Claim:Joanie Loves Chachi was the highest rated American program in the history of Korean television because "chachi" is Korean for "penis."
Origins:Joanie Loves Chachi was a
short-lived Happy Days spin-off starring Erin Moran and Scott Baio which aired on ABC in 1982-83. Initially a ratings success as a
mid-season replacement program in 1982 (when it had Happy Days as a lead-in and was airing
opposite reruns), it quickly tanked when the 1982-83 television season pitted it head-to-head against NBC's popular A-Team, and it was yanked from ABC's regular schedule by the end of the year. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the cult following this sappy sitcom and its mere 17 episodes have garnered is the claim that a racy translation of its name made it Korea's higest-rated program ever.
'Chachi' is not the Korean word for 'penis,' although it is close in pronunciation to a word meaning 'penis' in a pidgin language employed by
English-speaking servicemen stationed in Asia in the World War II era and beyond. However, it's unlikely this fact alone made
Joanie Loves Chachi "the highest-rated American program ever shown in Korea," as series creator and executive producer Garry
Marshall and series star Scot Baio have claimed, is another matter.
Joanie Loves Chachi was aired in Korea, but only in English (without subtitles), and only on AKFN, the Armed Forces Korean Network (a U.S. military organization that supplies television programming for servicemen). The show was not aired as programming available to ordinary Korean households, so (although some Koreans might have been able to view it through AKFN) Joanie Loves Chachi could not possibly have been that country's highest-rated television program. (If the series had been presented as fare for a general Korean TV audience, surely some alterations would have been made such as adding subtitles, dubbing the dialogue into Korean, or changing the title character's name to something less salacious.)
As mentioned above, this claim has largely been promulgated by Garry Marshall and Scott Baio, who have mentioned it during interviews and talk show appearances. Most likely they were simply repeating as true something that had originated as a joke and had no direct knowledge of how Joanie Loves Chachi fared in Korea.
Last updated: 6 August 2007
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/joanie.asp
short-lived Happy Days spin-off starring Erin Moran and Scott Baio which aired on ABC in 
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