Mork from Ork: Orkans, the Egg Ship, Nanu Nanu and Why Boulder

Mork arrived twice. The first landing was on Happy Days, in an episode called "My Favorite Orkan" broadcast on February 28, 1978, in which an alien in a red spacesuit lands in 1950s Milwaukee to collect a human specimen, Richie Cunningham, and is talked out of it by Fonzie; the episode was written as a one-off, the alien was played by an unknown stand-up named Robin Williams who had won the part by sitting on his head when asked to take a seat, and the studio audience's reaction told ABC what it had. Mork & Mindy premiered on September 14, 1978. Mork, sent to study Earth by his superior Orson, lands in an egg-shaped ship outside Boulder, Colorado, meets Mindy McConnell (Pam Dawber), a music-store clerk, and moves into her attic; at the end of each episode he reports to Orson, whom the audience hears but never sees, on what he has learned about humans, and signs off with "nanu nanu."

The show was an immediate hit, third in the ratings its first season, and its alien was its whole appeal. Williams improvised so much that the scripts left blank spaces marked for him to fill, the cameramen were told to follow him rather than the blocking, and the character's tics, the backwards sitting, drinking through a finger, speaking to eggs, the rainbow suspenders, came from the performer rather than the writers' room. Four seasons and 94 episodes later it ended, in May 1982, having burned through a change of format, a change of cast and a marriage.

Orkans look human, which is why Mork can live in Boulder, and are otherwise built for jokes. They hatch from eggs and travel in them, Mork's ship being a large white egg that opens along the middle; they drink through a finger; they sit upside down, on their heads, to rest; they can freeze time by pointing, and Mork does so to deliver asides; they sleep hanging in a closet. They age backwards, a rule the show established in its fourth season to explain the arrival of Mearth, Mork and Mindy's son, hatched from an egg Mork laid and played by the 55-year-old Jonathan Winters as a toddler in a grown man's body. Winters had been Williams's idol since childhood, and the last season was built around the two of them.

Ork itself is a planet of pure reason. Orkans have no emotions, having bred them out, and Mork was sent to Earth partly as a punishment for having a sense of humour; Orson, whose voice was Ralph James, is the show's picture of the Orkan mind, a bureaucrat of the psyche who wants reports and gets jokes. The series' running joke is that Mork's mission to understand humans succeeds because he catches their emotions like a cold, and its running melancholy, which grew in the later seasons, is that he cannot go home. The Orkans are the benevolent alien of the 1950s contactees made silly and then, slowly, made sad.

Mork was the last innocent alien of the decade. He landed a year after Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars and four years before E.T., at the moment when the screen alien was turning from invader to visitor, and the show could assume that an alien in Boulder was a delight rather than a threat. His costume was a red jumpsuit with a silver triangle, a design that read as space-age on a budget, and his ship was an egg because eggs were funny and the show could not afford a saucer; the ship was a joke about the flying saucer in the same way that the character was a joke about the solemn messengers of the 1950s films, the Klaatus who came to warn us and were shot for it. Mork came to observe and was adopted.

The performance mattered more than the alien. Williams's Mork was a channel-surfing intelligence that had absorbed Earth from television and returned it scrambled, and the show found that the best way to look at humans was through someone who had just arrived; it is the same device as 3rd Rock from the Sun two decades later and ALF in between, and Mork was the first to do it in prime time with a performer who could actually seem to be from somewhere else. The Orkan salute, the finger-drinking and the egg went into the culture; the reports to Orson, which ended each episode with a small moral about the humans, were the show's conscience and, for many viewers, the first sympathetic alien they had met.

Mork picked a town with a record. The University of Colorado at Boulder had hosted, from 1966 to 1968, the Air Force's contracted scientific study of UFOs, directed by the physicist Edward Condon, whose 1969 report concluded that nothing of scientific value had come from two decades of study and gave the Air Force the grounds to close Project Blue Book that December. The Condon Report was contested at the time, by members of its own staff among others, and the argument over whether it was science or a pretext has never ended; an alien landing an egg on the outskirts of the same town nine years later, to study the humans who had just finished declaring his kind unworthy of study, was a joke the show never made and probably never noticed.

The Orkans belong to the benevolent-visitor line of the lore rather than the invasion line. Mork's mission, observe and report, is the contactee's Space Brother recast as an intern, and his humanoid body, calm home world and ban on emotion are the Nordics of the 1950s accounts, the tall, rational visitors of George Adamski and his successors, made small and manic. The Nordic aliens article covers the source; ALF and the Solomons of 3rd Rock from the Sun are the sitcom aliens who followed Mork into the attic, and the aliens on TV article puts the three in order.