Fonzie

Not to be confused with Fozzie.

"Fonz" redirects here. For for the Spanish village, see Fonz, Huesca, see Fonz (disambiguation).

"Fonz" redirects here. For for "FONZ," see National Zoo, see Fonz (disambiguation).

Fonzie
File:Fonz Pic.PNG
First appearance	"All the Way" (1974)
Last appearance	"Passages, Part II"
Created by	Jesse Delamotte
Portrayed by	Henry Winkler
In-universe information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Mechanic, Part Owner of Arnold's Restaurant, Teacher (1956-)
Family	Vito Fonzarelli (father), Grandma Nussbaum (grandmother)
Relatives	Chachi Arcola (cousin), Spike (cousin and a child burlesque of Fonzie), Danny (adopted son)

Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli (also Fonzie, The Fonz, Fonzta!, or Fonz) is a fictional character played by Henry Winkler in the American sitcom Happy Days (1974–1984). He was originally a secondary character, but eventually became the lead. By the mid 1970s, he dwarfed the other characters in popularity.

Character traits and development

Fonzie (The Fonz) is a leather jacketed Italian-American, and later, part-owner of Arnold's restaurant, who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In the very early episodes, Fonzie rode custom Harley-Davidson models. In the later episodes he rides a Triumph motorcycle. Overall, the Fonz rode a variety of models including Harley Panhead, Harley Knucklehead, Harley Sportster, Triumph 500cc TR5 Trophy (seen in the opening credits), Trophy 650cc and a BSA. He is known for his catchphrases: "Whoa", and "Aaay!"/"Eyyy!" while snapping his fingers, and forming a thrust-forward double thumbs up. He is also known to be able to fix Arnold's jukebox (or cause it to play his favorite song) by hitting it with the side of his fist. This trait occasionally applied to other objects; for instance, in a flashback episode detailing how he became friends with Richie, Fonz hits the wall of a building, causing all the lights to go out.

As a child, he and his mother were abandoned by his father. The only advice Fonz remembered his father giving was, "Don't wear socks in the rain." When he disappeared, he left a locked box for his son, but not a key; Arthur did everything to open the box, finally running over it with his tricycle. The contents? "The key, and that's it!" In the sixth season episode "Christmas Time", a sailor delivers a Christmas present ostensibly from his father, who wishes to make amends. Fonzie is resentful, but at the end of the episode reads his father's letter explaining why he left and opens it. He also learns that the sailor was his father, who admits in the letter that he doubted he would have the courage to reveal the truth to his son. In a later episode, Fonz unexpectedly meets a woman he believes is his mother in a diner. She convinces him she is not, but in the end, she looks at a picture of Fonz as a small child and sighs.

Though he takes pride in his Italian-American heritage, at one point in the series, his "Grandma Nussbaum" moves in with him, suggesting that he is actually of mixed ethnic heritage, possibly German-American or Jewish-German-American on his mother's side. (Evidence of this is mixed. When the other characters first learn her last name, they do doubletakes, and Grandma replies that she had been married a few times, but shortly after, when asked what she thinks of the apartment over the Cunningham's garage, refers to it as a "schlep" --- a Yiddish term. Winkler himself comes from German-Jewish parents who emigrated before World War II.) In the episode in which Fonzie is baptized, he makes a point in noting his appreciation for the Jews --- possibly maternal relatives --- who attended the ceremony. Grandma Nussbaum appears to have been a primary caregiver to Fonzie through the age of six. When he (instead) moves into the Cunningham's garage apartment --- a plot development that helped precipitate his domination of the program --- he turns his old apartment over to his grandmother. She is rarely referred to after that but she is featured in at least one later episode.

Grandma Nussbaum (and she alone) calls Fonzie "Skippy." She is also the grandmother of Fonzie's cousin Chachi. Fonzie's devotion to her foreshadows his ongoing devotion to mother figures throughout the show, particularly to Mrs. Cunningham.

