Word: mork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Childhood has not been an easy path for Josh. He will never forget the night nearly nine years ago when his parents told him they were divorcing. "My sister Dana and I really liked watching the TV show Mork and Mindy, so my parents decided to tell us right before the show so we could watch it afterward," he says. "I don't think we ever got around to watching it. I just remember crying...
People are full of theories about my popularity. Some compare me to Rocky and Bullwinkle -- you remember, the plucky squirrel and the jug-eared moose -- or some klutz named Mork from Ork, because these bozos seemed to be entertaining children while really offering sophisticated satire of politics and pop culture. One notion is that because I am a shut-in, to stay hidden, and learn everything I know about the world from TV, I constitute some sort of commentary on what children learn from watching the box. Another idea is that I am sort of a metaphorical child myself...
...uncaged onstage Williams contains multitudes -- a Sybil's worth of funny, fractured personalities. The man who was Mork, on TV's sitcom smash of the late '70s, can switch in nanoo-seconds from an infant's helium singsong to Elmer Fudd as Bwooce Spwingsteen. This glossolaliac gift can give the listener a high and a headache; it is that quick, sharp and scary. Scares Williams too. "When it works," says the Chicago-born comic, 36, "it's like . . . freedom! Suddenly these things are coming out of you. You're in control, but you're not. The characters are coming through...
...movie star, though, Williams was on Call Waiting for the worse part of this decade. Fresh from Mork & Mindy, he starred in Robert Altman's Popeye. "It was a painful experience," he recalls. "We were on location for six months, the weather was awful, we were running out of money, and the sets were underwater. It was Apocalypse Now in Malta." Subsequent films were a little like Stardom When? The World According to Garp domesticated John Irving's novel and neutered Williams' wild talent. The Survivors set him up as the butt of a gun-crazy satire. Moscow...
Lucille Ball, for example, is returning as a "free-spirited grandmother" who moves in with her daughter's family in ABC's Life with Lucy. Elliott Gould, Ellen Burstyn and Wilford Brimley are among the other stars who will be heading TV homes this season. Pam Dawber (Mork and Mindy) becomes a roommate and surrogate parent for a runaway sibling in CBS's My Sister Sam. In ABC's Heart of the City, a police detective has himself transferred out of the SWAT unit so he can spend more time with his motherless children. And Starman, also on ABC, brings...