Robin Williams 1951-2014

[TMC]

Originally Posted by eng51squad51

Metv is airing the Happy days episde where Robin wiliams guest on Happy days as Mork.

Henry Winkler recalls Williams’ “Happy Days” debut

[TMC]

Originally Posted by shotzette

So sad about this. The word "genius" is thrown about a lot, but Robin Williams had such a unique talent for comedy and dramatic roles, that I do consider him a genius.

Praying he's up there right now having a great reunion with John Belushi and Christopher Reeves.

Williams changed TV forever: "I have always believed that television didn't create Robin Williams as much as Williams recreated television comedy"

[TMC]

Originally Posted by retroTVfan4ever

Wow this news certainly is a shocker, I didn't see that one coming. He loved to perform, wasn't getting the movie role offers anymore like he used to, and The Crazy Ones was cancelled after a season. Maybe he thought he wasn't being funny anymore, perhaps that was part of his depression problem. Whatever the reason, it's a tragedy, very sad, and you just never know what demons a person is battling. They can appear fine on the outside, but be miserable on the inside. R.I.P. Mr. Williams.

I immediately thought about this too. I know that this is likely oversimplifying the matter but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was at least a marginal contributing factor. The Crazy Ones was supposed to be Robin Williams' "big comeback" so to speak, since it was his first time starring on a TV show since 1982. From my understanding, Robin was also going through some financial issues stemming from his last divorce (which further pushed him back into doing weekly, episodic television).

[Mr. Television]

Originally Posted by TMC

Williams changed TV forever: "I have always believed that television didn't create Robin Williams as much as Williams recreated television comedy"

Memories of Mork: Robin Williams, RIP

James Poniewozik @poniewozik

Aug. 11, 2014
Robin Williams 1978 ABC/AP
To the kids who watched him in his first defining role, Williams proved that weirdness wasn't just O.K. — it was amazing

by Taboola

Robin Williams, of course, didn’t belong to me alone. At the peak of Mork & Mindy’s success — when he made the cover of TIME his first season — over 60 million people watched it every week. (A No. 1 show today is lucky to get a third that many viewers.)


But when I was a kid, raised on a steady diet of ABC sitcoms, he was the first TV star who felt like mine — the first one who amazed me, who connected with me, who I genuinely liked, rather than simply liked to laugh at. Williams, who died Monday at age 63, had that gift, the ability to be staggeringly gifted yet connect on your level, to do things it seemed no human comic could do, and yet feel as if he were doing them for you.

Again: I was nothing special in that respect. Kids loved Mork, the crazy alien on Boulder, Colo., and loved Williams as Mork. He was a man and a kid, buoyant, rubber-faced, an endless gusher of playful invention. That superhuman ability to riff and improvise was what led Garry Marshall to first cast him in an episode of Happy Days, home of Fonzie, whose 1950s characters and catchphrases were already enshrined on our lunchboxes. (Aaaaaaayyyy!) Soon enough Marshall had the sense to give Williams his own spinoff — time-jumped to present-day 1978 — to crank him up and let him run with his improvisations.

Like any American child, I loved the Fonz. But the Fonz was a grownup, with his motorcycles and dates with triplets. Mork, who soon got his spinoff in 1978, was something else: an adult, and a kid, and a magical being. He was a grown man who looked at our world with the delighted surprise of a baby. (He was also, of course, channeling ideas from the adult comedic counterculture at the time, but all my classmates and I heard then was the funny voices.)

The Fonz was cool. Mork was weird — popping-out-of-an-egg, rainbow-suspenders, scat-riffing-about-the-Shah-of-Iran weird. And he communicated an idea that I hadn’t seen in noncartoon pop culture before then: that weirdness was O.K. No, it was great. It was energy. It opened up worlds.

This being the ’70s, Mork had his own catchphrase — Nanu nanu! — but what was captivating about Williams was that you didn’t know what would come out of his mouth. In the classic episode, “Mork’s Mixed Emotions,” he begins by describing a dream he had to Pam Dawber’s Mindy, his roommate and later his love: he becomes a one-man comedy troupe, lurching from confusion to anger to jealousy, arguing with himself in multiple voices and slapping himself in the face, finally becoming Mindy herself. In that first season, Williams was making a rich-for-the-time $15,000 an episode, but it was a bargain: his producers were getting a package deal.

