Love and the Happy Days/Love and the Newscasters (1972) was the inspiration for the hit show Happy Days (1974) and featured eventual cast members Ron Howard, Anson Williams, and Marion Ross.
For the show's first season, the theme song was performed by the popular family group The Cowsills. For the rest of the show's run, it was performed by The Charles Fox Singers, who were a group of Los Angeles studio musicians that did numerous radio and television commercials.
Phyllis Davis, who did several low budget exploitation movies and co-starred in the television series Vega$ (1978), said she was cast as a repertory player on this show by accident. "I walked into Paramount to have lunch with somebody", recounts Davis. "They had already looked at two hundred girls, and I didn't even have an interview. I walked in, and somebody saw me and said, 'Do you have a bikini? Can you do lines?' They gave me a few lines to do in front of the network people and the producers, and I got it that day. It was a fluke and it lasted for years."
As of 2020, one of only four television shows that was an hour long and had a laugh track.
Happy Days (1974) was not a direct spin-off of this show, but an indirect one. Garry Marshall pitched a show to ABC called "New Family in Town". The network turned it down. So Marshall did a vignette on an episode of this show with the three characters. Two years later, American Graffiti (1973) became an unexpected success. The network remembered Marshall's show. It asked him to shoot a pilot with some changes. It wanted a gangster-type character to intimidate Cunningham. Thus, the birth of Fonzie.
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