Word: alien
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Penny Marshall before him, Robin Williams, 26, did one guest spot on Happy Days and wound up on a spin-off series of his own. As the affable Mork from the planet Ork, Williams has limitless opportunities to display his manic talent. Unaccustomed to the ways of Earth, the alien sits on his head, drinks with his fingers and holds philosophical discussions with eggs...
...inspired stroke of casting, this sci-fi sitcom would be indistinguishable from the rest of the kiddies' drivel aired by ABC at 8 each night. Robin Williams, a new young comic, sends Mork & Mindy into hyperspace. The show casts him in the role of Mork, a friendly alien who settles in Boulder, Colo., with Earthling Mindy (Pam Dawber), after leaving the planet Ork. It's a premise more appropriate to Saturday morning TV than prime time, but Williams transforms trivia into a tour de force. He speaks in dozens of different voices that ape the sounds of computers...
...catching the absurdity and futility of the operation, but in the long siege-and-retreat sequence, Director Post's failure to rise above simple realism becomes a problem. The scenes here should be spookier and more suspenseful, imparting a developing sense of the madness of isolation in an alien land where the native enemy has all the advantages of terrain and bred-in-the-bones knowledge of it. There are hints of an effort in this direction (Muc Wa contains a cemetery for the French troops who died trying to defend it, with an inscription about the Spartans...
...forsake comfortable backgrounds, familial esteem and personal success to invest their lives in America. The decision may have been reinforced by political, social and economic instability at home, an underlying factor in the entire history of westward migration. Nonetheless, the immigrants have much to lose by coming to an alien society: not only their grubstake but also their cultural heritage, the ease of self-expression in a native language, even the self-assurance that impelled them...
...hindered from receiving publications from Arab countries. Literary censorship, however, is quixotically enforced, and examples of a powerful new Palestinian literature-plays, novels but most notably verse, circulate freely in the West Bank. Inevitably, the themes of the writings reflect a yearning for freedom by artists living under an alien oppression...