Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host, Mallory.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: And I'm your host, Michael.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: We're here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is.
If you haven't yet, be sure to check out mallorysadventures.com and Weird World Adventures is on Amazon prime and Roku. And season two will be here and any moment now. We are editing aggressively, a repeated refrain.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: On the last several weeks of the podcast.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Well, you see how the process. I know it's a very long, rolling endeavor at the end when you have to get deliverables out.
Oh, the deliverables, they're so chunky. And lots of exporting all the fun stuff.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: It's very close.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: It is very close.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: You have exported finished a couple episodes.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: And the rest are at the 98% finish.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah. In the home stretch.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: That last couple percent is just brutal.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: I realistically believe it could be done by this weekend.
Well, if I have the weekend.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: She told me that last weekend, too. And the weekend before that.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: I have the weekend off, so. So just.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Yeah, home stretch. Home stretch.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Anyway, we'll have this conversation again on next week's podcast where it'll be again coming up soon.
[00:01:34] Speaker C: Okay. All right.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: We'll see, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see.
But in celebration of the second season launching on prime and Roku, I wanted to present another interview we have done at the Queen Mary, which was for. And while we were filming season two of Weird World Adventures. This one is kind of a special behind the scenes, extra bonus interview from the Queen Mary.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Yeah. This has more of the practical history of the boat, of the ship.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And what they're trying to do with it now, like PR wise.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah. What they're building now on the brand.
So this happened.
This interview occurred after the big tour interview that's featured primarily in episode.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yes.
It was pretty good. You know, it was pretty exciting because we. We did the big, like, ghost tour interview and it was. It was great.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: And we got all about ghosts.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Yeah. You were like, oh, this is my jam right here. This is so great.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: And then she just makes me be the camera guy for those kind of things.
I'm not trusted to speak during that stuff. I'll ruin it.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: The people that believe this much.
And then we ended in the restaurant, which was really nice.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: The bar restaurant.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: The bar restaurant. That's where we did the interview. So it's kind of more of just the practicality of what we're doing with the Ship now.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: And it was funny because we did this interview, which you're about to hear, and when we finished it, we then left and we're like, oh, we have like a good, like two hours before. Gonna have to do the Dark harbor tonight, which I'm. Dark harbor is my favorite Halloween experience of all time. So I was so excited to show Michael Dark harbor. And we had a couple hours before we had to be there. We can take a nap because, you know, we're like on the go. Filming this will be great. We have some time.
And so we started to walk back to our room to like take a nap because we were exhausted and change clothes.
And we stopped in B340 because that's like the really haunted, quote unquote, like the most. It's their famous haunted room. It's the one that was like on Ghost Hunters that Hold the controversy.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: I do always, like when you say the most haunted or when someone says, what does that mean?
Multiplying by zero is still zero.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: It's the legendary room of legendary. How about that?
[00:04:01] Speaker B: It's famous. Yeah, lore.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Famous lore of the Queen Mary. They used to have mazes called B30.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Yeah, okay.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: I respect the mythology. It's just. Yeah, okay.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: And we're. We're like leaning. You were leaning in the way, taking pictures in there. And I had moved on to take pictures of something else or video. I was doing something else.
And the guy, like one of the. The workers on the ship came up and like tried to scare you.
[00:04:29] Speaker C: I know.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: I felt almost bad because ghosts are just so not my thing that he was like, came up behind me and snuck up and he was like. And I was just like, oh, hello.
It's like, you can scare me, but just ghost thing just doesn't even move them. Just doesn't even move the needle for me. So I was totally unperturbed. And he was just like, oh, I thought I was gonna get you well.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: And then he proceeded to be like, oh, you guys are here filming the ship. Oh, you're tourists. Oh, this is great. Let me take you on another two hour unscripted tour of everything I know about the Queen Mary and show you everything you didn't see in last tour that you did.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: The thing was, he was great. He was great and knew a whole lot and some. And somehow we had just finished essentially a two hour tour of the Queen Mary and then this guy gave us an impromptu two hour tour of the Queen Mary and somehow it didn't really overlap. It was basically new additional Information. And I was just like, how.
[00:05:35] Speaker C: How is this?
[00:05:35] Speaker B: And this guy wasn't even a tour guy.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: He was.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: I forget what his role was. Electronics.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: He works like. Yeah. With the. With the events, like, setting up that Maybe it was the lighting. Yeah.
The tech side.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Yeah, he was on the tech side, but was just so knowledgeable about the ship.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: And he's like, just kinda like, you wanna look for a wedding here? And I'll take you in here. And I'll take you in here. And we. We went all over.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: It was essentially four hours of interviewing and it was just all new information.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it was great. I mean, the ship is also that big.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: I mean, I wish we had basically filmed him. I wish we had recorded that too.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: I know, me too.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: I just didn't.
It wasn't planned.
