Monday, April 15, 2013

What Might've Been: Out of the Blue (1979)

One year after Mork & Mindy took off like a runaway rocket, ABC & Paramount thought another out of this world sitcom might create the same kind of buzz. Well, to an extent it did......the same kind of buzzing a bee makes when it passes on.

A while back, I reviewed Out of the Blue on my other blog, Saturday Morning Archives, only because ABC took the incentive to air the show on a Saturday as a late substitute when their Saturday morning lineup was delayed for three weeks due to a strike of some kind. Truth be told, that was the only time I saw the show. The producers did the smart thing and had Mork (Robin Williams) make an appearance in the opener. His greeting to Random, the angel-turned-mortal housekeeper (Jimmy Brogan)? "Hey, brother, sell me some wind!"

Random debuted, as Mork did before him, in a back-door pilot on Happy Days, but, unfortunately, Jimmy Brogan lacked the one thing that made Mork so special. Charisma. Viewers stayed with Mork for most of his four seasons (five if you count an animated reboot), but couldn't give Random the time of day, and he was gone almost as quickly as he came.

Here's the open:



Rating: C.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

I do remember this show - although I didn't know the name. IIRC, like Mork's appearance on Happy Days, Random's appearance was part of a dream Chachi had (selling his soul to the devil) and even then Random was a bit of a klutz by angel standards. I know Mork's appearance was rewitten as real later on, but I don't remember such a change offered to random.

Funny to see Dixie Carter in this!

hobbyfan said...

Had Out of the Blue been a hit, the dream would've been real in this case, too, but because this came so soon after Mork, they didn't want to make it seem so redundant, I suppose.