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| Fonzie (right) meets his doppelganger on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. |
Recording a very unnecessary Happy Days podcast involves a surprising amount of solitary, tedious labor, namely researching and editing. But it's all worth it for the fun my cohost and I have when recording. I live alone and don't really have anything to say at work, so doing a podcast might be the only conversation I have with anyone all week. The problem is, I have so many words stored up that I turn into a real motormouth when I'm on mic. And because I converse so rarely, I tend to ramble and interrupt and go off on tangents.
As you might guess, then, each episode of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast has to be heavily edited before it can be posted. A lot of my digressions wind up on the proverbial cutting room floor. This week, one of the casualties was my lengthy explanation of the character of Cupcake (voiced by Didi Conn), the ditsy "future chick" who accompanies Fonzie (Henry Winkler), Richie (Ron Howard), and Ralph Malph (Don Most) on their misadventures through time and space. I felt that including this material in the podcast would have slowed down the conversation too much, so out it went.
But this blog is just for my own amusement, so I'll give the explanation here. Basically, my guess is that Cupcake is the spoiled yet nice daughter of a wealthy man from the 25th century. ("Cupcake" is just a nickname her daddy gave her.) She's never really had any responsibilities, and she was too focused on having fun to focus on her studies. That's why she's often so useless in crises and has such poor control over her magic powers. Daddy gave her a time machine for her 18th birthday, and she took it for a spin before learning how to operate it. She soon crashed in 1957 Milwaukee and recruited Fonzie and his pals to help her. (In the opening credits, you can see her sitting dejectedly on the hood of a car when Fonzie approaches her.)
That's my "head canon" for Cupcake on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. You won't hear it in our review of the cowboy adventure "Westward Whoa!" but you'll hear plenty of other things we had to say about the episode. And there's an easy way to do it: just press play.