One of the premises set early on in Mork & Mindy was that Mork had no emotions. He didn’t fool any of us for a second. His clipped alien-speak notwithstanding, Williams played him as all emotion: delight, confusion, warmth, amazement, glee. His emotions cascaded over him, and he struggled to wrestle and understand them — which, of course, was another thing kids identified with in him. When Mork began to fall in love with Mindy, he was the only one surprised that he had it in him. As he would eventually report back to his alien mentor Orson, “Love doesn’t make sense. That’s why Earthlings think it’s so wonderful.”

I am, I realize, sketching only a tiny corner of the career that Williams made for himself. But it was that performance as space-alien Mork — more human than any of us, Orkan though he was — that made me, and millions of others, feel like he belonged to us, even as he belonged to the universe. RIP.

[Steve_uk]

Originally Posted by Stuck In The '70's

Memories of Mork: Robin Williams, RIP

James Poniewozik @poniewozik

Aug. 11, 2014
Robin Williams 1978 ABC/AP
To the kids who watched him in his first defining role, Williams proved that weirdness wasn't just O.K. — it was amazing

by Taboola

Robin Williams, of course, didn’t belong to me alone. At the peak of Mork & Mindy’s success — when he made the cover of TIME his first season — over 60 million people watched it every week. (A No. 1 show today is lucky to get a third that many viewers.)


But when I was a kid, raised on a steady diet of ABC sitcoms, he was the first TV star who felt like mine — the first one who amazed me, who connected with me, who I genuinely liked, rather than simply liked to laugh at. Williams, who died Monday at age 63, had that gift, the ability to be staggeringly gifted yet connect on your level, to do things it seemed no human comic could do, and yet feel as if he were doing them for you.

Again: I was nothing special in that respect. Kids loved Mork, the crazy alien on Boulder, Colo., and loved Williams as Mork. He was a man and a kid, buoyant, rubber-faced, an endless gusher of playful invention. That superhuman ability to riff and improvise was what led Garry Marshall to first cast him in an episode of Happy Days, home of Fonzie, whose 1950s characters and catchphrases were already enshrined on our lunchboxes. (Aaaaaaayyyy!) Soon enough Marshall had the sense to give Williams his own spinoff — time-jumped to present-day 1978 — to crank him up and let him run with his improvisations.

Like any American child, I loved the Fonz. But the Fonz was a grownup, with his motorcycles and dates with triplets. Mork, who soon got his spinoff in 1978, was something else: an adult, and a kid, and a magical being. He was a grown man who looked at our world with the delighted surprise of a baby. (He was also, of course, channeling ideas from the adult comedic counterculture at the time, but all my classmates and I heard then was the funny voices.)

The Fonz was cool. Mork was weird — popping-out-of-an-egg, rainbow-suspenders, scat-riffing-about-the-Shah-of-Iran weird. And he communicated an idea that I hadn’t seen in noncartoon pop culture before then: that weirdness was O.K. No, it was great. It was energy. It opened up worlds.

This being the ’70s, Mork had his own catchphrase — Nanu nanu! — but what was captivating about Williams was that you didn’t know what would come out of his mouth. In the classic episode, “Mork’s Mixed Emotions,” he begins by describing a dream he had to Pam Dawber’s Mindy, his roommate and later his love: he becomes a one-man comedy troupe, lurching from confusion to anger to jealousy, arguing with himself in multiple voices and slapping himself in the face, finally becoming Mindy herself. In that first season, Williams was making a rich-for-the-time $15,000 an episode, but it was a bargain: his producers were getting a package deal.

One of the premises set early on in Mork & Mindy was that Mork had no emotions. He didn’t fool any of us for a second. His clipped alien-speak notwithstanding, Williams played him as all emotion: delight, confusion, warmth, amazement, glee. His emotions cascaded over him, and he struggled to wrestle and understand them — which, of course, was another thing kids identified with in him. When Mork began to fall in love with Mindy, he was the only one surprised that he had it in him. As he would eventually report back to his alien mentor Orson, “Love doesn’t make sense. That’s why Earthlings think it’s so wonderful.”

