Tune in Tonight: Blansky's Beauties & Out of the Blue
It seems that the era of sitcom spinoffs has come to an end. While reality shows seem to spread faster than e. coli, most TV comedies in recent years just don’t spawn the way they used to. Even The Big Bang Theory, despite its baffling popularity, has so far only birthed a single little worm baby of its very own.
In the 70s and 80s, though, if a sitcom made it past one season, there was an excellent chance it would get a spinoff, if not more than one. The Cosby Show begat A Different World, The Mary Tyler Moore Show begat Rhoda (and Lou Grant, and Phyllis), Diff’rent Strokes begat The Facts of Life, The Golden Girls begat Empty Nest (which in turn begat Nurses), Cheers begat Frasier (and the less successful The Tortellis), Growing Pains begat Just the Ten of Us. A rare few, like Benson (birthed from Soap), outlived their predecessors, but many, like Mr. T and Tina (birthed from Welcome Back, Kotter), disappeared after less than one season.
Outdone only by All in the Family, which sired seven spinoffs (one of which premiered fifteen years after All in the Family was canceled), Happy Days boasted six1: the fondly remembered Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy (both of which eventually got their own animated spinoffs), the less fondly remembered Joanie Loves Chachi and the animated Fonz & the Happy Days Gang, and the not at all remembered Blansky’s Beauties and Out of the Blue.
Like a lot of failed spinoffs, Blansky’s Beauties had only a tenuous connection with its predecessor: the title character, Nancy Blansky (played by Nancy Walker), appeared in a single episode of Happy Days as a cousin of Howard Cunningham’s. Grab a pencil, this is where it gets a little complicated: though the episode of Happy Days Nancy appeared in took place in the early 1960s, Blansky’s Beauties takes place in the present (well, 1977). Nancy appears to be the same age, implying that she is not just related to Howard Cunningham, but Dr. Who as well.
Also a time-traveling immortal is Arnold (Pat Morita), the hapless owner of the Happy Days gang’s favorite diner, who joins Nancy in late 70s Las Vegas2. When Blansky’s Beauties tanked, Arnold was sent back in the portal to 1960s Milwaukee. But it gets a little weirder still: Nancy has a nephew named Joey, played by Eddie Mekka, who is an identical younger cousin of Carmine Ragusa from Laverne & Shirley, meaning that, somehow, though it’s never mentioned elsewhere, Carmine is related to the Cunninghams.
Even weirder than that, when Blansky’s Beauties was canceled, two other cast members, Scott Baio and Lynda Goodfriend, were tossed through a rip in the time-space continuum and reborn on Happy Days as Chachi Arcola and Lori Beth, Richie Cunningham’s future wife, while at the same time playing retooled versions of their Blansky’s Beauties characters on two other equally ill-fated versions of the same show.
Confused? Imagine trying to write all that out. It all seemed to be an awful lot of trouble just so that Garry Marshall could produce a show about beautiful babes trying to make it on the Las Vegas showgirl scene. But try he did, three times, and each one was a complete failure (the final attempt, Who’s Watching the Kids?, was also responsible for giving Jim Belushi his first television role). While Who’s Watching the Kids? and the second attempt, Legs, focused more on the showgirls themselves, Blansky’s Beauties focused mostly on Nancy Blansky, who acted as the den mother for the girls, keeping them in line and organizing their stage appearances with wry humor and grudging affection.
The personalities of the showgirls are established right in the opening credits: Sunshine (Lynda Goodfriend) is the nice girl, Arkansas (Rhonda Bates) is the dumb hick, Hillary (Taaffe O’Connell) is the blonde bimbo, and Bambi (Caren Kaye) is the other blonde bimbo. When they’re not dancing (though the dancing scenes consist of stock showgirl footage interspersed with shots of audiences politely applauding), they’re hanging around their apartment in bikinis, or playing softball in tiny shorts and pantyhose. Adding a little much-needed testosteroni to the mix is the previously mentioned Joey and his brother Anthony (Scott Baio), a 12-year-old scumbag who speaks almost entirely in double entendres.
In this episode, the girls are all atwitter at the news that a millionaire sheik, who describes his home country as “the Cleveland of the Middle East,” is in town and planning to see their show. Bambi immediately sets her cap for him, declaring “I bet I can make his carpet fly.” Casual racism, along with later referring to the sheik as “El Sheiko” is what passes for humor in Blansky’s Beauties.
The sheik, of course played by an American actor using a broad “open sesame” accent, is immediately entranced with the bold, brassy Bambi, who hopes to set him up as a sugar daddy. However, he has other plans: he wants to marry her and whisk her back to his country, where he declares that she’ll be part of his harem because there are only just so many tired even by the 70s ethnic stereotypes one can fit into a half-hour TV show.
