Microsoft's Raymond Chen has revealed an unexpected use for the company's lawyers: securing permission from the cast of Happy Days so a Weezer music video could ship on the Windows 95 CD.
The video in question was to demonstrate the multimedia capabilities of Microsoft's successor to the Windows 3.x era. As well as all that 32-bit goodness, the operating system could play back a small, grainy video, and Microsoft included some music videos to emphasize the point.
One was Edie Brickell's "Good Times" and another was "Buddy Holly" from Weezer's debut album. Both tracks were recent, and Chen recalled the steps Microsoft had to take to get the latter in front of Windows 95 customers.
"First, Microsoft had to secure the rights to the song itself, which was negotiated directly with Weezer's publisher Geffen Records, and apparently without the knowledge of the band members themselves," Chen wrote on his Old New Thing blog.
The band later said the initial disquiet they felt about their music appearing on Windows 95 was offset by the exposure from the operating system's huge sales.
However, that only accounted for the audio. The video, which took place in a recreation of the Happy Days television show, was a different matter. Happy Days was set in the late 1950s and early 1960s and broadcast during the 1970s and 1980s.
This presented Microsoft's lawyers with a problem. Since clips from the show had been spliced into the video, Microsoft had to get permission from the actors featured. Chen didn't recall if the lawyer in question had to talk to the actors directly, "but I can imagine it being an interesting experience trying to find Henry Winkler's telephone number (or his agent's telephone number) with a chance of talking to The Fonz himself."
Happy Days was responsible for the phrase "jumping the shark," from an episode in which the Fonzie character, on waterskis, jumped over a shark. It was subsequently used to describe a show or concept that has run out of ideas and resorts to increasingly implausible plot devices.
In other news, Microsoft has continued to load its product lines with AI features, and its flagship operating system, Windows (which has suffered a terrible start to the year with multiple out-of-band fixes), is set to become an agentic OS. ®
