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| Cupcake, Fonzie, and a vampire on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. |
On December 20, 1980, just in time for Christmas, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang aired the episode "The Vampire Strikes Back," in which our heroes travel to Transylvania and meet a vampire named Count Wolfgang von Wolfenstein (voiced by sitcom veteran Henry Polic II). Such are the vagaries of TV scheduling. Maybe the episode wasn't ready in October or something. Besides, kids are already bombarded with Christmas-themed animation in December, so maybe a story about monsters and mad scientists would make a nice change of pace. And The Nightmare Before Christmas was still 13 years away.
As unlikely as it sounds, this madcap mashup of Happy Days and horror ends up being one of the most entertaining episodes of the animated series. There are a few spooky episodes of the live-action Happy Days series -- "Haunted," "Welcome to My Nightmare," and (arguably) "Fonzie's Funeral" -- and they're a lot of fun, too. I may be prejudiced, though, because I love horror movies so much, especially the Universal classics from the 1930s and '40s. "The Vampire Strikes Back" takes a lot of tropes from those films. I guess, if you were a kid watching this 44 years ago, it would all be new to you.
Anyway, you can hear what my cohost and I had to say about "The Vampire Strikes Back" by listening to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. And because I'm such a nice guy, I've embedded it below so all you have to do is push play.