Reliving Happy Days

It is September 24, 1984.  The final episode of Three's Company aired last week.  This isn't even Tuesday, but Monday.  Eight p.m. on Tuesdays this Fall will be (as it was for much of last season)  Foul-Ups, Bleeps, & Blunders, now followed by the 3'sC spin-off/sequel Three's a Crowd.  Before long, the outtakes show will be pushed to 9:00 and Crowd will foolishly be placed at 8:00, followed by Who's the Boss? , which has a much longer future ahead of it.  I will keep watching ABC, but I'm sixteen now and have a boyfriend who will eventually be my ex-husband.  The Tuesday Night ABC Line-Up I grew up with will become a set of mangled memories. I don't know if I watched this episode at the time.  I certainly didn't recall anything about it today.  I'm going with a C-, since it's pretty forgettable, except for the talk between Fonzie and Howard. Notes: Howard has been Grand Poobah for five years and has allegedly only recruited Potsie, but wh...

An of course simplistic view of drug abuse, including no acknowledgement of the detoxification process.  And I really wish they could've had Joanie as a teacher, I don't know, teach, like not deal with Very Special Crises but figure out her teaching style and stuff.  I'm going with C-. A couple notes: This is clearly set in Winter, although it aired in July. Casting Elinor Donahue of Father Knows Best as the troubled girl's mother adds to the "even nice families have to deal with drug abuse" message, which I have mixed feeling about.  (Not that it isn't true, but it's supposed to be worse that Jesse has a nice home life than if she lived in the expected "hellhole.")

They are definitely rewriting Chachi's history, with him not having had a real date in seven years or a maybe-date in four, not counting Joanie.  Also, if Chachi is the sweetest, warmest guy Joanie has ever met, she needs to get out more.  I'm saying C-. Note that Chachi says he went on a date with the girl in this episode as a boy and came back a man, and yet he slept in his jeans, making you wonder what he counts as sex.  Meanwhile Joanie offscreen gets jumped on by a guy at the end of a group outing, and it's treated as a joke of course.

The title is true, since I got this amateurishly burned copy of the Nickelodeon version of an episode that's forgettable (except for maybe the questionable running gag of people repeatedly seeing an offscreen Joanie in some degree of undress) for a low price.  Let's say C-. Notes: The thing of Howard being cheap, which I think came up in another episode this season, is either brand new or Flanderization of some trait I never noticed before. It can't be legal to hire minors for construction work, for school credit or not. I think Joanie is a teacher at Patton High, but it's unclear. Steven Baio is back as Joey. Jerry Paris's son Andrew is Shorty this time. Wayne Morton, Dwight Mesmer here, was a Bartender before, and he played a Doctor on Mork & Mindy.

If I didn't care about Fonzie and Roger teaching at Jefferson, I really don't care about them running a "bad kids' school," but the two more recognizable guest stars bump this up from D+ to C-. Notes: The studio audience recognizes Ken Osmond, Leave It to Beaver's Eddie Haskell, as the similarly named Freddie Bascomb.  The New Leave It to Beaver had premiered in March of '83. Nineteen-year-old Crispin Glover was then still unknown, a couple years before Back to the Future.  He's not bad as the redeemable bad kid Roach. Kathryn Fuller would return as Mrs. Shellenback.  She was Helen Hanley on HD  in '80. Scott Baio's brother Steven had played Jerry Wood on Joanie Loves Chachi.  He'd be back twice as Joey.

It's September 27, 1983.  I'm a high school sophomore and I'm still tuning in to ABC on Tuesdays out of inertia and what's left of my loyalty.    Laverne & Shirley is gone and Happy Days has been shuffled to 8:30.  ( Just Our Luck, about a modern genie, is on at 8:00.)  Three's Company is starting its eighth season at 9:00. I don't remember what I felt that night specifically, if I noticed how they showed younger and current Joanie and Chachi in the opening credits, how poor Anson Williams got shuffled to just before Ted McGinley.  I do know that I have absolutely no memories of this episode.  (Although I do recall rolling my eyes later in the season when they tried to tell me J & C would've been Kinks fans.)  Anyway, this is a C-, because I just don't care about Fonzie trying another pointless stunt. Notes: It's allegedly been twenty years since Fonzie's mother abandoned him, but maybe he's rounding that off. Harris Kal and Kevin Rod...