I am, I realize, sketching only a tiny corner of the career that Williams made for himself. But it was that performance as space-alien Mork — more human than any of us, Orkan though he was — that made me, and millions of others, feel like he belonged to us, even as he belonged to the universe. RIP.

It is sometimes the characteristic of a genius that the individual feels they have to live up that reputation and produce similar performances at periodic intervals. How hard it is to make people laugh only the comic really knows. I recall three personalities from my own experience here in England: Eric Morecambe,Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams(and I'm sure there are many others) who found it difficult to switch off in real life and paid the ultimate price of untimely death. Of course the reasons which drive one to suicide may be complex and diverse,but it may be no coincidence that this felo de se occurred on a Monday morning as capitalism woke up again from its weekend slumber with socio-economic issues foremost in Williams' mind.

[1960'sTVfan]

Originally Posted by TMC

I immediately thought about this too. I know that this is likely oversimplifying the matter but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was at least a marginal contributing factor. The Crazy Ones was supposed to be Robin Williams' "big comeback" so to speak, since it was his first time starring on a TV show since 1982. From my understanding, Robin was also going through some financial issues stemming from his last divorce (which further pushed him back into doing weekly, episodic television).

He had a complex mind, could be a number of things which caused him to end his life. The Crazy Ones cancellation might have been a factor. He had sobriety issues as well.

[Bonniegirl]

My co-worker just told me the cause of death was hanging! I didn't know that, I wasn't aware of all the facts! I thought he was found dead, and they were just assuming suicide! Wow, so sad, horrible way to end your life by hanging yourself. I guess I was in denial, I didn't want to think he did that!

[AB]

He will be greatly missed, may he rest in peace.

[Ohio8]

[Mr. Television]

http://www.newyorker.com/culture-des...ms-best-weirdo



Robin Williams: The Best Weirdo
By Sarah Larson



On Sunday night, I was startled to hear Robin Williams’s voice, warm and beseeching, playing like a theme song over an ad on my TV. “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race,” he said. “And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.” I hadn’t heard this speech since 1989, but I’d know it anywhere. It’s a soliloquy of sorts from “Dead Poets Society,” the carpe-diem boarding-school movie, which, to a tenth-grader in the late eighties, felt like pure emotion, pure beauty—full of idealistic, beautiful teen-age boys running around in the woods, playing Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” despite their stern fathers’ wishes, spurred on by a maverick teacher, the warmhearted, riffing Williams, in one of his heartfelt-inspirer roles. My mom found it mawkish, but she was kind to my tearful friend and me as we bravely made our way to the car afterward. On Sunday night, when the ad was over, I rewound it and listened to the speech again.

Robin Williams, who died yesterday at the age of sixty-three, seemed to be taking the world by storm for much of my childhood, and into my adolescence—and that was just fine with us. When I was little, I loved his humanoid alien-meets-cool-chick sitcom “Mork & Mindy.” (That it was a spinoff of “Happy Days” was a mark of quality, as far as I was concerned.) I spent many hours coloring in a “Mork & Mindy” coloring book during otherwise dull afternoons at my stepfather’s jewelry store, carefully filling in Mork’s rainbow suspenders and the egg-shaped spaceship that had sent Mork to our planet. I loved the romance between the ponytailed, no-nonsense Mindy and the bonkers, alien Mork; the show, set in groovy Boulder, Colorado, felt modern in its confident silliness, and because it was a vehicle for Williams, whom we could just marvel at as he spun along. When Mork would say “Mork calling Orson—come in, Orson,” hailing his alien overlord at the end of each episode, I appreciated his thoughtful reflections about the lessons he’d worked out that week on Earth. Williams had a way of making insane goings-on feel all right for his audience, because he had such sensitivity and gentleness when he was calm. He wasn’t a terrifying lunatic—he was an id run wild, or a child, or ourselves at our craziest. Mork would sit on the couch by standing on his head, and he did somersaults and said “Shazbot”; he made being a weirdo delightful and appealing. He was comfortable and kind, and he always returned to something like sanity.

