HAPPY DAYS was the most popular secular show of the ’70s, but it had one religious moment going for it when Fonzie got baptized.
The episode, titled “Fonzie’s Baptism,” aired as the finale for Season 4, Parade reported. It follows Fonzie, played by Henry Winkler, as he contemplates his mortality and salvation after a near-death car crash. After a talk with a priest, he decides to get baptized.
In his ceremony, Fonzie talks about the 10 Commandments and loving thy neighbor. His family and the congregation then sing a Catholic hymn, “Faith of Our Fathers.”
Winkler built up Fonzie’s relationship with God in previous episodes.
“In the first year [or] the second year, there’s a scene at the dinner table, and they asked me to say grace,” Winkler said previously. “And the show was being run by a man named Bill, who was very religious. I understood from the Fonz’s point of view of talking to God. And so I said I grace, I went ‘Hey, God? Whoa.'”
“In that ‘whoa,’ I said ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m grateful’ and I argued — I had to literally stop the filming for a minute and argue my case — because he wanted me to say a paragraph,” the actor said. “And I thought it all went into ‘Hey, God? Whoa.’”
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Winkler had a large role in shaping Fonzie’s character in other ways, like creating some of his catchphrases.
Because he plays a cool character, Winkler didn’t want to look in the mirror and start to get a big head.
He said, “I told the director: ‘I can’t comb my hair, I made a deal with myself.’ He replied: ‘It’s written. You have to.’ So I walked up, held up my comb, then went: ‘Heeeey…that’s perfect, I don’t need to comb.’ That moment defined the Fonz. I got the ‘Heeeey’ and the ‘Whoaaa’ from my favorite sport at the time: horse-riding.”
HAPPY DAYS creator Garry Marshall never had Fonzie in the show’s original script. He eventually realized he needed a different character to shake things up and based Fonzie off someone he knew.
He said, “I grew up in the Bronx and patented him off a guy in my neighborhood called Anthony, who could tie a rope to an ice truck and pull it along with his teeth. I always thought that was magical.”
The show ran for 11 total seasons and had 255 episodes in all. It is still available to watch now through Paramount+.
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