Haven’t watched it in years. If I were to watch now with honest criticism, I might have to admit that the later years with Jonathan Winters weren’t very good but… I always had a warm fondness for the Jonathan Winters episodes. He cracked me up, especially the interplay between Winters and Williams.
ETA: I haven’t seen Pam Dawber in years (looking at her credits her most recent is one guest spot on Williams’ “The Crazy Ones”), but the photo on on her Wiki page is noted as being from 2012. That would make her 61 in that photo and she looks great!
I found this AV Club interview with her from 2014. She looks damn good in the accompanying photo which, if it isn’t also from 2014, can’t be too much older.
So…if you remove the star, the star vehicle no longer works?
That’s like observing that no one will watch a porno if all the actors remain clothed.
and
"How can I help you if you won’t help yourselves?? 
"
:: wipes smashed eggs into the garbage disposal ::
“Burial at sea”
:: salutes ::
Pam Dawber turned 64 a couple of days before this thread was started (Oct. 18). She always had (and continues to have) that simple 70s-television attractiveness, like Jan Smithers from WKRP in Cincinnati and Marcia Strassman from Welcome Back, Kotter.
I have mostly fond memories of *Mork & Mindy *-- the character of Mork really was a cultural phenomenon; not quite on the level of Fonzie from Happy Days, but very, very popular.
In his book Still Me, Christopher Reeve recalls his first Julliard improv class. The students all had to give a five minute speech about themselves. They were all standing there stiff as boards and barely able to talk for three minutes. Then his short, hairy rubbery faced guy just got up, started bouncing around the stage and talked about himself for twenty minutes. The students and the professor were just drop jawed. Reeve told himself “I got to meet this guy.”
Nobody had a better brain for improv than Williams.
Thanks for bringing back that memory.
My source is a recent Carl Reiner interview. Either he misremembered or I did and he was actually talking about Morey.
Yup. Just another lame sitcom.
From memory:
Mork: Christmas is a plague! There’s a roving gang terrorizing the neighborhood, singing for trouble.
Mindy: Singing for trouble?
Mork: Yes, they want to beat up Monty Hall and his family. They’re going from house to house singing, “Deck the halls! Deck the halls!”
To my 12 year old brain, that was the funniest thing ever.
The point is that M&M wasn’t lame at all. It was hilarious because of its basic device: letting Robin Williams be an extemporizing nutball. Saying it would be lame without him is like saying TERMINATOR would he boring if you took out the killer robot.
Yes, but it’s not always the case that The Star totally dominates the sitcom that was made for him (e.g. Seinfeld, Newhart, Parks and Recreation).
The show was okay. It was definitely better than its competition, but that isn’t saying a whole lot. Robin Williams could be entertaining but he irritated me in anything but small doses.
One of the first places I visited when I moved to Colorado was the M&M house in Boulder. It’s rather well known, there’s a sign up and everything.
I’m not one for cursing, but one does need an exclamatory term or two for situations when one becomes necessary. To this day, mine is shazbot! Thank you, Robin.
That was a recycled Beverly Hillbillies joke
My favorite episode was the one in which Mork let his emotions run wild. Apparently, he took on a biker gang.
Another good one had him deciding to reveal himself as an alien to a reporter. Mindy dressed up in a costume and called herself Catwoman from Mars.
Mork and Mindy was a little too goofy even for me.
:: shrugs ::
To me, that says less about the Mork & Mindy producers than it does about the talents of Seinfeld and Newhart.
I remember more than one such episode, all excellent.
In the first, Mindy and Mork got hassled by some creep. Mr. McConnell wanted to teach him to box, which Mork went along with until he realized that McConnell wanted him to inflict physical harm, which he was unwilling to do. He got around the limitation by using his time-warp powers to slow down everyone’s motions but his own and hilariously humilating them – causing people to fall face-first into pies, etc – until the biker’s caved. But he didn’t let out his emotions to any unusual extent, and in fact felt himself to be humiliated because he had violated his principles.
In the second, some anti-Polish bigots fucked with Mindy. He came closer to losing it then, destroying their headquarters with telekinesis and his finger laser, but didn’t physically harm anyone.
In the third, some creep—mistaking Mearth (the Jonathan Winters character) for an adult with mental retardation–bullied and humiliated him. THAT was when Mork lost his shit.
Oh, and he got quite emotional when he shrank into the alternate universe and had to watch alt-Mindy die.
And very nice she looked, too.
Never watched that so it was new to me.