And there were only three networks. (PBS doesn’t count, nor do independent stations if you were lucky enough to have one in your market or available on cable.) If you couldn’t find something to watch on the Big 3, you were out of luck.
“Happy Days” was inspired by the success of “American Graffiti,” but there was one glaring difference: the parents. There were no parents in the movie. It was all about the kids. With the exception of Wolfman Jack and a few others here and there, “American Graffiti” was devoid of adults. I always thought the family aspect of “Happy Days” was weak, and I wonder how it may have played out had it focused entirely or at least predominantly on the kids.
However, they were doing a TV series, not a movie, and they needed as many plot options as possible.
Love American Style had an unsold pilot run as an episode titled “Love And the Television Set” (later Love and the Happy Days). Because of Ron Howard’s acting in the pilot, Lucas cast him in American Graffiti. The success of which led back around to Happy Days being picked up.
Fun fact: Howard, as the ostensible lead, had slipped in a “most favored nation’s” clause in his contract, that he would always be the highest paid actor. Which helped immeasurably when Fonzie’s popularity took off.
Thanks to Happy Days we have Ron Howard the director. I can’t complain.
There weren’t any. Chuck was in college, and so was away in most episodes. Even when he was home, he didn’t do much except bounce his basketball around. Even in those episodes where he did appear, it’s pretty obvious that they didn’t really know what to do with him. It’s not surprising that he was written out.
It’s not quite true to say that television in the Happy Days era was “pathetically awful.” When Happy Days premiered in 1974, shows like All in the Family, MASH, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had already been on for some time. There had already been a noticeable uptick in quality of TV since the end of the 60s and the downfall of the Paul Henning empire in the “rural purge.”
I loved Happy Days as a kid. I’m just the right age to have watched it as I was growing up. I haven’t looked at an episode in years now, which is probably a good thing for my nostalgia-tinted memories.
I’m thinking they just about missed that window given the 20 year nostalgia cycle that seems to have been established.
Watching Happy Days as a kid, I really didn’t have a grasp on how recent (at least by my current Old Guy standards) the setting was. I would have placed it somewhere near Little House on the Prairie if I were drawing up a timeline. Much earlier than those two, any show would have had to involve dinosaurs as far as my view into the past went.
I enjoyed it as a teen - 13 when it came out. I watched A LOT (too much) of TV back then, and pretty sure HD was in my regular rotation.
I recall especially finding Ritchie’s interactions with his parents hysterical. I’m sure it wouldn’t hold up well today.
Was a fan of Ron Howard from Andy Griffith, and remembered enjoying American Graffiti. Really liked the old cars and 50s nostalgia (tho I later shifted my preference in cars to 69-72 A-bodies…)
For whatever reason, I never got into Laverne and Shirley at the time, tho my later suspicion was that it was the better show.
If Happy Days was 16 years behind the then-present day, can you imagine that now? A nostalgic show for the simpler, happier days of…2008? I’m getting misty-eyed just thinking about it!
I just turned 60. So my birth and Pearl Harbor is about now and 9/11.
WWII and the 50s and the dawn of hippies are all in the 20 years before I was born and seem like three different worlds. Now and 9/11? Not so much with the exception of social media and even that doesn’t seem that different.
I’d watch a dramedy set in NYC in the aftermath of 9/11. Group of friends dealing with all of the tension, etc. I think that era is ripe for stories now.
Same here. I was a single digit age for most of its run.
I remember an episode where Richie called someone ‘bucko’. I’d never heard that term and I asked my brother what it meant. He told me “That’s the meanest, worst swear word you could ever call someone.” He was my unreliable mentor.
There was one. Richie is tired of having little to no privacy at home, so he convinces his parents and Chuck that he should move in with Chuck at college. Chuck’s place is basically a studio apartment. Things go awry when the hide-a-bed for Richie doesn’t fully pull out, when Chuck is always dribbling his basketball preventing Richie from studying or sleeping, and on the one night that Chuck is out, Richie and his date still have no privacy, because the gang (and their dates) all show up too.
So Chuck, and his apartment, was necessary for this plot, but I’d suggest that was the only one. Otherwise, Chuck served no purpose on the show. He’d show up for meals, participate minimally in the conversation, and that was about it. It made sense to get rid of a useless character.
I think those interactions were kind of a parody of Ozzie and Harriet. In that 1950s, the parents would say to Rick as he went out the door, “Don’t study too hard at the Library” and Rick would actually end up at the library. Richie and his parents would go through the same routine, but Richie wouldn’t be going to the library and his parents had no allusions that he would. They knew all about “submarine races” and the like and generally didn’t care because they did the same things as teens. The generation gap was portrayed as a polite fiction in Happy Days.
Political concerns with GWB and Iraq War were something people don’t even really talk or care much about at this point.
Culturally some of the sensitivity and MeToo type stuff was in a completely different place. If you look at what Saturday Night Live was focusing on, they were doing a lot of “gay panic” type material at that point.
Also the obsession at that time with pop/trash culture and people like Jessica Simpson.
There’s a lot of differences right there. But it takes a younger person to see them, I think. Most people have a dawning of awareness at some early age, and, to them, that is when all of the REALLY important change happened. Other people don’t have the same experience.
I looked up their ages for the premier. Those actors were children! And I found some pictures.
Ron Howard was 19. He’d turn 20 in March. Today he is 69.
Henry Winkler was 28. Today he is 78.
Anson Williams was 22. Today he is 72.
Donny Most was 20. Today he is 70.
Erin Moran, R.I.P., was 13. She died in 2017 at 56. Today she’d have been 63.
Tom Bosley, R.I.P., was 46. He died in 2010 at 83. Today he’d have been 96.
Marion Ross, was 45. Today she is 95. Way to go, Mrs. C!
A scary thing is that I named the cast from memory. It took me a couple seconds to recall Mrs. C.
They could have had a throw away line at the start of season 2 about him graduating and getting a job in California, or transferring for a basketball scholarship, or something. Or, you know, have him join the army and get stationed in Greenland.
20 years ago many people thought GWB was the worst president of all time, those people no longer think that.
I was going to come in and mention this. This is where I first saw a version of “Happy Days”, before the show itself premiered, and I was underwhelmed, so I didn’t watchj the show.
The musical Grease appears to have started the big-time 1950s nostalgia (although it had been there through much of the 1960s, to tell the truth), premiering in February 1971. The "Love American Style episode came out just a year later. Then American Graffiti in 1973 and "Happy Days in 1974.
Case in point. Sha Na Na was at Woodstock! I never “got” them. (and in our continuing watching of old game shows, Bowser was a celebrity panelist on Password Plus. And he was a good player!)
No, now I think he’s number 2. I hate to say I’m fondly remembering the days when you could rank bad presidents and not have to use “tried to turn the country into a fascist dictatorship” as a criterion.
