Subscribe!The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang (1980)
Originally posted on 13 June 2026First episode title: King for a Day
How familiar with the show am I?: I'm just aware of the original Happy Days, and I don't think I've actually seen any episodes of it.
I assume you're somewhat aware of Happy Days, but in case you're not, it was a live-action sitcom from the 1970s set in Wisconsin in the 1950s, about a group of fun-loving teenagers. In this show, the opening sequence explains that they've inadvertently ended up travelling through time with a woman from the future because of a malfunction in her time-travelling spaceship, and now they're trying to get back home. Because of course that's how you adapt that show to animation.
The main characters of this show that originate from Happy Days are:
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The Fonz (Arthur Fonzarelli), a super-cool greaser in a leather jacket
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Richie Cunningham, a wholesome and caring guy
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Ralph Malph, who thinks he's funny but never gets any laughs
And the new characters are:
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Cupcake, a 25th century time traveller with magic powers that are seemingly normal in her time
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Mr. Cool, the Fonz's dog who can sort of talk, Scooby-Doo style
In this instalment, the time machine is malfunctioning as usual, and instead of 1950s Milwaukee, the gang end up parked on top of a brontosaurus. They manage to get down from it, but the time machine gets knocked down in the process and sinks into a swamp. Meanwhile, cavemen kidnap Richie and Ralph. The others notice their absence, and Fonz's coolness charms the brontosaurus into being on their side, so he orders it to guard the time machine until they can free it. The Fonz, Cupcake, and Mr. Cool start searching for their friends. A cavewoman called Bruta who likes the look of the Fonz carries him away, but he smoothly escapes her grip. Richie and Ralph are in a cage when a caveman rather randomly declares Ralph to be the new king and leads him away. The Fonz's party encounter a tyrannosaurus, so Cupcake tries to use her magic to levitate it away, but the magic rebounds and makes herself and the Fonz and Mr. Cool float instead, luckily taking them to the safety of a clifftop. Then they see that the dinosaur has turned its attention to Bruta, so the Fonz briefly swings back down to save her, leaving her behind on another cliff.
Then the sound of drums alerts the Fonz's group to the direction of the caveman village, and they go there to find Ralph on a throne, being attended by beautiful cavewomen. He doesn't want to come with them, and then they see Richie in the cage and decide to at least save him. Cupcake tries to magic him out, but all that does is put her, the Fonz, and Mr. Cool in the cage with him. When a caveman comes over to mock them, the Fonz asks why they would make Ralph their king, and the caveman reveals that they only have a king for a day at a time, before sacrificing him to the fire god (a nearby volcano) at sundown - and then one of the other prisoners would become the new king! After they've seen Ralph go by in a parade that he doesn't know would lead to his doom, the Fonz whistles, summoning Bruta, who comes and breaks them out of the cage, then swings away with the Fonz under her arm, Mr. Cool chasing behind - the Fonz manages to get out of Bruta's grip by grabbing a bear and substituting himself with it. The Fonz and Mr. Cool find a tunnel that leads into the volcano and make their way through it, having to dodge lava pits all the way. On top of the volcano, the cavemen are preparing to throw Ralph in, and he's finally realising he's in danger. Other cavemen bring Richie and Cupcake along, and, when Richie tries to object to what's going to happen, the cavemen decide it would please the god even more if they threw all three of them in.
The Fonz and Mr. Cool arrive inside the volcano and hear what's happening above, so the Fonz uses a hollow stalagmite as a loudspeaker to pretend to be the fire god and tell the cavemen not to sacrifice anyone. The cavemen flee back to their village, performing a dancing ritual to see if that pleases the god, while the time travellers sneak past the village to get back to the time machine. But then they're confronted by three angry cavemen riding horned dinosaurs, and the Fonz has to trick each of them into crashing. Once the heroes are past the cavemen, they encounter their brontosaurus friend, who takes them back to the swamp and pulls the time machine out of the mud. As the time machine is about to leave, Bruta shows up and grabs the Fonz to try and stop him going, but one kiss from the Fonz is enough to immobilise her and he gets away in time. Back in the time machine, Cupcake remarks that she's never been kissed like that, and Mr. Cool decides to try one out on her, but it makes him faint instead - right onto the control panel, hitting buttons and making the machine malfunction once again.
