Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

imdb-clem I grew up watching Happy Days when it first aired. Yes I was there when the Fonz moved into the apartment over the Cunningham's garage, when Fonzie jumped his motorcycle in the parking lot of Arnold's, and even when Fonzie jumped the shark. I was there almost to the bitter end.However, it's really the first two seasons of this show that I remember most fondly, when it was a single-camera closed-set mid-season replacement production, and 'the Fonz' was merely a secondary character, a somewhat menacing hoodlum too cool to hang out with Richie and his friends, but who occasionally interacted with them to show that they weren't total 'nerds'.The decision to make Fonzie the star and to do the show before a live audience starting in season 3 changed the show entirely. It was a business decision to save a watchable show which was, however, faltering in the ratings. And perhaps it was because of that decision that we are even talking about this show today. So I can't completely hate that decision, but I will always be most nostalgic for the first two seasons .. and Chuck.But seasons 3-5 are probably the 'classic' seasons of this show for most viewers. That's when it got the highest ratings and when the Fonz became a cultural icon whose thumbs-up pose adorned the lunch boxes of half the kids in my school. Ayeeeeeeeeeeeee! Starting in the fifth season, during which the Fonz jumped the shark, the show began to run out of steam, but was still far too popular for its own good and for its creators and the network to stop milking it. So the usual expedients crept in. Authenticity was abandoned and the cast was allowed to stop looking like the time period and started sporting 70s MOR haircuts, in order to keep them happy now that they were 'stars'. A string of new regular characters were introduced to bolster sagging ratings - Chachi, Jenny Picolo, Lorrie Beth, Ted McGinley's character Roger. And can anyone forget that Happy Days actually launched the series Mork & Mindy and the career of Robin Williams? Well it did. Happy Days might hold the record for the number of (bad) spin offs it spawned. (Interestingly enough, it also launched Laverne & Shirley, but they were actually good characters introduced in season 3 when the show still had creative energy.) So if you've never really seen this show and are tempted, get seasons 1 and 2 to see the show at its nostalgic best. Get 3-5 to see the show at its peak of popularity and cultural relevance (and to see it jump the shark). Get the rest if you feel you have to for some reason.

Blueghost I liked Happy Days for what it was, but I didn't like Happy Days itself. I didn't connect with the 50s, really didn't get to see all the characters I wanted to (Pat Morita's the ORIGINAL Arnold as an example), and when the show really took off, I felt put out by the long pauses taken for audience applause and cheers as familiar faces would come onto the scene.It was a kind of idolatry that I just didn't get. And, to be exceedingly honest, I still don't understand. I liked the Mork from Ork episode, and some of the earlier mundane ones that seemed to have real slices of 1950s Americana. But beyond that... I just really didn't get into it. In fact, if anything, I liked the spin-offs that were born of the Happy Days effort more than anything else. Laverne and Shirley, or Mork and Mindy as examples. But Happy Days?Well, everything I'd heard about the 50s seemed to give me mixed messages as to what that time period was all about. And as far as I knew, they weren't exactly "Happy" days. Then again, it depended on your social circles, much like anything else.Some puzzlements abound; Richies older brother, the basketball star, mysteriously vanished after the first or second season. Then Chachi becomes part of the cast. And Ralph and Potsie never seemed to graduate while Richie goes off to become a Vietnam War correspondent or something.You know, again, I liked the show for being filled with familiar faces and a staple that I could always tune into when there was nothing else to do. But it all seemed so contrived after the first couple of seasons. So much that I had to just forget about it. People liked it, and I suppose that was enough.Me? I was a sci-fi guy, and was hoping that Space 1999 would expand, or after Star Wars had hit the screen that the much talked about TV series would manifest. But it never happened. I was stuck with Kirk and Spock reruns, which, to be honest, wasn't so bad given the alternative of watching shows like "Happy Days".Like I say, people liked it, it his some right warm emotional chords with folks, so can you really ask for too much more? Maybe not.

altair42002 I was 13 when this show first came out and I watched almost every episode. I think I remember an episode where some guys are looking for a stolen car. the car is in a garage being serviced and at one point fonzi doctors the license plate and possibly even re-paints the car to keep it from being spotted. In the entire run of this show, I think this is the only time Fonzi was shown doing something illegal and gives a glimpse of something of his past. My question is- am I correct in this or were there other episodes where he did something illegal??

