The ‘Happy Days’ Cast Reunites to Share Favorite Memories, On-Set Secrets and Heartfelt Moments
Ron Howard, Henry Winkler & more reflect on the show’s legacy, laughs—and what made them cry
It’s not every day that you get to see the stars of Happy Days back together again—especially not for an honest, laughter-filled and at times emotional reunion. But that’s exactly what happened when Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, Anson Williams and Don Most sat down together for a special panel at the recent Steel City Con in Pittsburgh, which felt more like a heartfelt catch-up among lifelong friends than a typical fan convention Q&A.
More than 50 years after Happy Days first hit the airwaves, these four cast members proved that the bonds formed on that Paramount soundstage were more than just scripted—they were real. The group traded memories, poked gentle fun at each other and shared behind-the-scenes stories that pulled back the curtain on one of the most iconic sitcoms in television history. Whether it was Winkler recalling Ron Howard’s nerves during the show’s first live taping or Don Most revealing how his improvisation earned him the role of Ralph, the panel was filled with genuine warmth, humor, and deep appreciation.
Of course, it wasn’t all laughs. There were poignant moments, too—especially when the actors spoke about their gratitude for the opportunity Happy Days gave them and how much it meant to reunite after all these years. From the earliest pilot (originally aired as a segment on the anthology series Love, American Style) to casting changes, directing aspirations and the creation of classic catchphrases like “I still got it” or Richie breaking into the song “Blueberry Hill,” nothing was off-limits, as you’ll see.
The enduring popularity of ‘Happy Days’
Henry Winkler: “Can I just say that I’m just talking emotionally here. This is the first time that we have appeared this way in 50 years.”
Ron Howard: “It feels like 50 minutes, because we were having so much fun hanging and this was our great excuse to come together. And by the way, it’s just been a great show [convention]. Everybody has been so warm and wonderful. All your energy has meant so much to us.”
Question: What do you think it is about Happy Days that gives it such an unbelievable staying power?
Anson Williams: “I think it’s pretty good.”
Henry Winkler: “I want to tell you that they chose really well. First of all, Garry Marshall was a brilliant creator, a great writer. He packed 22 or 21 writers in the room from 21 years old until 77. They chose a wonderful cast. Some of them unfortunately are not any longer on the Earth with us. But we played together, we stayed together and we worked hard together. Nobody thought they were better than anybody else.”
Ron Howard: “I’d say that a huge key is that the show evolved really as an ensemble, and so did the idea that we were a family. Well, okay, maybe not a family, but we were a unit. We were a community. I think for us, it was kind of like our coming-of-age story. We were just growing up through this process and we had great mentors. Jerry Paris, our director, Garry Marshall, our boss, some of the key writers, Tom Bosley was like a mentor to all of us. And it was a life experience that’s really unlike anything else that I’ve ever known. And we had great chemistry, we had fun working together from the beginning and it never failed us.”
Anson Williams: “Garry also involved us. It was collaborative. We could make suggestions. I think the cast really added a lot to the show creatively and they listened. Garry treated Paramount like a college. He really inspired us to shadow directors, come to writing sessions, go to editing rooms, learn more, learn the entertainment business. And Ron, too was a huge help. He was already a star, but your work ethic and professionalism meant so much. We followed suit.”
Henry Winkler: “You would never know that Ron was a star. He was just another member of this wonderful unit, as you called it. I’ll tell you the great thing: we’re standing in Arnold’s, we’re waiting at the door to come in and make our entrance. Ron turned to me and he said, ‘Let me ask you a question. I want to be a director. What do you think? Do you think I could do that?’ And I said, ‘Ron, knowing you’—he’s 18, I’m 27. And I said, ‘Ron, knowing you, if you were a brain surgeon, even if I didn’t need to, I would be a patient.’ And he went, ‘I don’t know.’ How is your directing career?”
