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For years during its run, producer Garry Marshall was fond of joking that Love, American Style was where failed sitcom pilots went to die. At the time, if a TV producer could not interest a network in a sitcom pilot, the producer would then sell the unused script to Spelling, who would extract the funniest bits of the pilot and use them as a segment on Love, American Style. When Marshall came up with a sitcom concept originally titled New Family In Town, shot a pilot for it in 1971, and couldn't interest any of the three major networks in a show about teenagers growing up in the 1950s, he finally took advantage of the well-known anecdote for Hollywood writers and producers. After the completed pilot was sold to Spelling, the show aired in February 1972 as one-half of the episode known as "Love and the Happy Days", starring Ron Howard as Richie, Marion Ross as Richie's mother, and Anson Williams as Potsie, Richie's friend, along with Harold Gould, Susan Neher and Ric Carrott in supporting roles as Howard, Richie's father, Joanie, Richie's sister, and Chuck, Richie's older brother, respectively. However, when the 1971 musical Grease became a huge hit on Broadway in early 1972, a wave of 1950s nostalgia was born. That fall, CBS tried out a sitcom of its own, also based in the `50s, entitled M*A*S*H, but the series struggled in its first season, narrowly escaping cancellation. When American Graffiti became another huge hit in Hollywood the following summer, CBS picked up the show for a second season, beginning its eleven-year reign as the longest running and most successful sitcom in the history of American television. Not wishing to be left behind, ABC executives picked up Marshall's pilot after all, replacing Gould, Neher, and Carrott in the process and truncating its name to Happy Days. With an eleven-year run of its own, the show became the second biggest sitcom success of the `70s after M*A*S*H and spawned numerous successful spinoffs. Hanna-Barbera's animated Wait Till Your Father Gets Home was another series pilot which originally aired on Love, American Style. Paramount declined to be involved in that series, but