Usually "The Love Boat" is thankfully innocuous. It tries to offend no one. In the LB's Japanese cruise the biases of the producers, writers and director are on full display.
In Hollywood, even when the have tight TV budgets, money is slung around. It may not seem much when we hear Doc was paid nearly 40,000 bucks an episode; but during that period my father earned fifty dollars a day plus commissions. Hollywood writers claim they hate the rich and the often write horrible things about them, but whom they really despise is the nouveau riche. And their fellow Americans.
In one notorious story-line Ted Knight (the Captain's erstwhile colleague on Mary Tyler Moore's show) and talented Academy Award winner Rita Moreno play middle-American lottery winners. The are incredibly gauche. They flaunt their wealth (Hollywood stars would never do that). Rather than show a hint of glee for the good fortune of a couple who have worked hard all their lives and still never had anything, living like most ordinary folk on the edge of disaster, they ratchet up the heat. At one point Knight's character buys a jacket in Japan with UCLA on it, thinking it's a Japanese word. Ha-ha, these ding-a-ling middle Americans, they're so stupid the never heard of UCLA. And toward the end they fall into the trite stereotype of how much happier they were when they were poor. Baloney. I've been poor all my life, sometimes living from paycheck to paycheck AND YOU CAN HAVE IT. Some of these Hollywood writers who have contempt for ordinary middle America, and who can't dream up anything but hackneyed situations solved by bromides should be kicked out of their jobs, get real work like most people do, and maybe they'll have more respect for their fellow citizens than to rake this muck.
Another yarn they've spun features an actor I've always liked, James Shigeta. A fine actor, he should, with his voice and calm self-assutance in front of the camera, have been playing Shakespeare, or other finely-limned characters in good dramas. In fact, Hollywood nearly always cast him as Oriental villains because he didn't fit its narrow notion of what middle Americans should look like. A great actor's career was limited because of Hollywood's tunnel vision. I'm as middle American as they come and I'd like to have seen him in better parts. It's Hollywood that held him back.
Shigeta is the key to the oh-so serious thread of story running through this tripe. Heather Thomas plays a woman whose father has been in a wheelchair all her life because he took a Japanese bullet in World War 2. Traumatic. Never mind, America was minding its own business in what is ignorantly called "isolationism" (actually, after the oft-repeated horrors of the Great War lots of Americans didn't feel the necessity of charging headlong into another European war--Europe made Hitler, let them deal with him: why should we die by the millions for your problem?).
Then came Pearl Harbor. To be fair, it wasn't the "sneak attack" it's often called. But it was unnecessary aggression toward a neutral power. Even Hitler didn't invade Switzerland. If Pearl Harbor and Japanese military aggression and thinking they were the Master Race (had the Axis powers won or at least destroyed the USSR's power the Japanese and the National Socialists would gave had to duke it out for that title) were mentioned, I missed it. But they mentioned Hiroshima! What they should have mentioned was the vital importance of Nagasaki: it had Japan's largest Christian community and it was the Truman-Democrats statement that if you don't surrender we'll invade and destroy you whatever religion you follow, even if it's that of middle America. Japan got the point. Most Americans didn't want the war and America didn't start it but we by God ended it. We didn't drop the bomb on Nagasaki because they were Japanese but because they were Christian.
And for a country that got dragged into the war by Japanese military aggression we did more that lose one man's ability to walk. Compare American casualties to Japanese. And think of the Americans liberating National Socialist death camps. It was a rotten war but that God the Allies (the United States + the others) won it.
Again, Thomas' character didn't have the attitudes of middle America as Hollywood's imagining of those attitudes, because they're so much superior to the rest of us clods and bumpkins. Or are they?
The third thread of storyline concerns Mariette Hartley playing a supposed Japanese scholar. Well, I've studied Japanese history in a minor way because I'm interested in the history of all cultures and countries and seeing how we all fit together; looking not for our differences but what we share in common as humans. And my studies took me to more in-depth material than the coffee-table fare she handed out.
But here's the clincher: Hartley spends half her time mincing around as a Geisha, in kimono and black wig and painted face, with a lousy faux-Japanese accent. Hard-working nouveau riche ding-a-ling Americans are depicted as idiots, but the writers by golly handed us the most whitebread women on TV who is supposed to be caring and cultured and put her in a part tantamount to a Minstrel Show.
Three lousy, stupid, unfeeling and biased stories (both ways) and factoids about Japan, its history and culture doled out with all the subtlety of a second-grade social studies film strip.
I'm fascinated by Japan's history and culture; but as I implied I'm fascinated by everyone's history and culture. I've studied it and appreciate it on a deep level. And I love "The Love Boat." But I'll never take this cruise again.
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