Podcast Tuesday: "Amazon Women on the Earth"

Cupcake (Didi Conn) and Fonzie (Henry Winkler) confer with an Amazonian queen (June Foray).

This week on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and his time-traveling pals find themselves stranded in the sweltering Amazon jungle, thousands of miles from their hometown of Milwaukee. And that's not the worst of it! They're captured by a tribe of fierce warrior women (whose leader is voiced by Rocky & Bullwinkle star June Foray) and threatened by a couple of treasure-seeking smugglers (one of whom is voiced by ventriloquist Paul Winchell). 

And our heroes have to deal with other typical jungle problems, too, including carnivorous plants, quicksand, and rickety rope bridges.  If all this sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, remember that this episode, "It's a Jungle Out There," premiered in January 1981, six months before the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). So Hanna-Barbera beat George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to the punch.

This is certainly an action-packed story. In fact, there's so much going on in this episode that I was overwhelmed the first time I screened it. It just seemed like 25 minutes of random chaos and noise to me. But I screened it a second time and was able to glean some kind of story here. Were my efforts worth it? Find out by listening to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.