This has some tonal shift problems, if not as much as the Laverne & Shirley and Three's Company episodes that aired that first Tuesday of 1983.  (Laverne is gang-banged by sailors while in an alcoholic blackout and "Furley learns that Terri's boyfriend is a convicted murderer.")  This at least has a plot that might've worked with better writing, but I just found it implausible that Ashley would get drunk and make a scene at her estranged parents' wedding anniversary.  So, yeah, it's a C-. A couple notes: Ashley's parents are named George and Millicent and they've been married thirty years.  She appears to be an only child. "The Prince of Wales" has gone vegetarian.  Charles was about 16 at the time this is set.

We get not one, not two, but three estranged families in this episode, which is a bit much.  That and the flatness (including a shockingly subdued studio audience) means a C-. Notes: Richard Paul, of Carter Country etc., plays Howard's brother Dick, whom he hasn't spoken to in 15 or 16 years.  Dick appears to be the elder brother, even though their father was 18 when Howard was born. Jenny says she "still" lives with her parents, but she is in her seventh year of high school or whatever it is by now. I don't like Fonzie pressuring Ashley to reconnect with her parents, but on the other hand, it'd be nice if there was some closure, since it was brought up. Roger and Flip are visiting their  parents, whom they presumably still get along with. Richie calls from California, or wherever he is these days, and we of course don't even get a voiceover. This is Beverly Bloomberg's penultimate HD script, and the first of two for Pamela Ryan.

Full of questionable content, from Joanie thinking her relationship with Chachi depends on her ability to cook to his hiding his food poisoning to spare her feelings, to her dreaming that Mario is married to his father in drag.  So C-. Notes: Joanie's dream is set fifty years in the future, by which point Erin Moran would be two or three years from death. Annette's hunky, new, younger husband is definitely the Tom Selleck as Magnum P.I. type. The old age makeup is terrible, even for the time. Chachi is a better cook than Joanie, so she jokes that she hopes he'll cook like that every day when they're married and she comes home from work, which in a stronger episode would be cutely feminist. This is the only JLC episode written by Paula A. Roth, who was then in the midst of writing seven HD episodes, although her thirteen for Laverne & Shirley are more notable.

  This actually doesn't have a bad concept, but the execution is disappointing, as Chachi worries that Joanie will outgrow him when she starts hanging out with her roommate, Suki, and Suki's college friends.  So C-. A few notes: I don't get why Annette and Mario dance together at the end.  I guess the joke is that the weird loser cousins are stuck dancing together, but why aren't they up onstage accompanying Joanie's solo? Brian Byers, who plays Squelch, was Biff on HD in '77. Lowell Ganz was more of a writer, but this is the first of two JLC s he directed.

Between Chachi guilting Joanie and the ridiculous number of anachronisms, especially with Bingo, I'm going to have to drop down to a C-, although this week's one-minute song is relatively good. Notes: "Aura," "finding yourself," etc. The timeline is a mess anyway, since Joanie wants to go to Richie Jr.'s first-birthday party, but he was born in approximately November 1962, probably not the summer anyway. On the one hand, Joanie and Chachi's different reasons for performing music are interesting, and on the other, shouldn't they have discussed this before she left Milwaukee to join his band?

Yeah.  OK, so I'm not crazy about the Roger character but I actively dislike his brother, Leopold "Flip" Phillips.  I was leaning towards a D+, but Joanie's "sleazebucket story" about living in Richie's shadow bumped this up to a C-. Notes: Jenny immediately develops a crush on Flip, in part because he's Roger's brother. Roger and Flip are the sons of Marion's nameless sister and they're from New Jersey. Howard doesn't like Flip's pranks, or Flip in general, go, Howard! Lori Beth appears briefly as a waitress at Arnold's again.  Presumably Marion is looking after the baby. Billy Warlock would make only a dozen more appearances as Flip.  He was then 20 and I assume his character is Joanie's age. Laverne & Shirley writer Paula A. Roth ("Debutante Ball" being the best of her baker's dozen) here begins her run of seven HD scripts.

After some initial reluctance, Fonzie tries to teach the teens that classical music is cool.  And if that's not a textbook definition of a C- episode, then I don't know what is. Notes: Fonzie again doesn't protect a Belvin from being bullied. Jenny again flirts with Roger and gets rejected. Lori Beth again wears leg warmers, far more '82 than '62. Richie, Jr. is again referred to but unseen. Joanie, Chachi, and their band do a middling cover of "Twist & Shout." Marla Pennington would return once more in the role of music teacher Cynthia Brannigan.  I know her from  Soap  and  Small Wonder. Fred Fox, Jr., had of course already written a lot for HD, but here his partner is Richard Correll, who actually was a child actor on '50s /'60s TV shows, most notably 32 appearances on Leave It to Beaver.

