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| The Three Musketeers confront Fonzie on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. |
In 1981, ABC gave The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang a second season, bringing the series' overall episode total to 24. That may not sound terribly impressive, but it's pretty good for a Saturday morning series of this vintage. Let me put this in perspective. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969-1970)—a beloved series that launched a lucrative multimedia empire, let's not forget—ran for only 25 episodes. Other classic HB series, like Jabberjaw (1976) and Hong Kong Phooey (1974), only got one season apiece.
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| A game-changer at NBC. |
And this phenomenon wasn't limited to just Hanna-Barbera. Sid and Marty Krofft's signature series, H.R. Pufnstuf, ran just 17 episodes. In those days, networks tended to order just a handful of episodes of children's shows, then rerun those episodes over and over for years. I say all of this because I want people to stop saying The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang was a failure because it didn't run 100 episodes. It did remarkably well, in fact.
However, on September 12, 1981 (my sixth birthday, incidentally), NBC debuted a Saturday morning series that would definitely buck the trend: The Smurfs (1981-1989). Peyo's iconic little blue creatures had been extremely popular in Europe for years, even getting their own movie and topping the UK pop charts, but they didn't hit in America until they got their own Hanna-Barbera series in the '80s. They quickly made up for lost time, however, and The Smurfs became a naitionwide pop culture sensation. And NBC didn't just make a small handful of episodes this time. They let the show run for nine seasons and 256 episodes. That's one more episode than the live-action Happy Days (1974-1984).
As it happens, the first episode of The Smurfs aired opposite the second season premiere of The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. The latter is a Three Musketeers parody called "The French Correction." And that's exactly the episode we're reviewing on this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. Check it out below!