"Hollywood," Part Three

Yes, this is the episode with the actual shark-jumping, with characters, even Fonzie, admitting it's a stupid idea.  I'm going with a C+, since the actual jump is filmed well and the father-son talk with Howard & Richie isn't bad, although not classic.  There's also a pre-stepfather & stepson scene with Al & Chachi, as they wait for the others to return from their vacation.

Fred Fox, Jr. wrote this episode and in 2010 wrote an L.A. Times article defending it.  Interestingly, he didn't point out the obvious: Jaws was a huge hit in 1975 and sharks were sort of hot.  (Jaws 2 was do very well in '78, as the highest-grossing sequel until Rocky II the years after that.)

This episode is set the week before Richie, Ralph, and Potsie start college, and later that night Laverne piloted a plane in the "Airport '59" episode, while Jack looked for a job on the racy nude-modeling-and-encyclopedias episode of Three's Company.  We are sort of where we started in the Introduction I wrote almost three months ago, but now we move forward, into the post-shark-jump era....