This is, as you might guess, well-meaning but simplistic in its view of Civil Rights, as captured in the vagueness of the above still.  I might've gone with a C, but the subplot of Howard's misery over living without the television for a few days is ill-timed, so C-. A couple notes: We never find out where in the South this is set, or in what part of '62 it happens.  We don't even get stock footage of the demonstration, just Fonzie telling Marion about it. This is Brian Levant's ninth HD script but Richard Gurman's first of six, although he had done one for L&S.

Act now and this final draft could be yours at eBay for just $50! OK, so we know Eugene and Jenny did actually date, but here it's as if they've never gone out.  The "twists" in the story are predictable, and I'm just glad that this thing isn't as bad as it could've been.  So C-.   A few notes: Rocky Baruffi, and his wife Buffy, are name-checked. It doesn't look like the middle of winter anymore.   I doubt they had gumball machines in the 1880s.

This episode kept threatening to tip into D+ territory, but it was saved because I sort of liked that Joanie proves she's responsible.   Notes: Everyone, except Joanie (and Potsie, who's just in the first scene and then never mentioned again), is leaving town and someone has to watch Richie, Jr., who's unseen but we do hear him cry. It's four months since Lori Beth has seen Richie, so I assume she was then very pregnant.  Then again, this episode is set "in the middle of winter," although it aired in early December, so who knows. Getting both Belvin cousins onscreen is a little terrifying, especially when Eugene says that Jenny's lips say no but her eyes say yes, but I will note that I can see that Melvin is more of a Woody-Allenesque nerd. Jenny is a rotten friend to "Joans," and throwing a party at the Cunninghams' may actually be worse than letting her take the fall for trying to steal a statue.  But I do like the red skirt & tights co...

I vaguely remember this episode from the time, including the girl thinking she could get pregnant from necking in a swimsuit.  I'm not crazy about how everyone just finds the possible pregnancy funny, and I can't believe they went and added a cousin for Eugene, named Melvin Belvin, leading to yet more nerd-bullying, including by Fonzie, but I did find one bright spot: Roger actually has a bit of a personality here, beyond being pseudointellectual hunk.  He shows integrity deciding to dispel ignorance, even if it might get him fired.  And I sort of like the scene of Roger and Fonzie's argument ruining Howard and Marion's romantic evening.  So C-. Notes: David LeBell makes at least his second uncredited appearance as a Patron at Arnold's. Scott Mitchell Bernstein would be back six more times as Melvin, oh boy.  (I had apparently blanked this character out of my consciousness, although I did recall Eugene before launching this project.) Ceil Cabot's third and final...

I don't understand the title, since we only see one night at the title restaurant.  Maybe it means that immature jealousy, gay panic, and bickering are just another night for the poor restaurant staff to endure in their patrons.  I'm going with a C-, and so far the proto-JLC plots are my least favorite this season. A few notes: Al indirectly refers to Rosa Coletti when convincing Chachi to make up with Joanie. Barbara Treutelaar was Lois before and is Andrea here. Waiter Robin Bach would be Maitre D' the next year. Marion is absent and off visiting Mother Kelp the entire episode.

It is now the Summer of '62.  I will rant about that under notes, but I will do a quick rant here about how Joanie is guilted into forgiving Chachi for cheating on her.  She has to work one night (as Weenie Heaven) so he has a "physical attraction" with a random girl on the beach.  And when they talk about it weeks later, she says maybe it has to do with him chasing after her for so long, and thus not dating other girls.  Now, wait a minute, there were times that Chachi would have one date with two girls, like his cousin Fonzie.  He wasn't exactly pining away and staying home.  Anyway, I'm going with a C- for Part 1 and a C for Part 2, because at least the latter had some not bad stuff with Howard. Notes: Joanie sends home movies of the Summer of '62 to Richie.  This means that somehow only three years have passed since Richie graduated from high school.  I'm not even clear if Joanie is done with high school, since Chachi says it'll be hard seeing...

In a nod to continuity, Chachi still hopes to get a basketball scholarship, and here he's offered a dubious one.  I found Fonzie very naïve, and using Roger as the authority on scholarships felt condescending.  So C-. Notes: Jenny has an unseen brother who wrestles alligators. In the previous episode, Potsie was very excited to be announcing Jefferson High basketball games, which he does again here, and which is symbolic of the pathetic role this once central character has been reduced to. Joanie has been a cheerleader for many seasons now, so maybe she does deserve a scholarship for it. Director Jerry Paris is listed at IMDB as uncredited in the role of the Doctor.  I wonder if he had to fill in at the last minute.  Anyway, it's not as memorable as when he heckled Richie at the 1956 political rally.