Nancy catches wind of this nefarious plan and comes to the rescue, which involves disguising herself as Bambi, despite being twenty-five years older and nearly a foot shorter. A lot of tiresome physical comedy ensues, Arnold shows up to distract the sheik’s henchman (who, according to the IMDB, appeared in the very next episode as an entirely different character), and in the end, scared away by Nancy’s silent, possibly gangster boss (played by the brains behind this operation Garry Marshall himself) the sheik agrees to leave Bambi alone. As a sign of no hard feelings, he leaves Nancy with a gift. Can you guess what it is? Go ahead, guess. If you guessed “a magic genie lamp,” go ahead and get an ice-cold Dr. Pepper or whatever else you’d think would make a fine reward. Nancy rubs the lamp and wishes for Rock Hudson. Comedy!
Blansky’s Beauties lasted thirteen episodes.
Out of the Blue, premiering two years later, makes Blansky’s Beauties look like M*A*S*H. While Blansky’s Beauties skewed towards cheeky adult humor, Out of the Blue was its deeply corny, family-friendly counterpart, with a heinous earworm of a theme song, and an aggressively intrusive laugh track that all but shakes the audience and demands that it agrees this is all terribly funny.
Its connection to the Happy Days Cinematic Universe is even more tenuous, in that the main character, a guardian angel named Random (sure, why the hell not), appears on one episode that, due to a scheduling error, actually aired after Out of the Blue premiered. Mork also appears in the first episode, with the explanation that Ork is right next to Heaven, so he and Random are intergalactic neighbors who know each other, if you needed an indicator of how desperate the writers were to tie this show into a wildly popular franchise.
The plot of Out of the Blue is simple: it’s basically It’s a Wonderful Life, if you removed all the pathos, drama, and humanity from it. Random (Jimmy Brogan) is an angel-in-training sent to Earth to look after a family of orphans and their extremely harried aunt Marion (Dixie Carter). As was often the case in mediocre sitcoms (particularly those in the 70s through the 90s, call it “The Brady Conundrum”), what the show lacks in plot and character development, it makes up for in a passel of kids with Vaudeville-level comic timing. Here, there’s a set of cute little boy twins who get almost nothing to do, a pair of interchangeable wisecracking tween girls, and a dreamy teenage boy designed in a laboratory to be Tiger Beat’s Hunk of the Month. Had the series lasted, undoubtedly a sixth child would have been added eventually, perhaps a sassy non-white child who’s always keeping the adults on their toes with their precocious wit.
Only the third episode is available online, so I’m unsure why the kids are allowed to know that Random is an angel who has magical powers, but not Aunt Marion or anyone else, and it almost certainly doesn’t matter. Though a guardian angel’s role is to protect people from harm, here Random is more like a surrogate big brother who steps in to get the kids out of one pickle or another, such as when oldest child Chris (Clark Brandon) gambles away the princely sum of $21 they saved to buy Aunt Marion a birthday present.
Random also works as a high school teacher (sure, why the hell not), so I’m unsure why he can’t just loan the kids $21, but it almost certainly doesn’t matter. He gets the money back using his magical powers, powers that seem to be more suited to a wizard than an angel, and which Random repeatedly protests that he’s not supposed to use in such situations, yet invariably does, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a show.
You’d think that the episode would end with the kids learning their lesson about losing money to a teenage pool hustler (a valuable lesson for us all, really), but don’t get up yet, folks, we still have five minutes to go. Much of that is dedicated to a drawn out, very mawkish scene in which Aunt Marion gives a speech thanking the kids for her birthday present, as the sweeping, tearjerking score gets so loud it almost drowns out her dialogue. It finally ends with her giving Random, a strange man who just appeared in her house one day, befriended her nieces and nephews, and then was allowed to stay, a big ol’ hug.
Out of the Blue lasted eight episodes.
Several more attempts were made at repeating the success of Happy Days, including C-quality cartoons3 and the ludicrous Joanie Loves Chachi, which, in its defense, lasted twice as long as either Blansky’s Beauties or Out of the Blue. There was even a plan at one point to give Carmine “The Big Ragu” Ragusa his own show4, enthusiastically titled Carmine! Regrettably, that never came to pass.
It’s unknown why, after the smash success of Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy, nothing else was able to recapture that Happy Days magic. Though, to be fair, after a while Happy Days wasn’t able to recapture that Happy Days magic either, having given up all pretense of taking place in the past and slowly swapping out its cast with far less charismatic replacements.
Maybe that was the problem: none of these shows retained the nostalgic, all-American, poodle skirts and Chubby Checker on the jukebox tone of the original show (not even the original show itself). There’s a distasteful cynicism in ginning up a contrived connection between one TV show and another to draw in audiences, and then making no effort to maintain that connection. It’s an old-fashioned bait and switch.
(Laverne & Shirley still rules, though)
And in itself began as a spin-off, after an episode of Love, American Style.
So too is Pinky Tuscadero, who bent the very fibers of human existence to appear in the first episode.
In a valiant attempt to keep things fresh, in the animated version of Happy Days the gang gained the ability to time travel, while in the Mork & Mindy cartoon they were high school age, and in Laverne & Shirley in the Army they were bumbling Army privates whose drill sergeant was a talking pig. Because, again, sure, why the hell not.
The real question here is why no one thought to try to give Lenny and Squiggy their own show, but the world probably wasn’t ready for that yet.