I’m so old, I predate Netflix.
Back in my day, whippersnappers, television programs came on the air at pre-determined dates and times. If you happened to miss an episode of your favorite show, you were pretty much forced to wait for months until the networks re-ran it during the off season. And some of the most successful shows— classics like Gilligan’s Island, or I Love Lucy— eventually made it into a state of perpetual syndication. Popular series like these were often licensed by smaller, local stations a way to fill airtime, so they seemed to run on indefinitely.
Which is how I became acquainted with a classic show called Happy Days.
Way back in the 1980s, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Happy Days reruns were in heavy rotation on a few of our local networks. The series and all its spinoffs had already come and gone by the time I started tuning in, but thanks to reruns, I’ve probably seen most of the episodes. And one thing that always stuck with me happened early on in the series, when Richie Cunningham’s older brother Chuck made regular appearances for a few episodes… before disappearing forever.
Back in the very first season of Happy Days, Chuck was introduced as the Cunningham family’s oldest child. The guy never really got much screen time, but this was supposedly because he was a college student, and living away from home. The part ended up being so insignificant that when the show was picked up for a second season, the producers swapped in an entirely different actor to play the role!
Which leads us to ask: whatever happened to Chuck Cunningham?
These days, looking into this sort of “unsolved mystery” is as simple as logging onto the Internet to connect with like-minded nerds. Today I learned that Chuck Cunningham was originally played by Gavin O’Herlihy, a professional actor who went on to enjoy a long and successful career. And I was shocked to find out that right around the same time I started contemplating Chuck Cunningham’s mysterious absence, O’Herlihy had actually scored a major role in one of the year’s most popular movies, Willow.
Through this “extensive research”— which basically consisted of browsing through websites dedicated to classic TV shows, when I really should’ve been working on my next novel— I came to learn that writing characters out of a show is a common practice in the entertainment industry. Normally, writers will seek out a cleaner disposition— working a character’s death into the script, for example, or having them board a one-way bus out of town for some contrived reason. But every so often, these characters just seem to up and vanish… and industry insiders have taken to calling this phenomenon the “Chuck Cunningham Syndrome”.
Of course, there are always legitimate reasons why actors may have to be swapped out. In the “Harry Potter” movie franchise, for example, after the death of Richard Harris, actor Michael Gambon stepped in to fill the role of Professor Albus Dumbledore for the rest of the series. And in another one of my childhood favorites, “Family Matters”, actress Jo Marie Payton was swapped out in the show’s final season after a series of arguments with her co-star, Jaleel White. Apparently the two nearly came to blows at one point, and just couldn’t mange to work together any longer. Forced to choose, the producers stuck with Jaleel White’s more popular character… the only fight Steve Urkel ever won.
Of course, these kind of cast changes can be jarring, particularly as a series grows in popularity and continues to find new viewers. But writers are just people, doing their best to create a product that their audience will enjoy. And as a writer, I wanted to do my part to help resolve the sticky problem of disappearing characters. That’s why I set aside a few minutes to try my hand at fan fiction, and to help answer the burning question of “Whatever Happened to Chuck Cunningham?”:
When Happy Days first premiered in 1974, the show’s producers were hoping to cash in on the growing nostalgia movement, since the global oil shortage had prompted a widespread longing for the “good ol’ days”. The situation looked bleak all over— even on the other side of the world, in South Vietnam, where combat continued despite the recently-signed Paris Peace Accords. With that in mind, it can’t be a coincidence that the first season of Happy Days was supposedly set in 1955… the very first year of the Vietnam conflict!
Watching the show from this perspective, it’s almost obvious what happened next. Not to stereotype or anything, but the show’s wily writers were probably left-leaning types, and no fans of the outgoing Nixon administration. I suspect that the famous scene where Chuck Cunningham lends Richie his draft card in order to visit a strip club was more than just a simple plot point; no, this scene had to have been a subtle protest of the ongoing Vietnam War! The writers obviously couldn’t get away with having a character burn his draft card, so instead they chose to have Chuck Cunningham— the only character with a 1-A classification— “give up” his draft card by lending it out for unsavory purposes.
Remember, Happy Days was still in its infancy then, and hadn’t yet attracted its full audience. The government censors must have missed this subtle dig, and the episode went to air before anyone noticed. But I suspect that “the man” probably tried to apply a heavier hand after that episode, which is why the writers chose to strike back by switching out Gavin O’Herlihy for another actor. Remember, the Cunningham household was supposed to portray an ideal picture of suburban life… so the blatant, unexplained swap was a coded message, intended to show that something was definitely wrong with the status quo in Middle America. Even for casual viewers this must’ve been an obvious distress signal, as clear a message as hanging an American flag hung upside down.
And then, in the second season, when Chuck Cunningham suddenly vanished from our lives, never to return? What possible explanation could there have been for that, other than a sudden deployment to a combat zone overseas?
With all that in mind, I suspect that Chuck Cunningham’s pointless cameo appearances— and his subsequent, permanent disappearance— were written into the script as an act of silent protest against the Nixon administration. The character was nothing more than a highly-coded metaphor, a symbol to represent all the young men who’d deployed to Southeast Asia over the prior decade.
Whatever happened to Chuck Cunningham? Nobody knows for sure, so as it turns out, your guess is as good as mine. Only the secretive members of the Screenwriter’s Guild have the answer to this one… and they’re not talking!
Postscript:
Wow… that escalated quickly! I could have easily gone on at length here, with yet another conspiracy theory about how Fonzie— with his laid-back motorcycle gang leader persona— was introduced to the show instead of a peacenik hippie character, as an attempt to re-write history and “tone down” the social unrest caused by youth protest. This casting decision must have been influenced by the beleaguered Nixon administration, during the very height of the Watergate scandal! Am I right??
And what in the world were the writers thinking when they introduced Robin Williams and his “Mork from Ork” character? Could this new, alien being have been introduced simply as a way to piggyback on the success of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind“, and capitalize on a worldwide spike in UFO sightings? Or was “Mork from Ork” intended to be just another distraction? A way to keep our attention away from what the government was really up to at Area 51?
Ultimately, the real problem with conspiracy theories like these is that they leave us with more questions than answers. And even after all my research, and all my creative writing, I only know one thing for certain:
Hollywood screenwriters definitely earn their money!