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| Merlin (left) and King Arthur meet the Happy Days kids. |
Suppose you were on a game show and you had 60 seconds to blurt out as many things associated with King Arthur as you possibly could. What might you come up with? You'd probably say that he was a legendary English king who lived sometime during the Middle Ages in a place called Camelot. He had a famous round table. He went looking for the Holy Grail. He slayed dragons. He jousted. He had a special sword called Excalibur that he either got out of a stone or out of a lake. (Definitely one of those.) You might also mention some of the other characters in his story, like Lancelot and Guinevere and Merlin.
The good news is, you couldn't really give a wrong answer in a situation like this. The exploits of King Arthur have been told for about a millennium through poems, songs, plays, novels, and more, but there is no definitive or canonical version of his story. Writers have been putting their own spin on the material for centuries, adding characters and plot elements to suit their mood or their purpose. While these stories were originally an attempt to record actual British history, they have long since entered the realm of the fantastic and impossible. As I see it, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is as valid a take on Arthurian legend as any other.
It was inevitable that The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang would do an episode about King Arthur. Theirs was called "Gone with the Wand" and originally aired in January 1981. Just like Walt Disney's version of Arthurian legend, The Sword in the Stone (1963), "Gone with the Wand" features an adolescent Arthur and a bumbling, bearded Merlin. I think, for the purposes of children's entertainment, it's safest to focus on this era of King Arthur's story. You can avoid some truly dark material, including adultery and incest, that way. Not to mention prodigious violence.
You've probably guessed by now that "Gone with the Wand" is the focus of this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. And it is. What did we think of this story set vaguely in the Middle Ages? Find out by listening to the podcast below.