Today in 1977, the first broadcast of the Happy Days episode called “Hollywood: Part 3.”
Though today it’s best known not for its title, but for the moment where Henry Winkler’s character, The Fonz, jumps over a shark on water skis.
The phrase “jump the shark” is now a shorthand we use for the moment a show or a story turns absolutely ridiculous and keeps heading downhill.
But why the heck was Fonzie jumping over a shark in the first place?
In the TV story, some Hollywood producers are in Milwaukee when their car breaks down, and of course Fonz helps get them back on the road.
They invite him to Hollywood for a screen test, and while he’s there he decides to take up water skiing.
Actor Henry Winkler had actually been a water skiing instructor, so it was a chance for him to showcase his real-life skills.
A dude on the beach known as The California Kid wants to see how brave Fonz really is, so he issues a challenge: they each water-ski jump over a cage containing a live shark.
The Kid chickens out, but Fonzie actually does it! And everybody is impressed.
Well, everyone except for comedian Jon Hein, who created the Jump the Shark website to mark the moments where shows went far off course, never to return.
As a symbol, it’s not perfect; as a lot of critics have pointed out, Happy Days was still a hit after the shark episode.
But by a lot of accounts, this was when the show stopped trying to tell a broader story about life in its time period and just sent its characters onto wacky adventures, like when they met a space alien named Mork and launched somewhere around 40,000 spinoffs.
For his part, Henry Winkler says he doesn’t mind the phrase “jump the shark.”
In fact, decades after Fonzie’s big jump, Winkler’s character on the sitcom Arrested Development happened to be standing on a pier, next to a shark… which of course he jumps as he leaves the scene.
Starting tomorrow in Springfield, Missouri, the Cider Days festival.
In addition to plentiful cider, there will be food trucks, arts and crafts and lots of autumn entertainment.
Or as they like to say, “gourd times are had at Cider Days.”
Henry Winkler is ‘very proud’ to be the face of the ‘jump the shark’ meme (Yahoo! Entertainment)
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