Remembering Happy Days

Sounds Good!

I spent a huge amount of my childhood watching re-runs of Happy Days. I started watching it when the original series was winding up. But I didn’t know that. The timeline was all out of whack for me for a while there – I was a young kid and I didn’t, for what seemed like the longest time, know that it was actually filmed in the 70s and 80s. I believed – for a while, anyway – its idealised version of America in the 1950s and 60s. Wanted to, anyway. The music, the cars, the milkshakes. These nerdy guys and the roller-skating girls – it was a cartoon fantasy world really, but it was good, good times…

You’d wait for the needle to drop on the record and for that jukebox to light up. It was usually tea-time, or just about to be, or – if you were really lucky – you’d just finished dinner. And if you could squeeze in a full episode of Happy Days you were doing well.

Everything about the show was wonderful to me – including the fact that the show was just a little bit shit. I might have even known that at the time, but if I did I sure didn’t care. Happy Days was escapism in a dream-world sense. That nearly-caricature recreation of the 1950s and 60s shaped my view of the world for a while – as I started to pick up a little of the wiggle from rock’n’roll music and the nerds/cool-guys vibe. Funny that Fonzie, when you watch it now, seems a far bigger geek than Richie Cunningham ever was. Don’t you think?

I always liked Richie. I didn’t identify with him – at least not particularly. But I liked his morally upright, clean-cut character.

My older brother got me up to speed though – taught me, fairly quickly, that Happy Days was actually filmed in the 1970s, even on into the 1980s. And that we were constantly watching re-runs of it, forever in syndication it seemed.

Mr and Mrs Cunningham were such a great TV mum and dad. And those dumb-ass goofs, Potsie and Ralph Malph.

Then you’d start to spotting people that you knew from contemporary shows and films – they started their career back here. Ted McGinley from the Revenge of the Nerds movie and Married With Children – he was Roger Philips. The Karate Kid’s Pat Morita was Arnold, Scott Baio (Charles in Charge) was Chachi – the Fonz’s little cousin. There were way more beyond that. The spin-off shows too – Joanie Loves Chachi had the Fonz’s lil cousin hooked up with Richie C’s lil sister, Laverne & Shirley had the two girls who were friends of Fonzie off in their own world (I didn’t click for a while that this, too, was set in the late 1950s/1960s) and Mork & Mindy. Robin Williams’ alien was a one-off for a silly episode of Happy Days, he was so popular they gave him his own show. In Mork & Mindy they didn’t even bother to set it in the 50s/60s, just straight to the late 1970s/early 1980s – the time when it was being shot.

Much has been made of the Shark-Jump episode from season five of Happy Days. Here the Fonz answers a bravery challenge by agreeing – in a three-part episode – to jump over a shark. He’s there in tighty swimming trunks but of course his leather jacket still. The phrase “jumping the shark” comes from this episode – it’s that moment when in an act of desperation a band, a TV show, a movie, a writer loses the plot by trying something so utterly absurd and losing sight and sense of what their work was once about.

Fair enough – it is a stupid moment. But Happy Days was full of them. Remember this happened just half-way through the show’s run. They had more shit to fling at the wall after this.

And as a kid I loved that shark-jump episode. I loved how stupid it was. The stupidity summed up almost immediately by Fonzie in togs and that leather jacket.

Happy Days was unstoppable.

Until it stopped.

Unbelievable now, when you watch the old re-runs, to think it ran for a decade.

But I credit it with my obsession for almost all things American pop-culture – high-school geek movies, rock’n’roll and laugh-track sitcoms. All daft. All good fun.

I had a lot of happy days watching Happy Days. I dare not revisit the show now. I know I’d loathe it. It’s best kept as some strange, mad thing from the time when I was growing up. Somehow the 1970s TV-land version of America in the 1950s made total sense to me as a kid in Hawke’s Bay in the 1980s. It was magical – a fantasyland I longed for. I hung on every word. Every alien-character walk-on. Every rock-star cameo (Suzi Quatro). Every dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers plot-twist. The way the show marched on when main characters left. Just invented more. Created so many spin-off shows.

It was unbeatable.
And then it just imploded.
How perfect.