Fonzie previously belonged to two different gangs, the Demons and the Falcons. He earned a particularly infamous reputation during this time, making many of his peers afraid of him. His redemption begins in the months before the series. The Fonz intervened in a rumble to which gang members had challenged high school student Richie Cunningham. Thanks to this intervention, Richie developed respect for Fonzie. Despite their differences, the two became best friends. While Richie learned the world from Fonz, Fonzie learned about the closeness of a tight-knit all-American family from the Cunninghams. Though at first looked down on and mistrusted (a result of his past and him being a high school dropout), he eventually became accepted by Richie's family, especially when he rented an attic room over the their garage. Even Richie's father, Howard ("Mr. C." to Fonzie and the most resistant to him living with them), a pillar of the community, came to regard Fonzie with affection.

At the start of the series, Fonzie is a high school dropout, prompting establishment characters in the show to see him as a rebel and bad influence. Fonzie is shown once attempting to go back to school with Richie, but he later decides it just isn't for him and drops out again. However, a few seasons later, Fonzie is secretly attending night school and ultimately earns his high school diploma. Throughout it all, Fonzie worked as an auto mechanic. He later became an auto mechanic instructor at the school and finally a full-fledged teacher.

Fonzie has a very high moral code. He always treats others with respect and sticks up for those that can't defend themselves. On the other hand, he often expects others to follow his example. After Chachi accidentally burns down Arnold's, for example, Fonzie very angrily yells at him for what he's done, even though other characters (including owner Al) understand it was just an accident.

Fonzie was consistently portrayed as being very successful with women. Very few women turned down his advances or made him nervous. While displaying somewhat womanizer behavior, Fonzie always treated whoever he happened to be with utmost respect. His success with women made him a frequent source of advice for Richie, Potsie, Ralph and Chachi. In Season 10, Fonzie maintained a long-term relationship with a single mother, but they would break up by the following year. Though he never married, he adopted a young orphan boy named Danny in the final season, completing his transformation from rebel to family man.

Despite his aloofness, Fonzie had more whimsical traits, such as a devotion to the Lone Ranger, whom he excitedly meets in a one episode. While confident with women, he blushed whenever Richie's mother Marion ("Mrs. C." to Fonzie), who became like a surrogate mother to him, kissed him on the cheek. She was the only person Fonzie allows to address him by his first name, Arthur, which she always did affectionately. Richie's sister Joanie also became attached to Fonzie; he called her "Shortcake." In one episode, when it is revealed that Fonzie had never been christened as a baby, the Cunninghams stood by him at church so that he could finally be christened.

Fonzie self-appointed the men's washroom at Arnold's as his "office," where he and Richie and his friends would gather to work out developing problems. Written on the walls were phone numbers of his many girlfriends (There was a payphone in there, too). On opening night of the newly-built Arnold's (after the old one burned down), Al had a desk set up in the new men's washroom just for Fonzie. It included a desk telephone and organized pull-down sheet of all the phone numbers Al recovered from the fire.

Fonzie's rough past earns him a great deal of respect and fear from more antagonistic characters. Various episodes indicate that the Fonz has extensive martial arts training. Even opponents larger than him are shown to back down from confrontations. Those who do fight him never come out on top. In one episode, he compares his nerve strike knowledge to that of a woman while both use Ralph as a training dummy. In subsequent episodes, he out-dueled an expert fencer and mangled a gangster's prosthetic iron hand with one fist. Meanwhile, more sympathetic characters idolize Fonzie due to his success with women and his imperturbable "cool". Despite the respect he has earned, several people still antagonized him — including Officer Kirk (Ed Peck), an overzealous police officer who sometimes (always unsuccessfully) tried to frame Fonzie or run him out of town.

Civic involvement

Fonzie is involved with community projects. He endorses Republican Dwight Eisenhower's 1956 presidential campaign. At a rally Fonzie declares, "I like Ike. My bike likes Ike." Eisenhower carried Wisconsin with 62% of the vote easily defeating Adlai Stevenson (supported by Richie Cunningham's more-researched speech). In that election, Eisenhower got 457 electoral votes to 73 for Stevenson.

