"Mork calling Orson...come in Orson. Mork calling Orson...come in Orson." - Mork from Ork (Robin Williams) reporting his earthly exploits to his leader, Orson
Mork & Mindy: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
If Emmy officials had ever established an award category for "Most Unlikely Spin-off," Mork & Mindy surely would have been a shoo-in to win the prize. In February of 1978, an episode of the series Happy Days featured improv comedian Robin Williams as an alien sent to Earth to kidnap a human specimen. Yes, Happy Days - the sitcom set in the 1950s that was originally conceived as TV's answer to the hit film American Graffiti. Williams' last TV gig had been the low-rated, highly controversial The Richard Pryor Show, which had been trounced in the ratings by Happy Days just a few months earlier. Now he was playing Mork from Ork, a wacky alien who chose Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) as his specimen, which is sort of like having sasquatch visit The Waltons, or a dinosaur follow Wally home on Leave it to Beaver. As unconventional as the idea may have been, audience reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and ABC gave Mork his own series that fall.
The show premiered on September 14, 1978 with the two part pilot "The Mork & Mindy Special." Mork is a misfit resident of the planet Ork on the far side of our own galaxy. Ork is a humorless place where emotions have been bred out of its inhabitants "a billion bleems ago." Mork, however, is a malcontent who insists on telling jokes and making fun of Ork's leader, Orson (the voice of Ralph James), whom Mork calls "laser breath." Because he is such an oddball, Mork is exiled from his homeland. He is sent to Earth, where he will study the strange customs and habits of earthlings, and make weekly reports of his findings to Orson. Mork is shipped off in an egg-like spaceship (Orkans evolved from chickens, you see), and lands in Boulder, Colorado in 1978. There he meets Mindy McConnell (Pam Dawber), a twenty-one year-old aspiring journalist who works part-time in the music store run by her widowed father, Frederick (Conrad Janis), and his perky septuagenarian mother-in-law, Cora (Elizabeth Kerr).
Mindy is at first skeptical of Mork's claims of being from another world, but she becomes a believer when a floating egg delivers the traveler's lost luggage. Mork is a little odd - he drinks with his fingers, takes pictures with his gloves, sits with his head in a chair, wears an ankle watch, and sleeps upside down in a cupboard - but Mindy recognizes him as a friendly soul and agrees to help her strange visitor, even allowing him to move into her apartment.
Recurring characters in the first season include Susan Taylor (Morgan Fairchild), Mindy's vain and shallow high school rival, Mr. Bickley (Tom Poston, Newhart's dimwit handyman), a grump alcoholic greeting card designer who moves into the apartment beneath Mindy's, and Eugene (Jeffrey Jacquet), a young violin student who befriends Mork.
In some ways, the first season of Mork & Mindy mimics Robin Williams' career. Thanks to Williams' incredibly funny performance, the first half of the season is filled with comic highs. Williams' helium-voiced characterization of this extraterrestrial is a comic masterpiece. Whether it's his barking seal laugh or the other indescribably strange noises that emanate from him, Williams is so odd and fresh that he easily reduces audiences to belly laughs. Even after all of these years - after we've seen these episodes a million times - his performance in the early episodes makes us feel like we are seeing something different and new. In "A Mommy for Mork," Mindy ponders what it would be like to have a child while Mork mourns the fact that he never had a real mother. It seems he was a "test tube baby" whose "father was an eyedropper, the scum!" Mork uses his handy "Age Machine" to turn himself into a child - physically, he's still the full-sized Mork, but mentally, he is a three year-old. Williams' impersonation of a three year-old is often excruciatingly funny, a level of humor and fun that is not uncommon in the early episodes. In one poignant moment, young Mork wails and screams through a closed window as he watches Mindy leave on a date, abandoning him. The Age Machine's effect wears off at that moment, leaving a melancholy Mork to utter "Goodbye, Mindy" to the window.
If the first half of the season resembles Williams' early standup work at its freeform best, the second half is closer to his Patch Adams period - manic, self-reflective humor combined with maudlin poignancy. Where Mork was a happy idiot simply out to make us laugh in the initial episodes, the episodes that follow aim to teach us trite lessons. These episodes still have some laughs, but far fewer. In "Mork in Love," the emotionless Mork decides to fall in love, but he misunderstands the concept and begins a torrid affair with a mannequin from Mr. McConnell's store window. The concept is played entirely for laughs, and the episode has some truly hysterical moments as Mork courts Dolly. The final episode of the season, "Mork's Best Friend," has a similar theme. While exploring Boulder, Mork finds a new pet and best friend: a female caterpillar he names Bob. Again, Mork begins a relationship with an inappropriate object of affection. Here, however, laughs are played down in favor of sticky sentimentality.
