson is wooing Juliet Mills away from his former songwriting partner, Robert Goulet (!). And get this: the producers give Dawson (the host of ABC's hit game show Family Feud) the solo number, while Goulet sits there with a sickly grin pasted onto this face, with smoke coming out of the top of his head, listening to Dawson murder that song. Hilariously sick. Oh, and Captain Stubing had an illegitimate daughter. She'll be back.

Till Death Do Us Part - Maybe / Locked Away / Chubs Jimmie "J.J." Walker is a ghost (yep), guiding his wife Vernee Watson towards smoothie Greg Morris, while Conrad Bain and Janet Leigh (there's a pairing!) are locked up together in a cabin while their daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, has absolutely nothing to do. More crew relatives: Gopher's formerly fat sister, Chubs (I kid you not) returns as the svelte Melissa Sue Anderson...and sets her sights on Doc.

Man of the Cloth / Her Own Two Feet / Tony's Family Van Johnson leads around his blind wife June Allyson, while cruise line employee Larry Storch has his family stow away with him for Thanksgiving. Oh, yeah; Peter Graves is a minister with the hots for stripper Roz "Pinky Tuscadaro" Kelly...which doesn't suit parishioner Vivian Blaine at all (despite her husband Allan Young's entreaties to shut the hell up).

DISC FOUR

Heads or Tails / Mona of the Movies / The Little People Patricia McCormack is terrified that any child she has with just-met Edward Albert will be little people, like his father Billy Barty and his mother, Patty Maloney. Adam Arkin and Richard Gilliland pursue Julie (on a pizza bet), while Orson Bean tries to overcome his feelings of inadequacy when screen legend Rhonda Fleming (still looking great) takes a shine to him.

The Captain's Cup / The Folks From Home / Legal Eagle Bert Convy's ex-wife's divorce lawyer, Leigh Taylor-Young, is open to some additional billings hours with him, while Florence Henderson makes over crewmember Pat Harrington to fool Captain Stubing. Oh, and Doc performs an emergency spleenectomy on John McIntire's wife, Jeanette Nolan

El Kid / The Last Hundred Bucks / Isosceles Triangle Jobless Dabney Coleman may be trying to snag Rue McClanahan for her dough, while Heather Menzies and Robert Urich make a big mistake in adopting thieving Gabriel Melgar. And Connie Stevens has Doc and the Captain chasing after her (god help her).

Julie Falls Hard / Double Wedding / The Dummies David Nelson and Fred Travelena are friends (borrrrrriiiiinnng), while Julie falls hard for...Tony Roberts??? And Sid Caesar is ventriloquist partners with...Ruth Buzzi (I'm not saying a thing).

The DVDs:

The Video:
In keeping with the previous two releases, The Love Boat: Season Two, Volume One looks better than it ever did on TV in 1978, or in the thousands of its reruns. Colors are saturated and correctly valued, and the full screen, 1.33:1 image is remarkably sharp for a 31-year-old series (some minor scratches and dirt do pop up, but in comparison to the original episode promos that are included - which have really terrible VHS-quality transfers - this show looks good).

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English 2.0 mix is in big fat mono, which is fine for this series (there's a Spanish mono mix, too). All dialogue is cleanly rendered, and English and Spanish subtitles are included.

The Extras:
The only extras, criminally, are the original episode promos that ran right before the credits rolled for the show. You can view the episodes with or without them.

Final Thoughts:
There are some very odd pairings this go-around on The Love Boat (Janet Leigh with Conrad Bains wins hands-down), but the formula, with the exception of the wildly inconsistent season opener, is left intact. So those looking to check their brains at the dock, and paddle along for a few hours with the Pacific Princess crew as they facilitate another 30-some-odd hook-ups, you can't go wrong with The Love Boat: Season Two, Volume One; I recommend it.