Ron Howard: “Well, I’m always working on it. The other thing, as Anson was saying, is that Garry was this mentor, so was Jerry Paris. And look, we’ve all directed, we’ve all produced. It was an environment that sort of inspired creativity, but it was also fun. And we were of an age where there was a lot of goofing around. There was a lot of, when we were supposed to be rehearsing, we might just decide to tape director Jerry Paris to his chair. We thought that was kind of funny. We’d roll a gaffers tape around him until he was stuck in his chair. We would throw spitballs…”
Henry Winkler: “Everywhere on the sound stage. And then it took me a year and a half to get Scott Baio. He was quick.”
‘Happy Days’ in the beginning
Question: The show’s pilot, “Love in the Happy Days,” originally debuted on Love American Style. Was that just a test?
Anson Williams: “That was a pilot. It was more like the movie Summer of ’42, There was no Fonz in it. No Ralph in it. Ron and I were in it. Marion Ross was in it. A different father, a different Joanie, too. It was a much kind of different pilot and it didn’t sell. But during the year, American Graffiti came out with Ron and Grease was on Broadway, and all of a sudden the 50s were becoming a big deal. So, they decided to do another pilot for Happy Days, but this time they wanted to make it more like American Graffiti. But guess what? They didn’t just hire Ron and I again, they thought we might be too old, so we had a screen test this time.”
Ron Howard: “Yeah, we had to come back. I had to audition again. In fact, when they sold the show, they called in Garry Marshall and they said, “Well, we want the ’50s. Look, Grease is on Broadway. American Graffiti is a huge hit.’ And he says, ‘We already have a show. I did it. It’s called Happy Days. And you even got the guy from American Graffiti who’s in it.’ And they said, ‘Okay, but we got to audition him again.’ It’s a cold business folks, but it all worked out.”
Anson Williams: “Ron, I remember you asked if I’d done screen tests and, I go, ‘Not really.’ He goes, ‘They don’t give you a lot of time. Let’s find the set and let’s block ourselves out and we act like we’re creating it on the spot. We might get more time.’ So we go down to the set and the painters are just finishing and we blocked out stuff. And we were the first up. So it’s supposed to be 20 minutes with each couple for two hours total. And there’s Donny waiting to screen test. All these other people, they’re all freaking out because there’s only two hours for everyone. We walked by them, but we lucked out. We got it again. But Donny, I have to brag about Donny. He actually screen tested for Potsie, but they liked him so much that they created Ralph for him.”
Henry Winkler: “All I remember is when I auditioned, I threw the script up in the air, I sauntered out of the room. They called me on my birthday, October 30th, 1973. I had to audition again for ABC, and I had to go in, and this time they put me in a T-shirt and jeans. They put my hair in a ducktail and I had a unibrow that they plucked.”
Ron Howard: “But the first read-through that we did, I remember Tom Miller, who was a brilliant leader also on the show, came to me. And of course I’d known him from the pilot and these tests and so forth. We were just getting ready to do our read through and there was this character, Fonzie, who was written into the pilot and only had five or six lines. Tom said, ‘We found a guy for Fonzie. At first we thought we wanted somebody like the Paul La Matt character in American Graffiti, but we found this guy and he’s, I don’t know, Dustin Hoffman. He’s Al Pacino. He’s just so charismatic and so laser-like, you’re just going to love this.’ I thought, ‘Okay, great.’ I met Henry and he seemed like a perfectly nice guy. We went into that read-through and those six lines jumped off the page through what Henry was doing. It was just one of those moments. Another moment was when Robin Williams came and created Mork before our eyes.”
Henry Winkler: “Garry Marshall’s son, who was nine at the time, said, it would be great if you had an alien on the show. So they wrote this alien, but nobody seemed right or would say yes to the part. We rehearsed Monday morning, 10 o’clock until Friday at 4. Then we did it in front of a live audience. All of a sudden, Wednesday, at about 11, this young man comes in and he’s very shy and he has suspenders. Well, finally they’ve gotten somebody and we’re going to do it on Friday at 4. We’ve lost a lot of rehearsal time. This young man picked up the script and it was like a volcano went off on the sound stage and I realized at that moment I had three jobs: keep a straight face, know my lines and get out of his way. There was no way you were going to compete with this brilliant fellow. It was done.”
