CRUISING: DESTINATION NOWHERE - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 97

The Mardi Gras was not large enough to accommodate all this entertainment, so Aris-
on bought its sister ship and named it Carnivale. This time Arison had his model ready
and Carnivale turned a profit its first year. By then the company had discovered its theme.
In his book Selling the Sea , coauthored with Andy Vladimir, Bob Dickinson wrote that
when he joined Carnival Cruise Lines in 1973 the firm fixed on the term “fun ship” to
describe their cruises. “The ship itself became a destination and the ports of call became
green stamps [extra bonus]. This was a total reversal of previous cruise marketing. Up to
that time, cruise promotion had been destination driven,” he wrote.
“By focusing on the ship rather than the ports of call, Carnival could communicate to
the public what the experience of the ship and cruising on her was all about.”
Popular culture caught on to the potential romantic appeal of cruises. Hollywood vet-
eran Aaron Spelling created a television series that starred one of these new cruise ships as
the locale of romance and glamour. The Love Boat went on air in 1977 and was a Saturday
night staple for a decade. Shot aboard ships from the Princess line, now part of Carnival
Cruise Lines, the show featured new passengers sorting out their love lives with the help
of the sympathetic captain and crew and a bevy of ship dancers known as the “Love Boat
Mermaids.”
Each episode opened with the lush and pounding theme song: “Love—exciting and
new—Come aboard, we're expecting you,” followed by shots of the jazzy guest stars who
romanced each other while sailing from California to Mexico and back. No public rela-
tions campaign could have done a better job of wiping away the old cruise image of the
aged playing shuffleboard and comparing stock tips. These cruises were for the young, the
dynamic and, yes, the middle class. It was a floating party.
Enter Kathie Lee Gifford, the entertainer hired by Carnival Cruise Lines to sing a com-
pany jingle that lodged permanently into American culture. While the camera followed
her around a cruise ship, jumping down a water slide, having her nails done, lifting a glass
at dinner and posing with show girls, Gifford sang a tweaked version of “Ain't We Got
Fun,” the paean to the poor from the golden age of the flapper and the very wealthy. The
original lyrics were:
Every morning, every evening, ain't we got fun?
Not much money, Oh, but honey, ain't we got fun?
The rent's unpaid dear, we haven't a bus.
But smiles were made dear, for people like us.
For the Carnival commercial, the stanza was transformed from happy commiseration
to a pitch for cruises for the spending classes.
Every morning, every evening, ain't we got fun?