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| Robin Williams (left) challenges Henry Winkler as Ron Howard looks on. |
It's not often that you get to see a performer's entire career change in a half hour, but that's exactly what happens in the classic Happy Days episode "My Favorite Orkan." First airing on February 28, 1978 as part of the sitcom's fifth season, "Orkan" made a national sensation of guest star Robin Williams (1951-2014). Within the year, Robin would have his own spinoff, Mork & Mindy, which in turn led to decades of phenomenal success as an actor and comedian, including an Oscar win for 1997's Good Will Hunting. This one sitcom appearance changed the course of Robin's entire life.
However, Robin Williams was not exactly a showbiz rookie when he signed on to play a wisecracking alien on Happy Days. Born in Chicago, Robin relocated to California in the 1970s and was already making a name for himself on the West Coast comedy scene before this episode aired. He was a finalist, for instance, in the San Francisco Comedy Competition in 1976 and was a regular at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles during the same era as David Letterman and Jay Leno. He'd even been a regular on two short-lived sketch comedy series: The Richard Pryor Show (1977) and a revival of Laugh-In (1977-78). Nothing really hit, though, until "My Favorite Orkan" came along.
The episode had a famously rocky production history. It's important to point out that "My Favorite Orkan" was not conceived as a vehicle for Robin Williams or as a pilot for a potential spinoff. It was just supposed to be a single, self-contained episode of Happy Days. The story goes that producer Garry Marshall wanted to do an episode about space aliens in order to please his Star Wars-obsessed son, Scotty. Space aliens on Happy Days? This may seem like a wild departure from the show's initial mission statement, but let's remember that America was obsessed with flying saucers and UFOs in the 1950s. The topic was bound to come up eventually.
Unfortunately, the initial script by Happy Days mainstay Joe Glauberg had not gone over well at the initial table read. Cast member Anson Williams in particular had doubts about whether the episode would work. Those doubts were compounded when the actor initially cast as Mork didn't pan out. Some sources say character actor Richard Dimitri was fired after one day; other sources say comedian John Byner quit after one day. Either way, the episode didn't truly click until Robin Williams was cast and made the character his own, even improvising much of Mork's dialogue.
It is our great honor this week to review "My Favorite Orkan" on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. And we have a special guest, Tina Carleton from Welcome to the Uncharted Territories. We certainly hope you'll join us, too.