Anson Williams: “Don has a funny story about his screen test.”
Don Most: “We were talking about the screen test and it was pretty intimidating. We saw Ron Howard in there, and we all knew who Ron was and he’s a big star. So it was kind of, like, why is he testing? We didn’t know who Anson was, but then they were in there for so long and we’re feeling a little bit deflated already before we even started. So for me, I had to wait. I was over 18 and if you were under 18, they only have you for so many hours, so they’re going to get them out before anybody else and I went last.
“So, I go in and do the scene and the scene felt pretty good. But now they said, ‘Okay, now we’re going to do improvisations. So what it’s going to be is we have a girl, a young girl, and you’re going to improvise that you’re going out on a date with her, your first date with this girl.’ So they give you the setup and then they leave it to the two actors to just do an improv. So again, I have to go last and it’s taking forever. And then finally they came up to me and they said, ‘Well, we had to let Kathy, the girl, go because she’s not 18.’ Then they said, ‘You’re going to do an improv with Harvey Miller a 38-year-old Jewish writer on the show.’
“I went in and I did the improv with Harvey, and he was pretty funny and it probably went better than I thought, but I thought at this point I had no chance in hell. And by the time they got to the interview, I felt there was no chance I’m getting this. And I didn’t care, which probably worked in my favor, because if you’re showing that you really need this part, it doesn’t work well for you. I literally almost didn’t care, because I felt there’s no chance. But when I got the call, they said, ‘You didn’t get the Potsie part, but there’s a small part in the pilot and they want to make you a regular in the show.'”
Ron Howard: “And Jerry Paris, our director, loved Donny and he loved us all. He was great. But he just connected with Donny in a way. I also remember the first time that you did the phrase, ‘I still got it!'”
Don Most: “Jerry was more like a Ralph character than I was. I mean, he was always cracking jokes. And if you’d get a really good laugh and score, he would say something, which I’m not going to say what it is, but he always would say this. So one day, it was in front of an audience, and it was a scene where I was supposed to come in. Richie was right there. I think Potsie was there. And I came in saying some kind of joke, and then they’d laugh and then there was something else that happened in the script. Well, I went up to Ron and said, ‘I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to say, but it’s not in the script.’ So, I come into the scene, I say what Ralph says, they start cracking up. And I go, ‘I still got it.’ That was Jerry’s line and it just felt like it was perfect. I stole it from him, but he was laughing like crazy when that happened.”
Filming in front of a studio audience
Ron Howard: “When we started going in front of the audience, they wanted us to all have a catchphrase. ‘Sit on it’ became a big thing, and it pretty much would go from either some little personal quirk that you had that the writers liked or something that would get a big laugh. The first time that I sang ‘Blueberry Hill,’ I just got a big laugh from the audience, so they decided that every time I thought I was confident or had done well with a girl, I would come in singing, ‘I found my thrill.’ But ‘I still got it’ started it all.”
Henry Winkler: “I want to say that Ron has been working since he was about three. I was trained in the East in drama school. Donny came from the East. Anson’s from California. But Ron had never worked in front of a live audience in all of the time that he was a professional. We went from single camera, which meant we made a little movie every week, and we were almost canceled. Garry Marshall had the idea that we would do it in front of a live audience. The first night, Ron was almost vomiting.”
Ron Howard: “No, no, just nervous.”
Henry Winkler: “The man had never worked in front of a live audience. They called action, and this man came alive. You would never know that it was his first time. And from then on, it was clear sailing.”
Ron Howard: “I really came to love it and I learned so much. And later, as I became a director, which was the dream that I’d been pursuing since I was a young teenager, I was so grateful because we had that experience. And as I did comedy, I had a better understanding of the rhythms, the way jokes worked. Of course, Jerry was a great teacher, but all of you guys were, and Tom Bosley because it was so much about timing and staging. I felt so protected and safe.”
