Happy Days: My Favorite OrkanABC
February 28, 1978
Sitcom
DVD
C+
Mork, with a weirder voice and a less pacifist attitude than on his own show, arrives and decides to kidnap Richie, specifically because Richie is average and humdrum. And in a way, that's a good metaphor for this episode. As I've said elsewhere, I was a Happy Days viewer but I'm not a HD fan. Watching this again, seeing how stilted and formulaic it was (yes, even compared to Laverne & Shirley or What's Happening!!), I felt the opposite of nostalgia, more of a comical disbelief. And then Williams showed up and, while he didn't make everything OK, he did make it better. He gave to the role, which was, remember, just supposed to be a one-time cameo, little whimsical touches, even if this is not the pop-culture freak that the '70s Mork would be. (He does slip in an Opie joke, but it's too set-up to be ad-libbed.) Note that the version on the DVD (packaged with M & M's fourth season) seems to be the original, rather than the later one where Mork has erased everyone's memories of him.
Jerry Paris, who it looks like directed just about every episode of Happy Days, definitely directed this one and "Mork Returns." Note that this is the 110th episode of the series, from Season Five, when Richie was in college.
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