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| The Controller (Alan Oppenheimer) menaces Fonzie (Henry Winkler). |
It's a losing game trying to predict the future. Science fiction writers and filmmakers have been getting it wrong for decades. The makers of The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang apparently tried to hedge their bets. This early '80s Hanna Barbera animated show gives us wildly different visions of what the future will be like. Maybe one of them will come true!
One of the show's main characters, Cupcake (voiced by Didi Conn), hails from the 25th century and is supposed to be a typical, if clumsy, human of that time. She has magic powers, shoots rainbows from her fingertips, and travels around in a flying saucer. I guess, based on her name, that cupcakes still exist a few centuries from now. That's nice to know. But Cupcake doesn't know what horses are, so apparently they're going extinct in the next few centuries. Bummer.
One of the first episodes of the series, "May the Farce be with You," is set in the year 2057, which is just a few decades away! In it, a race of sinister andtroids plan to destroy the earth. Luckily, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) shuts them down just in time. According to The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, we are basically going to be living in a Star Wars (1977) universe by the 2050s.
And then we come to this week's episode, "Science Friction," set in the year 3057. All the Star Wars stuff is over by this time in history, and we're experiencing the future from The Time Machine (1960) instead. The humans live above ground in constant fear of underground-dwelling mutants called Krolacks. And there's a mean android named the Controller (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer) who's pulling the strings. How do Fonzie and his pals react to all this? Find out by pushing the play button below for the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.