classicalsteve "Happy Days" was produced and broadcast from the mid-1970's to the early 1980's and seems to get more ridiculous with age. At the time of its broadcast, most viewers who grew up in the 1950's were in middle age with families, and the scenes at Mel's Diner probably brought an artificial nostalgia to them. The Fonz was of course the coolest of the cool (although the actor Henry Wrinkler to this day has never learned how to ride a motorcycle). Richie Cunningham was the all-American blond-haired kid who would probably be elected student body president. Potsie was Richie's best friend--the star of the show has to have a best friend, I guess. And Ralph Malph was the bumbling sidekick to the Fonz, if not the entire group. I loved it when the Fonz would beat up on poor Ralph Malph. And there was Mel, the middle-aged lug who ran Mel's Diner. And of course who could forget the appearance of Mork? Was this really the 1950's? Ironically, films produced during the 1950's, such as "Rebel Without a Cause" and "The Wild One" have gotten better with age and portray the period more honestly than this show which was produced 20 years after the period it portrays.Unfortunately, the TV show "Happy Days" is not in the same league as "Rebel Without a Cause" or "American Graffitti" for that matter. "Happy Days" may have captured some aspects of the 1950's with its burger diner, juke boxes, cool cars, and tacky plaid shirts, but it is more a nostalgic idealism done strictly for laughs rather than an honest portrayal. "American Graffitti" had something to say about young Americans in the 1950's whereas "Happy Days" seemed more about what middle-aged people of the 1970's wished the 1950's had been like. The result was a kind of watered down fabrication that really has nothing to do with the 1950's. "Happy Days" is, at best, a comedy-fantasy with some of the artificial culture of the 1950's as its backdrop. As pointed out by another reviewer, the all-American kid Richie Cunningham would probably have been chastised for befriending the likes of a drop-out like Fonzie. And Mel would probably forbid Fonzie from entering his Diner.A quick history: "Happy Days" was originally a pilot called "Love in the Happy Days" that was rejected for broadcast. Comedy pilots that had themes concerning sex and romance that did not make it to pilot airing sometimes appeared on the infrequently broadcast show "Love American Style" which was often aired in place of baseball games that had rained out or other unexpected programming cancellations and/or alterations. In short, "Love American Style" was a throw-away show that contained all these one-episode comedy pilots that never made it to a slotted debut. "Love in the Happy Days" did appear as a "Love American Style" show sometime in the early 1970's, but at the time TV executives could not foresee how a show about 1950's young people would be popular, particularly during the hey-day of comedy shows centering around middle-aged people, such as The "Mary Tyler Moore Show" (and its subsequent spin-offs such "Rhoda"), "The Bob Newhart Show", and "All in the Family". (How things have changed since now most TV sitcoms are about young people and the industry avoids most shows about middle-aged people like the plague!) Subsequently, one of the young stars of "Love in the Happy Days", a child actor from "The Andy Griffith Show" named Ron Howard, got the chance to star in a film about young people taking place in 1959 called "American Graffitti" directed by the relatively unknown George Lucas whose previous "THX 1138" had bombed miserably at the box office. Even when it was premiered to movie executives, again the studios could not see how a movie about young people in the 1950's could become popular because it didn't "fit" with what had been popular in the past, although they didn't realize that much of the movie-going audience had been young in the 1950's. As everyone knows, the movie was a huge hit, and studio executives recognized that they had completely misjudged their audience. Somewhere during the theatrical run of "American Graffitti", TV executives realized they had a comedy pilot in their vault that was a lot like "American Graffitti". They brought it back with the original cast, plus Henry Wrinkler as "The Fonz", re-titled it "Happy Days" and the rest is TV history as it became one of the most popular shows of the 1970's."Happy Days" now seems ridiculous. The characters are flat and cardboard, never being more or less than what they superficially are. The issues they deal with are trivial. And their reactions appear mindless and even silly. Nowadays, the character of the Fonz seems to be a caricature of, well, The Fonz. Was the idea to be a kind of parody of Marlon Brando's character in "The Wild One"? Looking on the show with fresh eyes, I feel the producers really missed out on a great opportunity to present the 1950's with depth and realism that still could be fun and entertaining. Instead the producers decided on cheap laughs for quick bucks. This is definitely a show that has not withstood the test of time. "American Graffitti" has many of the outward appearances of "Happy Days" but it had an edge. It had an honesty about the characters and their issues. "Happy Days" took the look of "American Graffitti" but failed to take its heart.