CRAPPY DAYS (part 1)

HAPPY DAYS
1974-1984 ABC

Happy Days was originally about the Cunningham family in the fifties. It started as a single-camera show and eventually took place on sets filmed in front of--as they reminded us every week--in front of a studio audience. The Fonz, who started as a supporting character, became the star of the show. Eventually they gave up the conceit of nostalgia, having seventies hairstyles and fashions, and it was just a show that happened to take place twenty years earlier.

The show was so huge and parodied so much I've broken this post into three parts.

CRAPPY DAYS
MAD #187, December 1976
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Angelo Torres

Richie (Ron Howard)'s sister was Joanie (Erin Moran) and his parents were Marion (Marion Ross) and Howard (Tom Bosley). When the show started out, they were always dropping fifties cliches but ran out after about three or four seasons.

Ron Howard started out as a child star and as a teenager was star of American Graffiti, a movie that also took place in the fifties, and originally this show. [Yeah, chronologically, American Graffiti was 1962, but the fifties really began with the debut of Elvis on TV and ended with the JFK assassination.] After the first two seasons they had Arthur Fonzarelli a/k/a "The Fonz" (Henry Winkler) live in the garage above the Cunninghams.

Snooky Lanson was the star of Your Hit Parade, a radio and then television show that featured the popular songs of the day, when songs were popularized based on the sheet music rather than the recording.

The malt shop where they hung out was run by a man name Arnold (Pat Morita), and Richie and Fonzie's friends were Potsie (Anson Williams) and Ralph (Donny Most)

Fonz would hit vending machines and make free things come out or make jukeboxes work by hitting them. He referred to the bathroom as his office. "Sit on it" was their big catch phrase, an attempt to make something sound like a dirty word.

It wasn't as much about the fifties as it was about "the fifties". Initially, it wasn't all rock 'n' roll on the soundtrack, they sometimes used Patti Page or Teresa Brewer in the background, but evolved into only using doo-wop for the bridge music that they made up. Beach movies didn't really exist until the mid-sixties.

Occasionally they had cameo appearances by well-known fifties celebrities, so the appearance of Milton Berle was a parody of that. It kind of looks like Redd Foxx without a mustache in the final two panels, and he's called 'Sanford", but he's too young. Did Angelo Torres not know he was an old man and only use his 50s comedy albums for reference? I have no idea what the significance of the T-shirt is. The others are George and Louise of The Jeffersons, and Florida and James Evans of Good Times.

From TV Disclaimers We'd Like to See in #180, by Lou Silverstone and Jack Davis. National Geographic was what teenagers had before porn existed because they sometimes showed nude natives and 3.2 beer was what kids had access to in some states because of its low alcohol content. I think that's supposed to be David Cassidy but it looks like someone in their mid-thirties.

SLAP-HAPPY DAZE
Goose #2, October 1976
a: Jack Bartlett

Goose only lasted three issues and claimed to be adult. It wasn't exactly mature, and it had the same formula as all the other MAD imitators, 52 pages on newsprint. There were no names, but it looked like most of the same contributors as all those other magazines.

I'm not sure who did the art for this, at first I thiught Tony Tallarico, but naaaah.

They felt the need to parody phrases here, so "A-A-Ay" became "E-e-e-e" and "be cool" became "be hot"

Margie Hart was a burlesque stripper at Minsky's.

SNAPPY DAYS
Car Toons #99, July 1977
w & a: Errol McCarthy

DA MOUTH INTERVIEWS DA FONZ
Sick # 112, October 1976
a: Nonoy Marcelo (miscredited)

FONZIE FOR PRESIDENT
Sick #113, December 1976
w: Mike Pellowski
a: Nonoy Marcelo

Laverne and Shirley, in addition to being a spinoff of Happy Days, often appeared on each others' shows. Lenny and Squiggy were regular characters on Laverne and Shirley.

From More Obscene Phone Calls in Sick #114 by Mike Pellowski and Jerry Grandenetti. Obscene calls seem to be a thing of the 70s like pay toilets that were talked about in comedy bits more than actually existed. I don't know who got off on calling numbers at random and saying dirty things or panting if a woman answered. I guess the Gamergate of its time?

That's not all. There's more tomorrow. We're only a third of the way through with Happy Days parodies.