Robin Williams’ Most Iconic TV Character Appeared in Four Different Shows, And Has Wild Lore Behind Him

There is no debating how iconic Robin Williams is. The late actor and comedian is an entertainment legend for his wide range of characters and enduring film roles that cover everything from truly beloved comedies like Mrs. Doubtfire to dramatic masterworks like Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, and even thrillers like One Hour Photo. But the actor also had television appearances as well and while he may not have had quite as an extensive career on the small screen as the large, he didn’t need one. Williams’ most iconic television role is also one of the most interesting of all time — and is also a character who appeared on not one but four shows and has some of the wildest lore in television history.

You have probably already guessed by now that the character we’re talking about here is Mork from Ork, the character perhaps best known from the 1978 ABC sitcom Mork & Mindy. The series starred Williams as Mork, an alien from the planet Ork who came to Earth to observe human behavior and ends up moving in with Mindy (Pam Dawber) who lets him live in her attic and helps keep his identity a secret. As you can guess and because this is an alien-on-earth comedy, shenanigans ensue. It is a fun, weird show that is absolutely a product of its time, but the character Mork is absolutely wild, so wild that his whole lore is almost too crazy to believe.

Mork Was Inspired By An Iconic Classic Sitcom and Appears On 4 Total Shows

To understand how wild the character of Mork is, you actually have to go back to well before Mork’s debut to a Season 2 episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show that aired in 1963. Written by Carl Reiner and directed by Jerry Paris, the episode “It May Look Like a Walnut” is something of a parody of The Twilight Zone and sees Rob (Dick Van Dyke) having a dream where he thinks the Earth has been invaded by aliens who steal humans’ thumbs and imaginations and also eat walnuts. While that doesn’t necessarily sound like Mork, flash forward 15 years to Season 5 of Happy Days. Paris is directing the episode “My Favorite Orkan” which features a simply plot: Mork, an alien from Ork (Williams) comes to Earth and tries to take Richie (Ron Howard) back to his planet as an example of a “humdrum” human. Fonzie gets in the way. It’s all revealed to have just been a dream when Richie wakes up, but a man who looks like Mork knocks on the door and asks for directions.

It’s kind of a wild origin, but we get the first appearance of Mork, set in the 1950s on Happy Days. But then, also in 1978, we get the debut of Mork & Mindy on ABC which also features Mork — the same Mork from Happy Days and that series is set in 1978. The decision to give Mork his own Happy Days spinoff is where the character starts to get weird, requiring an extra scene to be added to “My Favorite Orkan” for reruns. While the original broadcast scene ended with the whole alien thing being just a dream, the extra scene establishes that the man knocking on Richie’s door was actually an alien — he communicates with his handler Orson, who ends up sending him to 1978 and sets up the spinoff. Yes, time travel has entered the chat.

So, what about the other two shows that Mork shows up in? Mork would also go on to appear on ABC’s short-lived fantasy sitcom Out of the Blue in 1979. That series followed an angel-in-training assigned to live with and serve as a guardian angel for a suburban Chicago family and also work as a high school teacher. Mork appeared in the first episode, “Random’s Arrival”, as part of a crossover stunt meant to get people interested in the new series. It doesn’t work and the series is cancelled with only 8 of its 12 total episodes airing, The fourth series was actually an animated series, Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour. The Saturday morning series ran for just one season of 27 episodes in 1982 with the series having a Mork & Mindy segment that featured Williams and Dawber voicing their characters, this time as teenagers in original stories for the series.

If Four Different Shows Weren’t Enough, All The Details About Mork Were Wild

While it’s pretty unusual for a character to appear across four different shows in somewhat weird circumstances, it’s the details about the character that are honestly the craziest. The character canonically was created in a test tube. He was considered weird even to his own people which is part of what made the comedy work. But the character was also a little inconsistent. In Mork & Mindy, Mork had various powers that are never fully defined and sort of just happen as they suit the story. For example, Mork would point his finger and different thing would happen. None of the things that would happen were ever particularly clearly defined, something that David Misch, who wrote for seasons one and two of the series has previously spoken about. You could say that when it comes to Mork’s powers, it really was just a YOLO situation, or at least, whatever works.

There’s also the matter of Mork and Mindy’s child. In the fourth season of Mork & Mindy, Mork and Mindy get married and have a child, but this isn’t a typical pregnancy. Because Mork is Orkan, he ends up laying an egg. That egg then grows and hatches and what hatches is not a baby or even a child. It’s the actor Jonathan Winters portraying their son, Mearth. Now, the idea of an alien hybrid baby coming out of an admittedly weird pregnancy situation as an adult isn’t too insane but consider this: Winters was 26 years older than Williams. The series more or less explained this in a previous season by establishing that Orkans “aged backwards” but it’s still very, very weird.

Honestly, just about everything about Mork from Ork is strange, but that is also a huge part of the charm. Mork & Mindy is without a doubt one of television’s greatest sitcoms of all time simply because of how bizarre, weird, and unafraid of being insane it actually is. The insanity didn’t stop with Mork as a character; even the overall ending of the series involved time travel (via the clicking of heels of time travel shoes), the befriending of cave people, a vortex, a revelation of Mork’s alien status on Earth, and some truly wild adventures. We’re not even scratching the surface. It’s a show and a character that never took itself seriously and in doing so, helped shine a light on what it really means to be human. We’re all a little weird, a little awkward, a little backward, and a lot silly. Mork might be Williams’ wildest character, but he’s easily his best and there will never be another like him.