As I grew up, I was amazed at the role Williams had in pop culture. He seemed to occupy the same smart countercultural territory as “Doonesbury” or rock and roll—your cool young parents could like him and you could like him, too—and he was somehow able to be, all at once, Mork from Ork, a totally unhinged standup, the growly weirdo lead in “Popeye,” and a serious actor in movies like “The World According to Garp” and “Moscow on the Hudson.” When I saw him on a “Comic Relief” special in the eighties, I remember thinking that he seemed antic, a little too nuts in a way that was more exhausting than fun, and later I heard rumors that he was into cocaine. “Good Morning Vietnam” was a vehicle for this manic multi-character stuff—he took the idea of the beloved real-life d.j. Adrian Cronauer and made him a lot like Robin Williams, doing his campy gay-character voice, his Elvis (“Viva Da Nang! Oh, Viva Da Nang!”), his Cronkite, his all-purpose Robin Williams motormouth. If you bought the cassette of the soundtrack, you got Williams along with your Martha and the Vandellas, and bits of these routines lodged in your head forever. “Good Morning Vietnam” struck me then as smart, funny, a little edgy, subversive in its attitude about Vietnam in the way my parents’ whole generation was. But I also knew, at fourteen, as I watched the marsh grasses sway with the helicopter-blade wind at the end of the movie, set to the ironic strains of “What a Wonderful World,” that it was a little too much—a little too pleased with itself, and that somehow Williams, a natural for these roles in these films, was complicit in this kind of sentimentality.

Yet sentiment, or real emotion, was also his strength. He often did roles in which he played someone very special—Garp, Cronauer—or in which he alone saw what was special in other people, as in “Dead Poets Society,” where he stirs the souls of his English students; or “Awakenings,” in which he plays the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, and brings catatonic patients back to consciousness and life; or “Good Will Hunting,” where he plays a psychiatrist who saves a brilliant kid from a future of Southie squalor.

His habit of doing broader movies (“Death to Smoochy”), his adrenalin-fuelled shtick (on comedy specials and talk shows, he often seemed high or manic, and he made you feel nervous), and his corniness (“Patch Adams,” “What Dreams May Come”) made him eternally unpredictable, and a figure some people felt that they’d outgrown or had tired of. A friend and I, a few years ago, joked that we wanted to have a film festival called “Robin Williams: Non-Man,” in which we’d feature all his drag (“Mrs. Doubtfire”), genie (“Aladdin”), or robot (“Bicentennial Man”) roles. But he was always capable of truly connecting, of being real. When my friends and I saw him in “Good Will Hunting,” in 1997, we loved him all over again, despite his jarring South Boston accent and despite our mature selves. I have more than one friend who has said, as a joke at various points in the past decade, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault,” in reference to what Williams’s character says to Matt Damon’s character in a scene that made us weep. Post-college, in 1997, we might have thought that Robin Williams couldn’t still get to us, but he could. Whatever else he did, however many brilliant, antic impressions he did or costumes he wore, he was also that bearded, loving, real person who saw what was special in people and who was special himself. And we loved him for it.

[Ohio8]

Originally Posted by eng51squad51

Metv is airing the Happy days episde where Robin wiliams guest on Happy days as Mork.

Right now MeTV is airing the episode where Mork returns.

[TMC]

http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/08/12/mo...iams-boulder/?

The house located in Boulder, Colorado, was decorated today with flowers and signs in tribute to the late actor.
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/tv-tattle#msD6GbRdSUtigQJV.99

[Heidi Dawn]

I didn't realize he reunited with Pam Dawber on his last sitcom. They were quite fond of each other according to interviews I found on YouTube. R.I.P. Robin.

[Cheryl Harrell]

So sorry to hear about him. He will always be Mork to me, RIP.

[comedyfreak]

This was quite a shock to learn the details of his passing, really don't understand all the hate towards this man. Depression is a serious and a real illness. RIP Robin