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Henry Winkler Opens Up About The “Humiliating” And “Shameful” Experience Of Battling Dyslexia While Reading Lines For ‘Happy Days’: “I Was So F**king Angry”
Last Wednesday (Sept. 20) marked an anniversary of perfectamundo proportions. On Sept. 20, 1977, Henry Winkler‘s Arthur Fonzarelli leapt over sharks on water skis in the Happy Days Season 5 episode entitled “Hollywood: Part 3,” the final installment of a three-part episode.
However, it wasn’t until a fan of the Fonz recalled the scene with his friends in the 80s that it launched a ripple effect. At that time, Jon Hein was a student at the University of Michigan, where he and his friends were “talking about when [their] favorite shows started to go downhill.”
“A couple examples came out, and somebody said Happy Days,” he told Michigan Today, the University of Michigan alumni magazine, in 2016.
One of his roommates then uttered, “‘When Fonzie jumped the shark.'”
“There was a pause in the room because we all knew exactly what he meant,” he continued.
Hein and his friends began employing the phrase in their everyday speech to signify something going downhill, and ten years later, he decided to make a website featuring “a list of about 150 or 200 shows” that “jumped the shark.”
While the website is no longer running, the phrase that inspired it has held a lasting impact. According to Yahoo! Entertainment, “jump the shark” has been used to describe “creative bankruptcy.” The meme has also been threatened by “nuke the fridge,” which came out of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Despite the negative connotation of “jump the shark,” Winkler told Yahoo! Entertainment that he came to embrace Hein’s coining of the phrase.
“We were number one for years after it, so it didn’t bother us at all,” he shared. “I met John Hein, the man who invented the phrase with his pal… I did his radio show. So here we are, we’re both standing.”
He also revealed that he “did all the waterskiing for the jump, except for the jump.”
“They wouldn’t let me do stunts. Not only that, but I didn’t know how to jump! I knew how to waterski, but I didn’t know how to jump like they do in the show.”
Nonetheless, Winkler shared that he is “one of the only actors in the world who has jumped the shark twice.”
“Once on Arrested Development and once, of course, the original on Happy Days,” he said. “I’m very proud — very proud.”
Happy Days is streaming on Paramount+
