Did This 1960s TV Series Predict This ‘Happy Days’ Actors Future?

When I heard the toast that Lloyd Bochner gave to Marion Ross during the first season of the 1960s TV series Thriller I was absolutely dumbfounded. The two-word toast seemingly said nonchalantly in an attempt to change the subject would ring true for Southern Minnesota's Marion Ross just 14 years later. The two-word toast to Ms. Ross? "Happy Days".

I had never heard of the TV show Thriller before a friend of mine showed me the clip. It was what could be called the launching pad for plenty of successful actors and actresses like, Leslie Nielsen, George Kennedy, Mary Tyler Moore, William Shatner, and Cloris Leachman. The show centered on host Boris Karloff introducing a mix of macabre horror tales and suspense thrillers. Think Twilight Zone.

Episode 34 in Season 1, which was entitled 'The Prisoner in the Mirror' features Bochner as a professor writing a thesis on an 18th-century magician/sorcerer, Count Cagliostro. According to the Wikipedia entry for the episode, Bochner ends up going "to France to buy a mirror the Cagliostro once owned that has its glass painted over. Cagliostro is supernaturally trapped in the mirror and wants to use Harry's body to live again."

About 19 minutes and 50 seconds into the episode, the fateful and eerily accurate future prediction to Marion Ross was made.

It would be 14 years later, that Mrs. C would premiere on ABC "from January 15, 1974, to September 24, 1984, with a total of 255 half-hour episodes spanning eleven seasons."

It's the role that many of us know her from, well that and being SpongeBob Squarepants grandma, but that's another story in itself altogether.