The Fonz becomes involved with other issues. Highlighting actor Henry Winkler's off-camera work, several episodes dealt with civil rights of people with disabilities. Concerned that students with epilepsy were denied their chance to attend public school and play sports, he intervenes to resolve the issue. Such advocacy builds on the previous season's episode where Fonzie hired wheelchair-bound Don King to work in his garage, promising to provide workplace accommodation for his employee,

And concerned about other equal opportunity issues, Fonz wants Milwaukee racially integrated. Personally friends with African Americans, he becomes upset when a party in which Richie will welcome Hawaii into the Union gets boycotted. People have grown anxious because it will be racially integrated. Initially wanting to force people to attend, Fonzie learns from Mr. Cunningham that people cannot change their minds overnight. He volunteers to go south with Al and Freedom Riders to help integrate a segregated diner. Normally flirtatious with women, Fonzie is instead disgusted that the waitress does not serve Black customers. At one point he tells her that he cannot date her because of her compliance with the diner policy.

Production details

• Micky Dolenz, on the strength of his performance as a biker on an episode of Adam-12, was Garry Marshall's original choice to play Fonzie. Dolenz was several inches taller than the other cast members, and Marshall thought it might be better for Fonzie to be on the same eye level as the other characters. A search for a shorter actor as an alternate resulted in Henry Winkler landing the role.
• ABC's censors refused Fonzie a leather jacket, thinking it made him look like a hoodlum. Garry Marshall got them to allow Fonzie to wear his jacket close to his motorcycle (a Triumph TR5 Trophy) since a leather jacket was considered safety equipment. Marshall put him near his motorcycle as often as possible, even to ride it into Arnold's. Even so, for some first season episodes, he wears a white jacket. Eventually, Fonzie was allowed to wear the jacket even when not near his bike. One of the jackets is in the Smithsonian Institution.
• Henry Winkler gets requests to "be the Fonz" in real life. "People expect me to be this guy who can walk into a dark room, snap my fingers, and turn on the lights. Or they want me to pound my fist on the hood of a car, and start the engine. I can't do it. I've tried! I think the silliest request I ever got was when somebody asked me to quiet the animals in a zoo." He always insisted in interviews that Fonzie was a role he played and that he was just an actor. According to Winkler, "The Fonz was everybody I wasn't. He was everybody I wanted to be."
• On Happy Days, Fonzie met Mork, an alien. Played by Robin Williams, Mork proved so popular that he received his spin-off series, Mork & Mindy.
• Fonzie, Richie Cunningham and Ralph Malph starred in a Saturday morning cartoon spin-off, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, where the characters, with a female character named Cupcake and a "Fonz dog" (an anthropomorphic dog named Mr. Cool that imitated the Fonz's thumbs-up "Aaay" catchphrase), traveled through time.

References in popular culture

Television

Fonzie has been referenced in episodes of Boy Meets World (in-jokes of Boy Meets World being a "modern" Happy Days was a repeated theme throughout the show's run), Futurama, Family Guy (where the main character Peter Griffin is a huge fan of Fonzie), That '70s Show (which has a number of parallels with Happy Days), Kim Possible, The Replacements, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, The Simpsons, Scrubs, Newsradio, Clerks the Animated Series , The Oblongs, South Park, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, 21 Jump Street, Bo' Selecta!, End of Part One, Robot Chicken, Doctor Who, IT Crowd, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, The L Word, George Lopez, Friends, Gilmore Girls, The Office, Peep Show. How I Met Your Mother, Flight of the Conchords, Lost, King of the Hill, and "SuperNews".

Henry Winkler played Barry Zuckerkorn on Arrested Development (a show executive produced by Ron Howard). In the episode "Altar Egos", Barry briefly does the Fonz pose in a bathroom mirror. Another reference occurs in the episode "Motherboy XXX", in which Barry jumps over a shark. Scott Baio, the actor who played Chachi, was also featured as a lawyer in Arrested Development, and in the episode where the Bluth family was arguing about replacing Zuckercorn as their lawyer, it is said that Baio's character was "brought in to appeal to a younger demographic," a reference to the show.

