Before Jean-Luc Picard became TV’s sexy captain, there was another…and he had his own fragrance!

Before this gentleman became TV’s best known sexy bald ship’s captain…

…this guy was, and he had his own fragrance, too:

Click the ad to see it at full size.

Gavin MacLeod, who played “Happy” Haines on McHale’s Navy in the 1960s and “Murray” on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, played Captain Merrill Stubing on The Love Boat from the late ’70s to mid-’80s. For those of you who never saw the show — consider yourself fortunate — The Love Boat was a sitcom that revolved around a cruise ship, its wacky crew, and guest stars that would appear in every episode.

The show enjoyed consistently high ratings for most of its run, which made MacLeod a big enough star to rate his own cologne…made by Hormel. As in the people who make Spam (the woefully-underappreciated luncheon meat, not the unsolicited commercial email).

The great injustice is that there was never a fragrance named for “Julie, the cruise director”. I had such a crush on that character:

The two captains would finally overlap in the early 1990s, when Patrick Stewart guest-hosted Saturday Night Live, taking some very un-funny writing and through his acting and charm, turned them into some very funny skits. The most notable of the skits was Love Boat: The Next Generation, where Stewart played Picard as the captain of a spacefaring cruise ship:

The skit was popular enough among Trek fans that people have cosplayed it:

I’ll close with the 1979 opening of The Love Boat, complete with that karaoke-friendly stick-in-your-head theme song: