On this date in 1979 Robin Williams first appeared as Mork from the planet Ork on British TV in Mork and Mindy. 10 Mork and Mindy facts.
This show was a spin off from Happy Days. Mork first appeared as a guest on that show. This was in turn inspired by an episode of The Dick van Dyke Show called It May Look Like a Walnut, which featured an alien played by Danny Thomas. Happy Days producer Garry Marshall had a young son who was obsessed with Star Wars, and said he wanted to see more spacemen on TV. When his son said that, Marshall mentioned it to director Jerry Paris, who’d worked on The Dick Van Dyke Show, so they used the idea again.
Mork was Robin Williams’s first major acting role. He’d been spotted in an acting class and was invited to audition. Williams got into character immediately – when asked to take a seat at the audition, he sat in the Chair upside down. This netted him the part as he was “the only alien to audition.”
Pam Dawber, who played Mindy, on the other hand, didn’t audition for her role at all. She’d filmed one pilot for a show about a gang leader who found God and became a nun, but it flopped. She was still under contract and some scenes from the pilot were spliced with footage of Robin Williams as Mork as a demo. The idea was snapped up, and an article about it appeared in Variety without Dawber ever being consulted. She found out she had the part from reading the article.
Mork is an Ork from the planet Orkan. The Orkan race evolved from Chickens, and no humour is allowed on their world, which is why Mork was sent to study Earth by his superior, Orson.
Orson was named after Orson Welles as a tribute to him and his historic 1938 Radio broadcast of HG Wells' War of the Worlds.
Mork and Mindy’s residence was a real house in Boulder, Colorado, 1619 Pine Street, to be exact. Not a lot of thought had been put into the location for the show, but when they needed to come up with one, It was the first place that came to Garry Marshall’s mind because his niece was at school there. Mindy's father's music store was actually a book shop on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall. 1619 Pine Street is still there and has become a popular tourist attraction.
It was often said that much of the show was unscripted and the scripts had huge gaps where they just wrote “Robin does his thing.” The writers have been quick to point out that they worked very hard on these so called “ad-libs”.
At the beginning of the fourth season, Mork and Mindy got married and had a child. Orkan reproduction is rather different from ours, so Mork laid an egg which hatched into an elderly man, Mearth. Orkans age backwards, starting life as old people and regressing back to childhood.
At the end of season four, Mork and Mindy are stranded in prehistoric times, having arrived there by using a pair of magic time travelling Shoes. The plan for season five was that they would carry on travelling in time and meet historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. However, ratings had been declining for a while and this idea wasn’t enough to save the show from the axe.
Mork's greeting is "Na-Nu Na-Nu" with a hand gesture based on Mr Spock's Vulcan salute and a handshake. Mork says "KO" in place of "OK" and sometimes uses the interjection "Shazbat".
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