In the movie Scream, he played a principle, he did a Fonz pose in the mirror when he combed his hair.

Originally, Fonzie wasn't supposed to be the "cool character" that he became; Potsie was supposed to be the cool character, but after Fonzie gained popularity, Potsie then became a supporting character who was somewhat naïve.

Ron Howard created an Obama PSA campaign video which featured Richie Cunningham and the Fonz discussing the need for change with Obama. http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cc65ed650d/ron-howards-call-to-action-from-ron-howard-and-henry-winkler

A wax figure of the Fonz has been featured prominently on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. The hand positioning of the wax figure causes host Conan O'Brien to comment that the Fonz was finishing up at the urinal.

Statue

Main article: Bronze Fonz

"Jumping the shark"

The phrase "jumping the shark", a term originating from a melodramatic Happy Days scene in which Fonzie jumps on water skis over a tank of sharks, has become part of popular culture. The expression denotes the moment when a television series loses its credibility due to predictable repetition or contrived extensions of its theme, usually as a result of the writers being unable to maintain its quality indefinitely.

Trivia

Fonzie was referred to in The One Hundredth episode of popular television programme Friends. The doctor that is delivering Phoebe's triplets seems to have an obsession with Fonzie.

In the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious, Fonzie is referred to in a comment made to two people driving classic muscle cars. The actor Tyrese Gibson makes the comment, "Real funny, Fonzie!"

In the SIRIUS Satellite Radio Covino and Rich on MAXIM 108, they commonly use the "WWFD" (What Would Fonzie Do).

XBXRX sing a song named "The Fonz". Eugene McGuinness sings a song named "Fonz". Smash Mouth also have a song named "The Fonz". He is also referenced in many songs, including "A Pack of Dogs" by Lightyear, Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song", the Evil Dead: The Musical song "Do The Necronomicon" and the Weezer music video of "Buddy Holly". In the video game Saints Row 2, one of the compliments is called "Happy Days" and mimics Fonzie's thumbs up greeting. It even plays a voice similar to his.

In the DC Comics publication Booster Gold, Booster is seen to admire The Fonz, and imitates his thumping of the jukebox and thumbs up greeting upon going back in time.

Stefans has a registered haircut called "The Fonz" for AU$34.95.

In his 1970s heyday, MPC issued a model kit of 'Fonzie & His Bike' featuring the character and the Triumph TR5 Trophy he rode.

Fonzie had a habit of hitting electrical equipment to make it work, and this became known as the Fonzie touch, a term that is still in use today.

He is also referred to in the movie Pulp Fiction. During a Mexican standoff at a diner, Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules Winnfield asks a robber what Fonzie is like. When she answers that he's cool, Jules replies: "And that's what we're gonna be. We're gonna be cool."

On the song "Simon Says (remix)", by MC Pharaohe Monch, guest MC Redman quips in his verse 'respect like The Fonz, you see my collar up? (Eyyyy!)'

On Smash Mouth's debut album Fush Yu Mang, there is a song named "The Fonz" that compares the writer's coolness to that of Kurt Cobain. The original idea behind the song sprung from the band's original guitarist (Greg Camp) receiving a pair of shoes signed by Cobain, not long after these shoes were signed, Cobain was dead.

In the Literal music video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, the lines "but Arthur Fonzarelli's got an army of clones (Fonzie's been cloned)" accompany a group of similar people walking up a stairway.

The Fonz is parodied in an Family Guy episode called The Father, the Son, and the Holy Fonz.

Reception

Virgin Media included Fonzie in their "80's finest" segment and stated: "He was the coolest dude in suburban America on the classic sitcom Happy Days. He wore a leather jacket; he got all the chicks; he even made the thumbs-up sign look good."

See also

• List of breakout characters
• Fonzie (band) – Punk rock band from Portugal