Danza, who's 59 and talks about being able to "smell 60," seemed willing enough to shake a reporter's hand - no Howie Mandel fist bump for him - during an interview earlier this month in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he was promoting what he calls his "responsible reality show" during the Television Critics Association's summer meetings.
So what's up with the germ patrol?
"I'm not Howie Mandel, but if you remember, at the beginning of the school year, we were faced with the possibility of a swine-flu epidemic. And I just thought - I am a little nutty," Danza said, looking a little sheepish as he pulled a small bottle of sanitizer from a pocket.
And, OK, yes, he installed the dispensers himself.
"I decorated my room. But I gave everyone a small bottle. And I said, 'If you have this at [the end of] each marking period, I'll give you extra credit,' " he said.
He provided the sanitizer for refills, "and a lot of them did it . . . Don't get me wrong. [It's not as if] singlehandledly we took care of the swine flu in Philadelphia, but we had a pretty healthy class."
Initially, at least, it was also a fairly skeptical one, with students who'd been chosen to be in Danza's classes - and had agreed to be filmed - expressing concern that the actor was up to the job.
They weren't the only ones. Danza, an emotional guy who gets teary more than once in the first episode, recalled one instance, caught on film, in which "I'm crying one night by myself, thinking what have I done and I say, I mean, 'Would I want my daughter in this class?' And at that moment, I didn't know. But now? I think I would be OK."
