Alien Invasion Robin Williams Stellar Debut

The Sitcom Smash Hit Was Simply Out Of This World

Kooky alien Mork first nanu-nanu-ed his way onto television in the cult comedy series Happy Days.

The spaceman, played by a then unknown Robin Williams, tries to take Richie Cunningham back to his home planet of Ork but is foiled by The Fonz. The character was so popular that a spin-off series, Mork & Mindy, was created.

Producer Garry Marshall wryly observed that Robin was the “only alien” to audition for Mork and “it was immediately obvious that he was exactly right for the role: anarchic and a little bit crazy, you could easily believe he was actually an alien”, he tells.

Even crazier was the fact that Pam Dawber (67), who played Mindy, didn’t even know she had been cast in the show and found out after reading about it in industry magazine Variety.

It turns out, she had caught the eye of ABC executives and was part of a development deal where they paid to keep her under contract until they found a project for her. She did one pilot for them called Sister Terri that flopped. However, the scenes she filmed for it were later spliced with scenes of Robin’s from his appearance on Happy Days. The cobbled-together video did the trick and Mork & Mindy was picked up without so much as a pilot episode.

“I hadn’t auditioned, I hadn’t met anyone, and I knew nothing about it,” Pam recalls. “I remember going, ‘And who in the hell is Robin Williams?’”