[00:06:17] Speaker C: So he.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: I thought he was gonna take us one place. And then he was like, let me take you to this next place and this place. And by the time it was done, I was like, God damn, we should have filmed this too.
I didn't know this guy was gonna be somehow the most knowledgeable guy on the ship.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: And I felt that because it had gone on for two hours and we were like, we need to be at Dark harbor in.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: We did 10 minutes.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Like, it was. We were.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: It was a hard out.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Yeah, hard out because we had to enter at a specific time and just full heart out.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: And he would have kept going.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: He would have kept going. I had to be like, oh, sorry.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: We have to go now.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: And then he still, like, did that thing where he wanted to keep talking. And I was like, I know. It was so nice of you.
[00:06:55] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: We really have to go back to Dark harbor now. Our ticket start.
I gotta change my clothes. Yeah, yeah, it was great.
And the one thing that I was like, oh, bummer. Was he used to have the maintenance key for the old pool. Pool. That's something I wanted to see more than anything else. I wanted to see that old pool so bad. But they were using it for the maze. They had, like, actors out there. So he's like, oh, it's closed off and there's actors out there. I take it down there. I'm like, damn it.
[00:07:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Oh, well, that have been cool. We did get to kind of walk through it, though, so.
Through?
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Yeah, during the Mexican. Yeah, yeah, we kind of saw it.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: We walk, like under it, right?
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Or in it or.
I don't know, whatever.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: We walked by it and. Yeah, it was cool.
But anyway, I hope you enjoy this additional bonus interview from The Queen Mary. Bts bts, enjoy.
[00:07:51] Speaker D: Thank you so much for meeting with me today, Steve.
[00:07:53] Speaker C: You're welcome.
[00:07:54] Speaker D: Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the Queen Mary, when it was built and kind of how it progressed throughout time?
[00:08:00] Speaker C: Yeah. So it was built, first put into the water in 1934. That's when the ship was christened by Queen Mary. And then in 1936 is when it first set sail. So it set sail from Southampton, England to New York in 1936. So that was, that was it. And then after that, the ship has been through so much. In 1936, when it first set sail to New York, I mean, it was a luxury liner. It was the place in elegance and class. And it was really a first class, first, first class venue. And, and it was that way until 1940. So when the war was going on in 1940, they, they took the ship over to Australia and in Australia they retrofitted it and painted it like a navy gray.
And that's how the name, the Gray Ghost, came about, is the ship helped transport troops actually throughout the war. And altogether, I believe, was a little over 800,000 troops that they, that they transported back and forth from United States to Europe. And, and at one point, it transported over 16,000 soldiers in one trip. That's still a record. No ship has ever had that many people on a ship across Atlantic. So, yeah, it's pretty great. And then after that, it went back to being the luxury liner that it is. It's just a beautiful ship and, and around, you know, in the 1960s, the 1950s, 1960s, the jetliner was starting to be the thing. So some people felt like, you know, hey, you know, we can get there faster.
So in 1967, Cunard sold the ship to the city of Long Beach. There was different bidders, Philadelphia, New York, but Long Beach, Long beach, you know, won out. And the ship came in in 1967 to Long beach, and then there was a lot of work put on the ship. And in 1971, it became public, open to the public. And then after that, you know, sitting here in Long beach and, and, you know, it's had tremendous success in entertaining the world. Lots of people come from all over and it was out of service for a little bit during COVID and then we just opened last year and, and, and ever since then, it's just, it's great. We're putting, it's a work in progress. We keep on putting a lot of work into it, but, but at the same time, it's just you know, people love the Queen and we love hosting all guests from all over the world, really. So we're having a good time.
[00:10:33] Speaker D: Amazing. Can you tell us about some of the more recent renovations to the ship?
[00:10:38] Speaker C: Yeah, so we, we. We call them like preservation and restorations.
So we're not going into a room and saying, let's just change all the carpet out and all the wallpaper out. We're really going to certain places and. And just fine tuning it. Like in the Observation Bar right here, there's a lot of paint that was put into it. The floor was worked on, all of the brass and the silver was all polished.
So restoration would probably be the main hall. We put a whole new floor in there, but it's linoleum that looks like the original floor in the 1930s. So we did work on that. We did work on the Queen Salon, which is where Bob Hope used to, you know, perform Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby. So we put a lot of work into the Queen Salon.
The decks outside the promenade deck that the original teak wood was hidden over the years, just glossed over. So we sanded that back down to get to the original teak wood floor. So that's what it is right now. So. And then just really working on the sleeping rooms, which we call staterooms. And with the state room, you know, new beds, new, you know, fixtures in there and. Yeah, so it's really cool to stay here overnight as well.
[00:11:55] Speaker D: So you capture a lot of that history.
