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| Henry Winkler and a bust of Mozart on Happy Days. |
Two hundred episodes. Jesus, how did we ever let things get this far?
Yes, this week marks the 200th installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, which started in October 2018 and has continued more or less steadily since then with its goal of reviewing each episode of the classic ABC sitcom Happy Days (1974-84). We're about 80% of the way toward achieving that goal now as we cover the show's ninth season out of eleven.
Sometimes, I feel like my cohost and I are playing an incredibly prolonged game of chicken. Surely, after a while, one of us will admit that doing a podcast about Happy Days is a ridiculous idea with an incredibly narrow appeal and stop this madness. But we don't. Neither of us is willing to back down. So the podcast continues—episode by episode, season by season. Garry Marshall is holding us hostage from beyond the grave.
As it turns out, our 200th episode is a review of the February 1982 episode "A Touch of Classical" in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) tries to get the kids at Arnold's to embrace classical music over rock. He's doing all this to get in good with his new girlfriend, a sophisticated music teacher named Cynthia (Small Wonder's Marla Pennington). The episode's highlight is a dream sequence in which Fonzie imagines himself to be Tchaikovsky. You call tell it's a dream because this version of Tchaikovsky is aggressively heterosexual.
What did we think of "A Touch of Classical"? There's one way to find out. Just click that play button down there and listen to the 200th episode of These Days Are Ours.