Podcast Tuesday: "Mork Returns... But Why?"

Robin Williams and Ron Howard on Happy Days.

For decades, clip shows were a necessary evil of network television. Each series only has so much money to work with per season. The producers have to cut costs somewhere. Why not recycle some classic moments from previous episodes, linked together by a thin wraparound story? That way, you let your fans relive some cherished memories without having to make an expensive, all-new episode.

I would say that the traditional TV clip show thrived—if that's the word—between the 1970s and the 1990s. Back then, older episodes were not so easily accessible through DVD or streaming, so fans may have actually welcomed the chance to revisit some favorite scenes. It may have been The Simpsons that killed off these patchwork shows once and for all. The long-running Fox animated series undermined the trope with such slyly self-referential episodes as "So It's Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show" and "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular." After the dreadful "Gump Roast" in 2002, however, even The Simpsons gave up on clip shows.

Happy Days did more than its fair share of clip shows over its decade-long run. Season 6's "Mork Returns" (aka "The Fifth Anniversary Show") is merely one example among many. What sets this apart is the participation of Robin Williams as the manic alien Mork from Ork. Williams' guest shot in Season 5, "My Favorite Orkan," had been a sensation and led to the top-rated spinoff Mork & Mindy. It was only natural that the character would return to Happy Days someday. Why they brought him back for a lowly clip show is anyone's guess.

Does Robin Williams manage to make "Mork Returns" an episode worth watching? Find out when we review it on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. 

Podcast Tuesday: "Mork Gives Fonzie the Finger"

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.

He was what he was.

Pop art: Shelley Duvall and Robin Williams in 1980's Popeye.

"I Am that I Am."
-God (Exodus 3:14) 

"I yam what I yam." 

-Popeye the Sailor Man

The soundtrack LP.

The star of my favorite movie from childhood died today. The star was actor-comedian Robin Williams, and the movie was Robert Altman's much-maligned Popeye (1980), a feature-length musical adapted by Julies Feiffer from E.C. Segar's long-running comic strip of the same name.

Though hardly the financial disaster everyone remembers (in fact, it grossed a cool $50 million and turned a tidy profit), the film was lambasted both by critics, who wondered why a "serious" director like Altman would be wasting his time on such a frivolous movie, and by audiences, who wondered why the movie wasn't more like the Popeye animated cartoons.

Williams distanced himself from the film later in life, alluding with scorn in interviews to "the Popeye years" of his career when he was first transitioning to films after finding success in stand-up comedy and series television. He even made a point of disparaging Popeye at a gala tribute in his honor, cringing and complaining when a clip of Altman's film made its way into a highlight reel of his movies. Obviously, the film was a negative experience for him, and he was not shy about expressing that.

I'm genuinely sorry he felt that way about Robert Altman's Popeye, because I still think of that film as one of the highlights of his filmography. He gives quite a remarkable performance as the legendary "sailor man" of the title, one very different from the types of roles he usually played. Most of Williams' characters were whimsical, motor-mouthed, childlike eccentrics, like the alien Mork from Ork in the TV series Mork & Mindy. In Popeye, however, Williams portrays a muscular, tough-talking loner who makes sardonic remarks under his breath, strictly for his own amusement rather than to entertain or impress those around him.

The original character from the comic strip is such an oddball, with his knotted-up face, swollen forearms, and peculiar syntax, that it must have been supremely difficult to make the character seem even remotely believable or three-dimensional. And yet, somehow, Williams manages to do it. In Mad magazine's beautifully-drawn parody, "Flopeye," (#225, Sept '81), writer Stan Hart has Williams address the audience thusly: "The Director tells me to put on these phony arms, squint one eye, jut out me jaw, talk through clenched teeth, and then -- act natural!!!"

When Popeye was first released some 34 years ago, one of the most controversial aspects of the movie was its unconventional score by Harry Nilsson, another creative talent who left us far too soon. Williams himself brought Nilsson into the production, even though the studio bosses were wary of this notoriously hard-drinking singer-songwriter and feared that his erratic work habits and eclectic tastes might endanger the film. And, sure enough, critics and viewers were only too eager to criticize the often-simple, repetitive songs Nilsson composed for Popeye upon the film's original release. To this day, even some Harry Nilsson fans don't dig the Popeye soundtrack, though it has also gained a cult following along with the movie which spawned it.

Partial redemption came in 2002, when "He Needs Me" from Popeye was used very prominently in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love. (Though this, too, caught some flak.) To this day, I remain entranced both by Altman's odd duck of a film and by Nilsson's odder duck of a soundtrack. I'm proud to own both, and I'd like to leave you today with an excerpt which finds Robin Williams in fine form.

Mr. Williams, the floor is yours...