The gang’s back together! Henry Winkler and Ron Howard reunited with their Happy Days costars more than 50 years after the show premiered.
“I’m just kind of emotional here. This is the first time that we have appeared this way in 50 years,” Winkler, 79, said on Saturday, April 5 during a panel at Steel City Comic Con in Pittsburgh, according to video footage posted from the event.
Winkler and Howard — who played Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli and Richie Cunningham, respectively, on the classic sitcom — took part in a discussion with former Happy Days cast mates Anson Williams and Don Most, who played Potsie Weber and Ralph Malph, respectively. While the Happy Days cast have reunited in various incarnations since the show ended in 1984, Winkler confirmed the Steel City Comic Con appearance was their first long-form fan panel as a group.
After Winkler mentioned the 50-year milestone, Howard, 71, joked that it had been “[more], like, 50 minutes because we’re having so much fun hanging, and this was sort of our great excuse to come together.”
According to The New York Post, Winkler and Howard paid tribute to the many cast members who have died since Happy Days ended, as well as acknowledging their gratitude towards the show’s late creator, Garry Marshall, who died at age 81 in 2016.
“First of all, Garry Marshall was, like, a brilliant creator, a great writer,” Winkler said. “They chose a wonderful cast — some of them, unfortunately, are no longer on the earth with us — but we played together, we stayed together, and we worked hard together. Nobody thought they were better than anybody else.”
The Fonz on Robin Williams: I Knew I Was “in the Presence of Greatness”
Howard added that “a huge key” to Happy Days’ success was due to its cast forming a tight bond early on.
“The show evolved as, really, an ensemble… We were a unit, we were a community, and also, I think for us, it was kind of like our coming of age story,” the actor and filmmaker said. “We were just growing up through this process. It was a life experience that’s unlike anything else that I’ve ever known.”
Happy Days was made into a sitcom by ABC in 1974 following a one-off pilot that originally premiered as part of the anthology series Love, American Style two years earlier. Marshall chose to base Happy Days around Richie Cunningham and his friends’ high school exploits in 1950s Milwaukee.
Winkler was originally only a recurring guest in the first two seasons, but got top billing alongside Howard by the end of season 2.
During a recent interview with The Post-Gazette, Winkler revealed that Howard once opened up to him about how it felt seeing Fonzie become the focus of Happy Days in its later seasons.
Are Tom Hanks and Henry Winkler Feuding? Breaking Down Decades of Drama
Winkler said in an interview published on March 31: “Ron understood two things. First of all, he is a very good friend of mine. Ron, his daughter, who is our goddaughter, and my daughter, we all did my daughter’s podcast ‘What in the Winkler?!’ We were all in my living room doing the podcast together and that was two weeks ago.”
“Ron said to me, ‘I have to admit it, it hurts my feelings, and I have to admit you are doing nothing to make anybody feel bad. You’re just being good and that’s good for the show.’ That was the only time we discussed it,” Winkler confirmed.
Happy Days was such a phenomenon in the 1970s and ‘80s that it spawned seven different spinoffs, including fellow classic sitcom Laverne & Shirley and Robin Williams’ breakout role in Mork & Mindy.
Henry Winkler Proudly Owns Being the Face of ‘Jumping the Shark’
Having left Happy Days in season 7, Howard became most famous for his work behind the camera as two-time Oscar-winning director of A Beautiful Mind, Cocoon, Apollo 13 and Backdraft.
Winkler earned three Emmy Award nominations throughout his run on Happy Days (and six more later in his career), before finally winning Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2019 for his performance in Barry. He reached a new generation of fans through playing bumbling Barry Zuckerkorn in the Howard-produced sitcom Arrested Development.
