For eight seasons, the roommates and Shotz Brewery coworkers got into uproarious, I Love Lucy —like high jinks in Wisconsin and, eventually, in California. Much of the show's success was due to Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, who brought personal touches to their title characters. As zany as the show could get, these felt like real people. They were believable. Around the time of our nation's bicentennial, Godfather director Coppola was producing a spoof dubbed "My Country Tis of Thee.
Garry Marshall, Penny's brother, would pluck the two and cast them as Laverne and Shirley. The characters made their debut in a third-season episode of Happy Days titled "A Date with Fonzie" in Lenny does not appear much in the eighth season, as McKean was busy filming Spinal Tap.
As students at Carnegie Mellon University, the two were part of a comedy troupe named the Credibility Gap and created the characters Lenny and Squiggy original name: Anthony Squiggliano for skits. The forgotten sitcom Hey, Landlord! Quincy Jones wrote the theme music, for starters. Secondly, its creator was TV icon Garry Marshall. However, the show was a bust. Image: jacksonupperco. Though it was obviously completely redecorated, the guts of The Odd Couple condo was used to craft Laverne and Shirley's garden apartment.
You can spot the similarities in the entryways to the right, seen here, which feature two doors at a right angle on a raised platform.
Obviously, Penny Marshall starred — and she directed some episodes, too. Her brother Garry created, produced, directed and scripted. Ronny Hallin, their sister, served as the show's casting director. Oh, and Anthony Marshall, their father, produced as well. As it was a cartoon, the plots got quite surreal — the two military newbies faced off against aliens, werewolves and Bigfoot.
Commanding over them was Sgt. Squealy, a talking pig, who was voiced by Ron Palillo — a. Horshack of Welcome Back, Kotter. Pepsi Milk, which is just what it sounds like, was Laverne's comfort drink of choice on the show.
The treat was an old favorite of Marshall's. She got in the habit of drinking it as a child, when her mother would make her drink a glass of milk before having some soda. Young Penny would top off her unfinished milk with a splash of cola and — voila! Here's a recipe if your tastebuds are curious.
Or, you could head to Japan, where Pepsi made a strawberry milk flavor. As Cindy Williams herself explained to us in an interview , the duo's hopscotch mantra was from Marshall's youth. We'll shoot that. When Penny and her school chums would walk to school, they'd link arms and count off their steps, '1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, schlemiel, schlimazel, hasenpfeffer incorporated! Garry remembered that. After years on the air, sitcoms tend to shake up the formula.
Laverne and Shirley went from bottle-cappers to aspiring actresses and department store employees. Two years later, early in the eighth and final season, Cindy Williams became pregnant and left the show. Originally, there were plans to have her character Shirley pop in here and there, but that did not come to fruition. Instead, her parts were rewritten for guest stars, most notably in "The Baby Show," where Vicki Lawrence played an expecting mother.
The tune would make singer Cyndi Grecco a one-hit wonder. The single was co-produced by Jose Feliciano's wife, Janna Merlyn Feliciano, and released on the Private Stock label, which was known for celebrity crooners. Private Stock put out the debut full-length of Blondie, too.
The imprint also released singles by Vicki Lawrence, including " The Other Woman " — perhaps foreshadowing her fill-in role mentioned above? Image: lyrics. She was performing there by the roller coasters when Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, the ace songwriters, discovered her. The Squigtones even performed on an episode of American Bandstand.
NFL defensive star Fred Dryer — the first man to record two safeties in one game in — decided to give acting a go late in his career. Dryer appears as a lifeguard in Laverne's dream sequence. He would later be considered for the lead role on Cheers — which eventually went to Ted Danson, of course — but he ended up going the action route as the star of Hunter.
In a episode, Marshall and Williams appeared together as the feuding co-creators of a s children's show called Salmon Cat. As you can see in this boxing scene, the two proved they still had those physical-comedy chops. Two Monkees were almost Fonzie. Welcome to MeTV! Find your local MeTV station. Where to watch. See when your favorite shows are on. To remember the show, we grabbed our Boo Boo Kitties and Pepsi Milk and came up with seven interesting facts about its history.
Little did they know that the spin-off would quickly become more popular than the original show. In her memoir, My Mother Was Nuts , Marshall explained that it was a Yiddish song from her childhood that she and her friends would sing on their way to school.
For a comedy, the show featured a healthy dose of musical numbers, including countless performances at the Pizza Bowl and that zany Christmas episode at a mental hospital. Actors Michael McKean and David Lander created the comedy routine while performing together in college. Studio execs gave them the green light on one condition: The character Anthony Squiggliano had to be renamed Squiggy because execs thought there were too many Italians on the show.
In the fall of , the studio tried to reboot the show by moving the story from Milwaukee to Burbank, California and fast-forwarded by a couple of years. Laverne and Shirley got employment as gift wrappers at a department store, the Pizza Bowl was replaced with a BBQ Pit and Carmine delivered singing telegrams. Over the last two seasons, a number of characters came and went; Lenny disappeared for the last four episodes. Early in the season, the actor married and became pregnant.
She thought she would return to the show with camera shots carefully designed to hide her baby bump, but when the studio wanted Williams to work on her due date, Williams left the show triggering a weird multiverse where it seemed like Shirley never existed. A schlemiel is somebody who often spills his soup and a schlimazel is the person it lands on. Hasenpfeffer is actually a German stew and I have no idea why it is part of this ditty except that when it is all put together you cannot help but laugh at how it sounds.
If you are feeling a bit nostalgic here is the YouTube Link to the opening theme. Humor has existed since the beginning of mankind, and recent scholarship even places it in one of history's earliest recorded documents, the Old Testament.
For almost all cultures, humor actually springs out of tragedy. It is one of mankind's original coping mechanisms. In fact, the term "Laughter in the trenches" originated out of the despair on both sides during the bloodiest battles of World War I.
But sometimes humor also springs forth out of innocence and gentleness. Just watch any young child playing and laughing and a smile cannot help but cross your face. I cannot even begin to tell you half the things my granddaughter does that makes us all laugh out loud. This week, on most of our PBS stations, you too will get a chance to experience humor that springs forth from a joyous, loving place.
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