Question: Ron, seven seasons in you left the show to follow your directing dreams…
Henry Winkler: “That was a moment. There was a phone booth by the door next to the donuts and it never rings, but one day somebody said, ‘Henry, there’s a phone call and it’s Ron.’ He said, ‘I just have to tell you, it’s going to break in the news in about 10 minutes. I’m not coming back.’ I thought my life was over.”
Ron Howard: “Well, it wasn’t. The show went on for years after that, and we remained very close. Occasionally my character would come back and I think those are my favorite episodes, because it was a return. And even though I had left to kind of go on my own adventure of trying to become a director and make movies and so forth, I still felt a part of it all. But it also reminded me just how great those years where I was there every week with them were. It sounds a little corny, but when you asked that question, I immediately thought of episodes where I was coming back and sort of feeling that warmth and excitement and also just the fun of the show and the laughs of making the show and hearing the audience laugh at what we did.”
Henry Winkler: “In one of the last episodes we did, Ron came back and said, ‘Now I’m leaving for good.’ And at the door, I was saying goodbye to him and I started to cry. That was Henry crying, saying goodbye to Ron.”
Ron Howard: “But it wasn’t goodbye because a few years later, I had a chance to make my first studio movie, Night Shift. We had a good script and the studio really wanted to make it, but we were having casting trouble and they wouldn’t do it without a star. And finally they said to me, ‘Do you think Henry Winkler would be in this movie?’ I said, ‘He could play either part.’ They said, ‘We don’t care. If we get Henry Winkler, we’ll make the movie.’ I went to Henry and I said, ‘There’s this opportunity for this movie, and I would love to work with you on this.’ And in a day he called back and said, ‘I’d love to be in the movie,’ and it was a green light from there. I don’t think I would be sitting here with the credits that I have if Henry hadn’t said yes to that movie.”
Henry Winkler: “Because I had my choice of playing the roles, I thought, ‘For the last 10 years, I have been flamboyant. I’m going to choose to play Richie.'”
Question: In the early years of the show, the tone was a lot different and then it changed dramatically. As actors, how was it adjusting to that change? And did you prefer one acting style over the other?
Anson Williams: “We almost were canceled, and that’s when they decided to go live audience. And I think that’s when we really came to life and the show really took off. It was part of the strategy of going in front of a live audience, was also to take advantage of this phenomenon that was occurring in that first season and a half, which was Fonzie emerging as this great pop culture figure. This was going to be a chance for them to feel the audience responding to Henry’s charisma and what he had created with the Fonz. And it really, really worked. So it was a different tone.”
Ron Howard: “And as I said, I was more comfortable personally with the single camera. It was more like The Andy Griffith Show had been done, but I was so grateful as I began to understand the excitement of the live audience. And, of course, the show climbed into the top 10. Then I think in our next season, it became the number one show. I also think it was a better show, because we had a week to rehearse and they kept rewriting and rewriting to really perfect the show.
“For Donny, who’d done a lot of theater, and Tom Bosley had done a lot of theater, I think you guys were kind of excited about it in a way.”
Don Most: “And Henry had done a lot of theater, too. And yeah, we were excited. The thing was, I think Garry and Jerry thought we had a perfect cast to do this kind of a show. And the thing is that the big shows at the time were All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude and Good Times, which was aired against us. It seemed like we had to convert to that to compete with that style. I was excited because, doing live theater, it is different and it’s exhilarating and it’s very exciting. And Jerry had directed that style in his first year directing The Dick Van Dyke Show. He won the Emmy as best comedy director, so we had a perfect team to do it.
“Henry said this earlier, but we worked hard. We goofed around at times, the cast consisted of really talented people working very hard to make something look easy. We respected each other professionally and we did take it seriously, but we were able to balance it, because we got along so well. And with the three-camera format, Happy Days was able to blossom.”
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