“5, 6, 7, 8, Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hassenpfeffer Incorporated!”

I’m not often one for the “Wow, that makes me feel old” line of thinking. I like to think that I’m pretty realistic about the passage of time. But…good lord, how can it be that we’ve just passed the fiftieth anniversary of the series premiere of Laverne and Shirley?!

I haven’t watched L&S at all since it first aired, but it was still iconic as hell. It was huge in its first few seasons, and I remember it being one of those shows we kids would talk about at school the morning after it aired. There was a kid in my kindergarten class, as I recall, who absolutely adored Fonzie on Happy Days, and I remember (vaguely!) talking about those two weirdos on L&S, the ones whose names my mother could never quite remember. “Who are those guys again?” I’d ask, and Mom would say, “Squiggy and somebody.”

I honestly don’t have a whole hell of a lot to say about Laverne and Shirley. It turns out that what I remember most about the show is its opening titles sequence, which would only be in use for the first half of the show’s run; for the back half of the show, when the entire cast all uprooted to go live in Burbank, the whole “flavor” changed, didn’t it? Maybe I’m wrong here, but I suspect that this was L&S‘s version of the shark-jumping that happened on that other show.

Anyway, here’s that iconic opening:

And how iconic was this opening? Almost ten years after L&S ended, the movie Wayne’s World would come up with a convoluted reason to send its main characters on a brief road trip from Chicago to Milwaukee, which resulted in this: