Happy Days

The hour-long variety series 'Happy Days' (no relation to the Samuel Beckett play or the Fonzie sitcom) was a 1970 summer replacement show on CBS that was never meant to run more than 13 weeks. This nostalgia series made a creditable attempt to replicate the experience of old-time radio shows and movies from the 1930s and '40s, and there were occasional guest performers from that era, such as big-band vocalists Bob Eberle and 'Red Hot' Helen O'Connell.

Regulars on this series included Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, doing basically the same material they'd done throughout their careers. (No complaint here.) Also on hand were actors impersonating W.C. Fields and Laurel & Hardy, doing new material in the style of those great performers. This material was verbal only (no sight gags, no slapstick), but it was well-written and showed some genuine knowledge of the original sources. For instance, in one episode of 'Happy Days', "Laurel" and "Hardy" did a comedy routine in which they discussed how they were going to sneak off to a convention in Chicago while telling their wives they were going to Hawaii for their health. This isn't a repeat of an old Stan and Ollie routine: this is new material, written especially for 'Happy Days', but the scriptwriters were obviously inspired by a situation in the (real) Laurel & Hardy movie 'Fraternally Yours'. I kept hoping that 'Happy Days' would eventually put all three impersonators into a single comedy routine -- Laurel and Hardy meet W.C. Fields! -- but this was a missed opportunity. The W.C. Fields impersonator was Bill Oberlin; I don't recall who played Stan & Ollie.

At one point in each episode, the camera would show a static shot of an old-fashioned Atwater Kent 'cathedral' radio, while we hear a (very) brief sound clip from an authentic old-time radio comedy turn, such as Fred Allen or Bergen & McCarthy.

One weekly spot featured a reporter allegedly interviewing an old-time movie star, who appeared on screen in clips from one of his or her movies ... the dialogue of the 'interview' always being tailored to suit the available clips. For instance, one week the reporter would claim to be interviewing James Cagney (who was still alive at the time) about a minor-league baseball team which Cagney was supposedly managing ... at which point the show cut to an uncredited clip from the movie '13 Rue Madeleine' with Cagney saying: 'So far, we're batting zero-zero-zero.' Another 'interview' featured Charles Laughton (who was already dead at this point) in the banquet scene from 'The Private Life of Henry the Eighth.'

Certain features which didn't work at all were nonetheless recycled every week, such as a spot with Jack Burns impersonating bandleader Ben Bernie ('Yowsa, yowsa!') presiding over a marathon dance. Is anyone out there actually nostalgic for marathon dances? Another weekly spot featured a dance team billing themselves as 'Fred and Ginger' (actually Clive Clerk and Laara Lacey, a very pale imitation of Astaire and Rogers) doing a limp dance routine to the same tune every week: 'Top Hat, White Tie and Tails', always with the same high kicks at the same point in the routine, in every episode. This routine was so boring that the scriptwriters were finally forced to jazz it up one week by having Fred and Ginger swap costumes!

Many sequences on 'Happy Days' were tributes to specific performers from the 1930s and '40s. Considering the tremendous contributions that black performers made to American popular culture during those decades, it's disappointing that 'Happy Days' had an all-white cast and never honoured any black performers from the past. Also, this series constantly evoked the war years without ever mentioning the World War nor any of the home-front phenomena from that period (such as ration stamps or scrap-metal drives). No mention of the Depression, either.

Every episode ended with the song 'Dream When You're Feeling Blue', sung in a ballroom filled with revolving mirrored balls. This was quite pleasant, even though it never varied from one week to the next. I'll rate this series 7 points out of 10: six points on its merits plus one point for addressing a period in American culture which most other TV shows actively reject as old-fashioned and 'corny'. Some video company should release a compilation of the best parts of 'Happy Days', but they would have to change the title to avoid confusion with that Fonzie show.

Archival Television Audio (www.atvaudio.com) has nine of the ten HAPPY DAYS complete 52 minute broadcasts,(June 25-August 27, 1970...missing July 16) preserved on 1/4" reel to reel master tapes...all recorded at the time of the airing for direct line pristine sound quality.The archive, Archival Television Audio, Inc. archives over 15,000 hours of mostly "lost" and not presently available TV broadcast AUDIO circa 1946 thru 1982, at which time networks and local stations wiped 2" Quad tapes for space and financial reasons. Only a few of the 10 original HAPPY DAYS programs can be found at UCLA and at PALEY archives. To date ATA has the most BROADCAST EXAMPLES and in excellent sound condition. And, it is the SOUND that makes this nostalgic trip back to the 30's so special.

1970 was a watershed year in my life, the year that ushered in many life-long obsessions. That summer, AM radio stations coast to coast ran historic programming and specials honoring what was being called the fiftieth anniversary of broadcasting. Most documentaries and nostalgia shows started their run with noisy clips of the KDKA coverage of the 1920 presidential election. It was about this time that Old Time Radio record albums began appearing on store shelves. I bought my first OTR record from a very old style (complete with lunch counter) S.S. Kresges downtown about that year, and shortly followed with the great Themes Like Old Times radio theme compilation (actually, the first minute or so of a whopping 90 radio programs from the '30s and '40s). The nostalgia craze, centering on the Depression years and WW2 (happy times, those - !?) was in full throttle. (I remember quite a number of "nostalgia" books popping up everywhere at the time, books such as Richard J. Anobile's frame by frame reconstructions of classic film comedies of the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy, packaged to echo the bygone Deco era graphically.) It wasn't long before the focus of the commercial nostalgia industry shifted from this earlier period to the mid to late 1950s represented by that other Happy Days. But briefly, for one twinkling instant, it seems now, the commercial nostalgia industry threw all it's resources behind this always-interesting era, before closing the book on it forever and leaving devotees of the period to rummage in flea markets and public libraries to satisfy our inborn archivist's/throwback's avocation.

Happy Days came at just the right time to act as an enhancement to this nostalgia craze, and I eagerly ate it up. Certain things from this show pop into my head to this day, 40 years after the fact: Skermahorn and Ballou (Bob and Ray); Curly McDimple; Voodini, the bumbling magician (Chuck McCann). There was a fair amount of throwaway material here, a lot of soft padding in the Hee Haw type format. But seeing an historic and cultural period acknowledged in the context of a culture that ruthlessly discards the past -- that always hard-sells the trend of the second and determinedly promotes itself as "modern" --was thrilling. No other way to describe it.

Always a completist and documentarian, I seem to have been cursed even as a child with a wistful sense that life is a passing parade. Somewhere, I have cassette recordings of the audio of bits of this show, made against that day when no other trace of it would exist.

Nothing much to add to the admirably complete comments of the previous poster, except I am almost certain that Gary Owens was a regular on this show as the radio announcer, even though he is not credited as such in this listing or his own here on IMDb. That made it difficult for me to locate information on this program, since I couldn't remember the show's name, just his participation. Eventually it occurred to me that Louis Nye was also a regular. Anyone else searching for this show who remembers only Mr. Owens being on it, maybe this mention will show up in your search results.

Oh - I second the motion for a best-of compilation. It was an imaginative and entertaining series.