[00:11:58] Speaker C: Yeah. The goal really is. I mean, the goal on our ship is turn it back into the ship of the 1930s. You know, a lot of times you'll go into a building and they'll say, how do you want to design it? We have a little heads up because we know what worked back in 1936.
So now the goal is, the mission is to get it looking the way it did before. And because it was elegance, it was the elegance of the 1930s.
And that's really our mission is to, you know, to make it so. And not only that, but there's not another Queen Mary, there's not another place like this. So why not just show people what, you know, what passengers felt like back then?
[00:12:35] Speaker D: That's amazing.
[00:12:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:37] Speaker D: And what about this Observation Bar, too? You were just talking about the changes that happened in here.
[00:12:42] Speaker C: Well, the Observation Bar is, you know, there's lots of places on the ship, but this is like the. We always say this is like the, the. The. The heart of the ship is the Observation Bar. And a big part of it is this We, A lot of our, our local friends, neighbors, they come here to the Observation Bar, and we just always. I mean, obviously you see the, the original artwork right here that, you know, you look at the, the, the original light fixtures, and it's really not just a beautiful place because it's original, but because people, locals and, and visitors from all over the world alike, they meet here, they have something in common. You get the best views of Long beach right there on the observation deck. But this really is the. I believe it's the heart of the Queen. The Queen Mary here at the Observation Bar.
[00:13:30] Speaker D: I have to ask, too, have you seen anything strange yet? I know we heard a lot of stories on our tour earlier.
[00:13:37] Speaker C: Before we opened up the ship last year, but I don't know if I was just hallucinating or what, but. No, I haven't seen anything. But I believe that people do see things and I believe that people do have encounters, but I have not. I have not yet.
[00:13:55] Speaker D: Is there anything else you'd like to tell us about upcoming events or things you're looking to promote for the Queen Mary?
[00:14:00] Speaker C: Well, there's a lot of, you know, on our website, on our website, it's queenmary.com WhatsOnDeck so when, when guests go on there, they can see everything.
So to your question, we have art deco dances.
We have something. We have the Veterans Day coming up on November 11th, and we're offering, we're offering free admission to all veterans and their families on November 11th. We have the 12 Days of Christmas coming up in December.
We have New Year's Eve, which is a blast New Year's Eve. I mean, it's about 10 different parties on the ship that night and then concludes at midnight with a fireworks show just for Queen Mary guests. So there's just lots of things going on. We do numerous meetings which are meetings and conferences which a lot of people don't know about. They think of the weddings, they think of the gala, but they don't think about the meetings and conferences. But we're doing more and more of those. But it's just a fun ship. There's always something going on. The Royal Sunday brunch every Sunday with music. The best part of the Sunday brunch is when people start dancing in front of the band. So it's great. We're having a lot of fun here.
[00:15:11] Speaker D: Fantastic. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
[00:15:14] Speaker C: You're welcome. It's my pleasure. It's great having you here on the Queen Mary.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: It's always so nice to hear about the Queen Mary. I don't know. It's nice to reminisce because we had such a good time.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: I, before you told me about it especially, essentially knew nothing about the Queen Mary.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: I know you thought it was nothing.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: The name vaguely rang bells, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about it. And I certainly didn't know it was a place you could stay that did fully interactive stuff.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: You got out of the car and you're like, oh, my gosh, that's a huge ship. I think were your exact words.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a giant Titanic looking cross cruising ship just permanently docked and kind of moored to the dock. And you just stay on it.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: I was like, what did you expect?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: And you're like, not this.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what he said. You're like, not this. This is not all what I expected.
It's a floating city. That's what the guy said. Floating city. Walt Disney spent a lot of time on there.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Anyways, yeah, it was cool seeing and hearing what they're trying to do with it now. Definitely going forward.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: Yeah, very cool.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: Appreciated the extra interview there, bts.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Yeah, it was awesome. And stay tuned next week when we definitely will have Weird World adventures.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: We'll see. We'll see. I'm not banking it.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Wow. You see all the work that goes into it.
You can edit it somehow.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: I got dragged into some of this work.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Yeah, you did.
[00:16:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I did.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Just the fun stuff, though, the voiceovers not making you export anything.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: That's kind of what I'm good at though, is the tech stuff.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: You want to do the caption file.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: I've been misappropriated.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: I'll put you on the caption files.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: I'm good.
You seem like you have it under control.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I do.
And it's not like last time where it was just six episodes. This is 12. So it's very substantial the amount of.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: We planned 10. And two of them became so in depth that they needed to be two separate episodes. So there are 12 episodes now.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: It's gonna be great.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: It's gonna be good. We've already started filming season three.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Yay.
Yep, yep, yep.
Alrighty. Thank you so much for tuning in today, guys. Stay tuned next week to see whether or not Weird World is done.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Dun, dun, dun.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Until next time, everybody. I'm your host, Mallory.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: And I'm your host, Michael.
Stay weird.