The worst of the episodes from this Jakob the Liar period is "It's a Wonderful Mork." Mork upsets Mindy and her father by ruining a dinner party which results in Mr. McConnell's new girlfriend breaking up with him and Mindy losing out on the chance to get a great new job. Feeling blue and thinking that the McConnells hate him, Mork tells Orson that he wants to return to Ork. Orson agrees, but insists that Mork use a new Orkan device to see what Mindy's life would have been like had he not landed in Boulder one year ago. As it turns out, without Mork in her life, Mindy marries an abusive gambler who spends all of the money she earns from two dead end jobs, Grandma Hudson lives with Mindy and is constantly berated by Mindy's husband for being in the way, and Mr. McConnell is a world traveling playboy wannabe who has sold the music shop and squandered the money. Mork observes the action unseen and unheard by the others. This episode's idea of fun is to have Mindy sobbing in misery for several minutes while Mork tells knock-knock jokes in a futile effort to cheer her up. Not quite fun and wacky, is it? The other of this season's lesser episodes are not quite this bad, but the change in tone from carefree humor to "aw shucks" life lessons is just as noticeable.
The series was obviously created as a vehicle for Williams. Many of the episodes - good and bad - seem to have been crafted so that Williams could improvise his dialogue and engage in his strange noises. This creates some funny moments (unfunny ones, too, since to this day Williams could use a healthy dose of restraint; sometimes less is more), but the unhappy result is that Pam Dawber is completely wasted here. She is immensely likeable, but she is rarely given anything resembling a laugh line. She isn't even used as a straight man in the traditional sense of the word. Instead of setting Williams up for punchlines, she is simply in charge of moving the plot forward. It's a thankless job, especially since her character cannot help but seem boring when compared to Mork. Even Conrad Janis and the charmingly sweet Elizabeth Kerr are better served by the scripts in their secondary roles.
The crazy antics of Mork were enough for audiences, however. In its first season, it shot to number three in the ratings, bested only by Laverne & Shirley and Three's Company. It even tied Happy Days, the series that spawned it.
These twenty-four episodes include appearances by several famous guest stars. The pilot episode features a visit by Happy Days' Fonz (Henry Winkler) and Laverne & Shirley's Laverne (Penny Marshall). Both Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley were set in the 1950s (although as the series progressed, they took on more characteristics of the decade in which they were produced), of course, so the characters are here seen in a flashback sequence. Except for a funny slapstick sequence, the visit by Fonz and Laverne is pointless, but it did allow the producers to use TV's top two highest rated shows to help booster their latest project. Other guests include Geoffrey Lewis, Pink Lady and Jeff's Jeff Altman, Barry Van Dyke, Homefront's Tammy Lauren, future talk show host David Letterman (as a flakey EST-like guru in the disjointed "Mork Goes ERK"), Ironsides' Don Galloway, Ruta Lee, and Just the Ten of Us' Bill Kirchenbauer.
The twenty-four episodes that make up season one are divided onto four discs. The discs are housed in slim, clear keepcases. The front covers each feature a different publicity photo of Mork and Mindy. The back covers include smaller production stills and a list of the episodes found on the DVD. Because the cases are clear, the double-sided coversheets show through to the inside of the case. The interiors include episode titles, original airdates, and plot synopses. The color scheme on the inside and outside of the cases features red (mimicking Mork's spacesuit) and rainbow (mimicking Mork's earthly suspenders) hues. The DVDs have a bulls-eye rainbow design, and when removed, they reveal Mork's spaceship/egg which progresses from whole (disc one) to completely cracked (disc four). The four keepcases slide into a cardboard sleeve which continues the red/rainbow look.
The DVD menus are a simple, no frills affair. The rainbow and cast photo theme is continued here. Viewers can choose an individual episode, or play all of the episodes. The episodes are divided into chapters (including one immediately after the show's opening credits), but there are no scene selection menus.
