Happy Days' Original Title Was A Terrible Idea

Before it was "Happy Days," one of the most ubiquitous sitcoms of the '70s was almost called "COOL." Series creator Garry Marshall, who died in 2016, once revealed as much in a retrospective with The Guardian, where he also shared the strange reason the title didn't work out.

Some of the problems with the proposed name are obvious; if audiences are told something is cool before they even see it, won't that make it uncool? Even though Henry Winkler's leather-jacket-clad scene-stealer The Fonz was eventually seen as the epitome of cool for a whole generation of viewers, I imagine that pitching the sweet, cheesy series as "COOL" from day one could have backfired. It might have come across as trying too hard or, well, jumping the shark.

According to Marshall, though, the problem with the title had nothing to do with its implications and everything to do with period-specific branding. Namely, audiences at the time already had strong associations with a cigarette brand called Kool. "I wanted the show to be called COOL, but test audiences thought it a brand of cigarette, so my producer said: 'How about Happy Days? That's what we're going to show,'" Marshall said in Guardian's 2015 look back at the series. In series star Marion Ross' book, "My Days: Happy And Otherwise," Marshall elaborated more on the story, saying that the show was picked up by the network under the title "COOL," but after test audiences got confused by its similarity to the cigarette company, producer Tom Miller came up with "Happy Days" instead.

Today, the idea that a tobacco company could have its own TV show sounds outlandish, but for much of the 20th century, Kool actually was cross-promoting its famous menthol smokes in a variety of unusual ways. According to research done by Stanford Medicine, tobacco companies spent big money trying to catch new customers in the decades surrounding "Happy Days," and Kool was no exception. The company had a friendly penguin mascot, threw a spring break beach party with Playboy bunnies handing out sample packs, and even briefly took over the Newport Jazz Festival (it was renamed the Kool Jazz Festival for a while in the '70s, per Stanford Medicine). With all that in mind, a show named after the cigarette brand wouldn't have seemed outside the realm of possibility at the time.

Luckily, Marshall and his team went with "Happy Days" instead, and the series' creator even resisted attempts to change the series' name to "Fonzie" out of respect for co-star Ron Howard when Winkler's character took off, per Marshall's book "My Happy Days in Hollywood." In the end, the title fit the series about mythical "simpler times" that never really existed. As Jeff MacGregor once wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, "the show's title was at once literal and ironic, an incantation of better times. To its fans the program was a simple pleasure in a complicated age." At its best, "Happy Days" was a weekly dose of escapism during one of the most change-filled decades in recent history. Plus, unlike cigarettes, it could be enjoyed guilt-free.