THE LOVE BOAT

A little more than a year ago I posted on The Best Cruise Disaster Films.  Then a few months later I reinforced that topic.  Titanic was a particularly popular movie, getting 89/69 ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, and was 3 hours and 15 minutes long.

If I did my mathematics correctly, there is another cruise production that ran for almost 200 hours.  The Love Boat had a pilot in 1976, then lasted on television from 1977 to 1986, followed by four 3-hour long specials in 1986, 1987 and 1990.  

I bring up this subject because the ship used for the television series was the Pacific Princess, the sister of Island Princess.  But this was not the Island Princess we will be on for our around the world adventure beginning on 19 January 2022.  The first Island Princess began operation in 1972 as the Island Venture.  In 1974 she was sold to P&O's Princess Cruises with the Sea Venture.  They were renamed the Island Princess and Pacific Princess.  Turns out that both ships were used for the sitcom.

They were 554 feet long with a beam of 81 feet, and built at Nordseewerke, West Germany.  The engine was of Fiat Diesel design.  They had eight decks and carried 646 passengers at a top speed of 24.7 MPH.  However, the Pacific Princess (right) underwent an upgrade to 780 passengers later in her life.

This first Island Princess remained in the Princess fleet until 1999, when she was sold to a South Korean company and renamed the Hyundai Pungak to transport pilgrims to religious sites in North Korea.  Then it had a major refit between 2001 and 2003, renamed the Platinum.  She was again refurbished in the 2012-13 period and became the Discovery, and had management problems.  She finally became the AMEN and was scuttled in 2015.  

The Love Boat, the Pacific Princess, kept that name, and in the process of cruising, became a major tool for drug smugglers in the Mediterranean, and essentially retired in 2012 to undergo ship breaking.  The dismantling occurred in 2013, killing two men in the process.  However, the Pacific Princess is credited to have increase the popularity of cruise ship travel.

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  About the TV show, there were always guest star actors,  32 with Oscar credentials:  Olivia de Havilland, Luise Rainer, Shelley Winters, Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, Janet Gaynor, Kathy Bates, Tom Hanks, Tim Robbins, Gene Kelley, Mickey Rooney, Debbie Reynolds....
• Aaron Spelling was the executive producer.
• Made TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of all time.

Today, Princess still has ships with those same names.  Here is a graphic showing their relative sizes today.  The metric used is k for gross tonnage.  

Thus, the Pacific Princess is the smallest of the fleet, with a passenger capacity of 826, a bit more than the original.

The Island Princess for our global cruise.

The largest Princess ship is the Sky, built in 2019:

Would have been nice if our around the world ship was the Sky Princess.  Our Island Princess:

• Was constructed in France and launched in 2002 at a cost of $330 million.
• So, almost 20 years old.  
• But was refurbished in 2017 into:

Princess MedallionClass™

Make the most of your vacation time. With Princess MedallionClass vacations featuring the OceanMedallion, you can experience a more personalized and hassle-free vacation, so you can do more of what you love. MedallionClass essentially promotes health and has the best WiFi at Sea.

• Our world cruise, from 19 January 2022 to 11 May 2022 from Los Angeles:

Cruise Critic lists the top 20 cruise movies that they say will make you want to sail.  Here, chronologically:

• 1931  Monkey Business (...the whole film, Rotten Tomatoes 89/84):  This is the one with the stowaway room sequence.
• 1937  Shall We Dance (RT: 89/85)  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with the music of Ira and George Gershwin.

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  1939  Love Affair (...this is the whole movie, RT:86:71)  Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne fall in love on a transatlantic cruise.  Do they meet again?
• 1951  Royal Wedding (RT: 92/69)   This is the film where Astaire dances on the ceiling.

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  1953  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (RT:98/83)  You might have remembered Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, but forgot that Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend takes place on a cruise ship.
• 1957  An Affair to Remember (RT: 65/87)  Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr fall in love on a cruise.
• 1997  Out to Sea (RT: 36/52...actually, I enjoyed this film)   Walter Matthau cons Jack Lemmon to become dance instructors on a Holland America ship known then as the Westerdam.

There were more, but here is another link on how to stream cruise films.  They even recommended the 2011 Jack and Jill, starring Adam Sandler, which got a 3 rating from Rotten Tomatoes reviewers, meaning one of the worst movies ever made.  But, ah, it is filmed on one of Royal Caribbean's Oasis Class vessels.

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