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| Fonzie (Henry Winkler, right) confronts a villain on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. |
Cartoons are educational! And I don't just mean the ones that are trying to be, like The Magic School Bus or Tennessee Tuxedo. I mean pretty much all the cartoons we grew up on, including Looney Tunes and the collected works of Hanna-Barbera. Like it or not, you did learn some stuff while watching those, if only through osmosis. Looking back, we were introduced to classical music, opera, and even important names and events from history while watching the adventures of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest.
But it goes beyond that. Cartoons have also served as a great museum of show business history. Long before I knew who Peter Lorre, Jimmy Durante, Mae West, and Humphrey Bogart were, I'd seen parodies of them in old cartoons. And it's through cartoons that I was introduced to the trope of the top-hat-wearing, mustache-twirling villain. Characters like these appeared in silent films of the 1910s but trace their lineage back to stage melodramas of the 1840s and 1850s! So latter-day cartoon characters such as Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dastardly have quite a heritage.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we review an episode called "Perilous Pauline" that takes place in the late 1800s in Canada. It draws on both the silent films and the stage melodramas I mentioned earlier. But is it any fun? Let's find out together, huh?