Mork & Mindy
was a spin-off from an episode of Happy Days seen
in February 1978, in which an alien from the planet
Ork landed on Earth and attempted to kidnap Richie.
So popular was the nutty character created by Robin
that Robin was given his own series in the fall of
1978, and it became an instant hit.
Mork was a misfit on his own planet because his sense
of humor (he was heard to call the Orkan leader, Orson,
"cosmic breath"). So the humorless Orkans
sent him off to study Earthlings, whose "crazy"
customs they had never been able to understand. Mork
landed, in a giant eggshell near Boulder, Colorado.
There he was befriended by pretty Mindy McConnell,
a clerk at the music store run by her father, Frederick.
Mork looked human, but his strange mixture of Orkan
and Earthling customs--such as wearing a suit, but
putting it on backwards, or sitting in a chair, but
upside down--led most people to think of him as just
as some kind of nut. Mindy knew where he came from,
and helped him adjust to Earth's strange ways. She
also let him stay in the attic of her apartment house,
which scandalized her conservative father, but not
her swinging grandmother, Cora.
After a season of simple slapstick and big ratings,
both the producers and the network unfortunately got
a little cocky and violated one of television's cardinal
rules: "Don't tamper with a hit." In the
process of doing so, they almost destroyed the program.
The producers decided to shift to more "meaningful"
stories, opening the second season with a strange,
surrealistic episode in which Mork shrunk away to
nothing and dropped into a never-never world filled
with caricatures of good and evil. At the same time
practically the whole supporting cast was changed.
Simultaneously ABC decided to move the series from
its established Thursday time slot to Sunday, to prop
up their sagging schedule on that night. Understandably
confused, viewers deserted the show in droves and
it lost nearly half its audience.
By December 1979 ABC and the producers were scrambling
to undo their mistakes. Mork went back to Thursday,
and stories got less complicated. Mindy's father,
who had been dumped (along with the grandmother),
returned for the third season. He was supposed to
have sold the music store and gone on tour as an orchestra
conductor, fulfilling a lifelong dream. Now he, but
not Cora, was back full-time. Other changes in the
second and third seasons included the addition of
brother and sister Remo and Jean DaVinci, recently
arrived from the Bronx. Remo ran the New York Deli
and was helping put Jean through medical school. Nelson
was Mindy's cousin, an uptight young social climber
with grandiose political ambitiions; Mr. Bickley was
the grouchy downstairs neighbor (He had been on before,
but his role was enlarged); and Mork's friend Exidor
was a crazed prophet and leader of an invisible cult,
the Friends of Venus. Mindy, a journalism student,
got a job at local TV station KTNS, where her boss
was Mr. Sternhagen.
All of this brought back some of the lost viewers,
but Mork & Mindy never recaptured the enormous
following it had during its first season.
The fall of 1981 brought the most surprising developments
of all. Mork and Mindy were married, and honeymooned
on Ork--which proved to be full of bizarre creatures.
Shortly thereafter Mork gave birth, by ejecting a
small egg from his navel. The egg grew and grew and
finally cracked open to reveal a full-grown Jonathan
Winters! Mearth, as they named their first child,
weighted 225 pounds and looked middle-aged, but babbled
like a baby, calling Mork "Mommy" and Mindy
"Shoe." Since things were backwards on Ork,
he would gradually grow younger (instead of older)
and never want for affection in his waning years.
Despite some hilarious scenes between Robin and his
idol Jonathan Winters, the series was by this time
losing audience rapidly and left the air at the end
of the season. It had succeeded primarily because
of the versatile talents of Robin, who mugged, mimicked,
and delivered torrents of one-liners and Orkan gibberish.
At the end of each episode he reported back to his
leader Orson, on Ork, twisting his ears and signing
off, "Na no, na no"--good-bye in Orkan. |
