A Strange Saturday Morning Memory

None of this is about slot cars, but when I saw this I hadda do a on post on it…

Looking back on the popularity of the late 70’s/early 80’s TV show “Happy Days” can be quite amusing. As most people likely know, “Happy Days” was itself inspired by the timeless 1973 movie “American Graffiti.” I will never forget the experience of watching that movie on TV with my dad when I was probably no more than 6 years old in what must have been 1977, which may have been the first time it aired on television. All we had at the time was a tiny little black and white Zenith portable television, as my parents had just bought their first house (on a loan at 17% interest!) and were scrimping to get by. Of course I didn’t know any better so that little BW TV was fine by me, but the memory of watching my father light up and smile as we screened that movie and he narrated how the onscreen antics recalled his own teenage years growing up in Kansas City is something I will cherish until my ending days. That movie, incidentally, is also what likely triggered my lifelong love for “Tri-5” Chevrolets, and the film was so popular that it spawned a TV show only a year and half later that itself was to become one of the most beloved and (up to that point) longest running TV franchises in history.

Happy Days did, however, spawn a lot of spinoffs; probably too many, and some of them were better than others; “LaVerne & Shirley,” “Mork & Mindy,” and the awful “Joanie Loves Chachi” are 3 that most people seem to remember. Less often recalled, however, are the stranger Saturday morning cartoons “The Fonz” and “LaVerne & Shirley In The Army.” So, as an addendum to my previous Saturday’s Post recalling the fun of Saturday Morning cartoons, I recently saw a few episodes of both these shows courtesy of the Group Therapy Podcast YouTube channel’s “Saturday Morning Serials” videos, and I noticed something that blew me away: that’s the photo at the top of this post!

Both “The Fonz” and “LaVerne & Shirley In The Army” were just…weird. The former show features the Happy Days gang meeting up with some ditzy girl from the distant future who takes a wrong turn with her “time machine” and picks the gang up from 1957 Milwaukee and takes them on a haphazard blundering journey through time, getting into adventures in strange, often futuristic landscapes; one of the early and best known episode seems like a comedic attempt at a rewrite of the original H.G. Wells classic complete with a race of underground dwellers enslaving surface inhabitants. The latter show featured our titular girls becoming soldiers for unknown reasons and getting into comedic situations with their talking piglet drill sergeant named “Squealy.” Yeah. 😐 This strange concept debuted in the fall of 1981 and ran for 2 years, and sure enough I remember it, although even at the time (I was 10 years old) I remember thinking…”who thought this was a good idea?”

Amazingly, both shows featured the voice talents of the actual cast members of their respective prime-time parents, and they must have been entertaining enough, since I remember watching at least a few episodes of both shows, and when I saw one last weekend featuring the still you see reproduced here, I thought, “Well, isn’t that cool? Laverne & Shirley have visited Wardglenn, California and gone to the track!”

No idea where any of this came from, but I thought it was a fascinating rabbit hole to go down, both for the sake of my own personal history and the history of American television during those halcyon days of the early 1980’s when I was a kid. 40 years later, I’m still a kid: still playing with toys, still watching cartoons, and “LaVerne & Shirley In The Army” is still…weird!