Mork & Mindy: The Complete First Season (1978-1979) – DVD

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"The Mork & Mindy Special," "Mork Moves In," "Mork Runs Away," "Mork in Love," "Mork's Seduction," "Mork Goes Public," "To Tell the Truth," "Mork the Gullible," "A Mommy For Mork," "Mork's Greatest Hits," "Old Fears," "Mork's First Christmas," "Mork and the Immigrant," "Mork the Tolerant," "Young Love," "Snowflakes Keep Dancing On My Head," "Mork Goes Erk," "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," "Mork's Mixed Emotions," "Mork's Night Out," "In Mork We Trust," "Mork Runs Down," "It's a Wonderful Mork," "Mork's Best Friend"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover When you're a kid, you're introduced to the movies and TV shows that pleased your elders and think: did people really believe in this stuff? You see the stilted acting, the forced situations, the alien ways of relating and decide that we've made progress–that we'll never be that dumb again. Then the years go by, and you forget the things you watched as a kid, and for a while, you think you're still living in that sensible golden age–until you revisit those childhood pleasures and gasp in horror. At that point, you realize not only that some of the things you worshipped as a young pup are as stilted, forced, and alien as the aged entertainment you once derided, but also that there are kids alive today who are scoffing at these museum pieces and writing you off the way you wrote off your parents. Such is the case with "Mork & Mindy", a Garry Marshall sitcom to which I was religiously devoted as a credulous six-year-old; now, after enduring all ten-plus hours of season one, I'm forced me to ask: did I really eat this stuff up? And will I burn in cultural hell as a result?

To be sure, the high-concept pitch seems surefire only if you put yourself in the shoes of a 10-year-old. Mork (Robin Williams) is an alien from the planet Ork with a notably irreverent nature; as Orkans have banished emotions (in no way resembling the customs of a certain pointy-eared Star Trek regular), Mork is sent to Earth as punishment and ordered to study its customs. Mork was a guest on a couple of episodes of "Happy Days" (another Garry Marshall-produced childhood fave best left undisturbed), so this suits him just fine, and after a chance meeting with Colorado college student Mindy McConnell (Pam Dawber), he's found both a crash pad and a yin to his yang. Thus the series revolves around ball of loose energy Mork misunderstanding Earth customs and sensible Mindy extricating him from the trouble he makes–a situation the writers like to call "fish out of water" and I like to call "archaic and clichéd."

Mindy, of course, has a widowed father named Fred (Conrad Janis), the strait-laced owner of a music store. Working alongside him is Mindy's maternal grandmother, Cora (Elizabeth Kerr), whose level of feisty insouciance can be divined by her addressing Fred as "Fredzo" and referring to him as, yes, a "wiener." They provide the backbone of the set-up, conferring with Mindy and hemming and hawing over the walking disaster that is Mork. The assumption is that Mork's ADD antics are too much for the easily disturbed members of the home audience, therefore he must be tempered with horrific dullards in order to reassure them–the thought of a show devoted to Robin Williams's unchecked eccentricity is unthinkable in the straitjacket TV sensibilities of 1978. The irony is that nothing is more exaggerated than the laboured "normality" of Mindy and Fred, who betray no natural human sensibilities in their attempt to provide a padded cell for the lunatic. Mork seems more human than they do.

The writers, alas, are Mindys and not Morks. The latter's dialogue is restricted to simple wordplay and puns that would embarrass a "Bazooka Joe" wrapper ("It's written all over your face!" "Shazbot! I'm breaking out in words!"); when they're really feeling frisky, pop-cult references are sprinkled in to light us up with familiar, undemanding juxtapositions. And, of course, there's the "hilarious" Orkan nonsense language that would surely have Alfred Jarry spinning in his grave: eleven hours of this, and I will punch the next person to utter "Na-No! Na-No!" But what's worse than the details is the suffocating format. Mork must learn something new every episode, everything is tied up with a big bow at the end, and Mork reports to master Orson to explain the moral of the story. Nobody really believes that moral, though: everything is so arbitrarily put together that the message is mocked and nothing really sticks. The scripts are mindless, rickety insults imprisoned by a structure so rigid that all creativity is crushed and left to die.

The only time the show takes off is when the Mindy contingent gets the hell out of the way. Occasionally, we get a character turn: either our hero trades delusions with crazy vagrant Exidor (Robert Donner), or he plays off sour downstairs neighbour Mr. Bickley (Tom Poston), the greeting-card author with a drinking problem. Mork, relieved of the responsibility of being resident lunatic, suddenly assumes the voice of reason, and the show becomes about degrees of unreasonableness instead of all or nothing. The one episode that is sustainedly tolerable ("Mork's Night Out" (1.19)) involves Mork and Bickley accidentally landing at a singles bar: with no wet blankets to bring us back to "rationality," it becomes two contrasting misfits playing off each other. It's still not especially funny, but it's nice to see Williams and Poston able to run the show instead of suffer under the thumb of their milquetoast oppressors–and you can at least enjoy their shapely performances before the axe of normalcy comes crashing down.

While Robin Williams has been derided as "America's velvet clown" by some (you know who you are), you have to give him credit for doing what few others could with the lines he's forced to deliver. In a show of bland conformity, he's brave enough to be sincerely insincere–sincere in his reading of the dialogue, insincere in its interpretation. He gets away with so much because he knows the show should be played the other way around: he's zestily sensible, and they're the ones who need to be taught. Mixed blessing that it is, his exuberance is the one thing that keeps you from lobbing a brick at the screen, because it's the only major element that has sensibility instead of sense. That "sense," I now realize, is what informed much of the awful tripe I mainlined as a kid, and what the intervening years of "Seinfeld"and "The Simpsons" have ruined me for appreciating. I will never be able to look any six-year-old in the eye who wonders what we were thinking–though he or she will no doubt have some other coaxial cross to bear.

THE DVD
Paramount's box set of "Mork & Mindy: The Complete First Season" spreads 24 episodes across four discs (25 if you consider that the pilot aired as a two-parter in some markets), which are individually packaged in wafer cases. The full-screen image is surprisingly rich in detail: while blacks sometimes get a little inky (especially during the already-underlit establishing shots for night scenes), the colour is at once vivid and subdued; one can see every nook and cranny of M&M's plant-laden apartment. I don't remember the series looking this good during its original run–granted, I was a little kid at the time. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound betrays the limitations of the original mix, but though it's a little flat, it stretches the elements about as far as they can go. There is no supplementary material.

71 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; English subtitles; 4 DVD-9s; Region One; Paramount