Somewhat surprisingly, the three characters imported from the live-action Happy Days are played here by their regular actors! Most things we've so far encountered that are adaptations of live-action used substitute actors, although the one big exception was another adaptation of a sitcom, It's Punky Brewster.
Anyway, let's address the elephant in the room. Or should I say woolly mammoth in the room. Yes, there's no time period where prehistoric humans live alongside dinosaurs. But this is a sitcom, and one of the most famous cartoon sitcoms ever is about cavemen living with dinosaurs, so I'm happy to accept it here.
The characters in the original show are teenagers blatantly played by adults. That leads to an amusing effect in the animation here. They've done a good job of making the character models look like their live-action counterparts - which means they've inadvertently also made the cartoon versions look like teenagers played by adults! It's mostly noticeable in the Fonz.
Fonz's whole thing being his coolness, he's unfazed by anything - he never shows the same fear of the things happening around him that the others do, and he can get a malfunctioning machine working again just by hitting it. The latter was a gag usually applied to a jukebox in the live-action show, but this show takes it to the next level. At the start of the episode, the time machine's gravity goes wrong and turns the whole place upside down, leaving everyone tumbling to the ceiling. Then the Fonz enters the room on the ground, unaffected by this reversal, and one kick to the time machine's floor restores the gravity! Also, sometimes he casually gets out a comb and starts sorting out his hair during perilous situations, just to demonstrate how unbothered he is.
Richie seems to mostly be the straight man to everyone else's antics, acting as the voice of reason when needed. As a result, he doesn't get to do much in terms of comedy, his only real joke being when he and Ralph first get captured by the cavemen and he says they can't do that because "we're American citizens!"
Ralph comes across as the most self-centred, mainly because this episode is about him jumping at the chance to be a king and mostly ignoring his friends until things go badly for him. Like I said, he thinks his jokes are funny, so conveniently it means the writers can give him a bunch of lines where if we don't find them funny then that's all part of the joke. Still, I do like it when the cavemen are about to throw him into the volcano and he objects that he's allergic to lava!
Cupcake is an enigma. She has all these magic powers and I guess the implication is that humanity has just evolved that way in the future? Or does she have, like, nanotechnology in her blood? At one point she walks through a wall and the Fonz tells her she needs to learn to use doors, as if she's a naughty child. She seems clueless about everything and it's not clear why she is in charge of a time machine.
Mr. Cool is way cartoonier than the rest of the main cast. He's voiced by Frank Welker once again doing the same animal/alien voice we've heard a lot of variations on by now, and he seems to have the ability to produce any random anachronistic object just by dashing off-screen and returning with it, like hammerspace but with slightly more effort involved. He also seems to be the one that all the violence and accidents happen to - he even gets flattened by a dinosaur - but, being so cartoonish, it doesn't seem to affect him much. And he imitates the Fonz every now and then, like he's trying to learn how to be cool from the master. It's just strange that the set-up of the show presents him as the Fonz's existing pet even though he's not from Happy Days - he could have been Cupcake's pet without changing much.
The cavemen are the usual stereotypical kind. They all speak with bad grammar, like we recently saw with the Neanderthals in Cro. Worshipping a volcano as a fire god is interesting, and human sacrifice is an unlikely plot point for a sitcom but they made it work. Most of the cavewomen seem like ordinary women from the little we see of them, so the big and strong Bruta seems to be an outlier even though her concept clearly comes from an interpretation of the fact that she's a cavewoman.
There's some very egregious recycled animation in this show. A particular clip of cavemen drumming gets used about four times, and another shot of a frightened Mr. Cool tying his ears in a knot in front of his eyes gets used twice. The latter is worse for me, since the drumming is just scene-setting, whereas the ears thing is meant as a joke - and it's not that funny to do the exact same joke again!
When Bruta gets immobilised by the Fonz's kiss, it's weirdly represented by her hovering over the ground horizontally. Is it meant to imply that the kiss had an actual magical effect? Why doesn't she just faint normally?
I'm guessing that every episode starts with the time machine malfunctioning again, and ends with something else breaking it. Cartoons of this era tended to be designed to be aired in any order, so you'd be able to pretend that each new episode's malfunction was caused by the previous episode's ending, no matter which one it was!
For an adaptation of a live-action comedy, we've certainly seen worse than this on Debutniverse. Still, I wouldn't say that it's one of my favourite shows we've covered either.
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