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.
