Penny Marshall
Garry Marshall, creator and then part-time writer for "Happy Days", cast Marshall and Cindy Williams to guest on an episode of the show. The installment, titled "A Date with Fonzie", aired on November 11, 1975 and introduced the characters Laverne DeFazio and Shirley Feeney (played by Marshall and Williams, respectively). In that episode, Laverne and Shirley were a pair of wisecracking brewery workers who were dates for Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Richie (Ron Howard). The pair were such a hit with the studio audience that Garry Marshall decided to co-create and star them in a successful spinoff, "Laverne & Shirley" (1976–1983). The characters of Laverne and Shirley appeared in five more episodes of "Happy Days". In 1982 at the beginning of "Laverne & Shirley"s eighth season, Williams left the show due to her pregnancy. Marshall continued with the show, but it was canceled after the season's final episode aired in May 1983.
American Broadcasting Company
In the early 1970s, Michael Eisner, who joined ABC in 1966, became the network's program development manager. He helped bring about ideas for many series including "Happy Days" (which originated as a segment on the anthology series "Love, American Style"), as well as several soap operas; however, Eisner's main credit at ABC was for developing youth-oriented programming. He was responsible for reacquiring the rights to the Looney Tunes-Merrie Melodies library, bringing the shorts back to ABC after spending several years on CBS, as well as developing "The Jackson 5ive" animated series and a series about the Osmonds, and greenlighting "Super Friends", based on DC Comics' Justice League of America series He also laid ground-work for the development of educational children's programming (predating the 1990 Congressional passage of the Children's Television Act) through interstitials such as "Time for Timer", "The Bod Squad" and, perhaps most famously, "Schoolhouse Rock!". Eisner left ABC in 1976 to become president of Paramount Pictures; he would later become the President of ABC's eventual parent company, Disney.