The Dance of the Censors

Is there a way of me trying to tell you that I’m currently doing a season of Raquel Welch films, without sounding like a dirty bastard? Maybe I could say that I highly recommend her 1967 film Fathom, a Bond pastiche which she is fantastic in, and which avoids every single Mary-Goodnight-shaped mistake you might worry they would fall into.

My feminist credentials duly restored, I also recently watched the double-length Mork & Mindy episode “Mork vs. the Necrotons”, broadcast by ABC on the 18th November 1979. This was broadcast during sweeps week – the period where the viewing figures set the advertising rates – and featured Welch as Captain Nirvana, one of the evil alien Necrotons. I’m sure they didn’t do anything too exploitative and over-sexualised, did they?

I can only presume that teenage boys across the land had a confused sexual awakening directly in front of their parents, leading to an awkward evening all round.

Truth be told, “Mork vs. the Necrotons” is a mixed bag of an episode, but then Mork & Mindy is a mixed bag of a series. One moment it’s superb, the next moment you’re checking your watch, particularly in the second half. And Williams himself can go from comic genius to somebody who deserves a slap in ten seconds or less. But Welch herself is very funny in her guest role; funnier than I think she generally gets credit for.

There’s also the requisite number of dirty jokes for which the series is famous. For starters is this amazing gag, when Mindy nearly sits on Mork when he’s hiding in the sofa. How the hell they got away with this one is anybody’s guess:

MORK: It’s alright for me to sit on my face, but I don’t think you can.

Bearing in mind they got away with the above, there’s one very very suspicious moment near the end of the episode, when Captain Nirvana’s two lackeys Kama and Sutra attempt to take over the ship. What the hell do you think is going on here?

After Nirvana’s line “See, I told you they wanted my job”, there’s an abrupt cut, and the tail end of an audience laugh. It looks uncannily like a line has been removed here. And it’s removed in every single version of the episode I can find; I highly suspect this was an edit made before original transmission back in 1979.

The question is: what, exactly, was cut? If only we had the script in order to check.

Well, we do… in a slightly odd fashion. Back in February of this year, a YouTube channel run by Duane Channcey published two videos where he takes the shooting scripts for “Mork vs the Necrotons”, and flips through them while playing the soundtrack of the episode. This makes it very easy to spot where changes and edits have been made to the final show.

From this, we know that the cut line in the above scene was:

NIRVANA: (TO MORK) I told you they were after my job.
MORK: Good privates are hard to find.

Which is very funny, and doesn’t really feel much different to other slightly dirty jokes in the show. Maybe somebody thought “privates” was slightly too direct, or maybe it became a sacrificial lamb to save other gags they liked more.

It’s even possible that the producers didn’t like how Robin Williams said the line, despite the good audience reaction. This oral history of the show published by Gizmodo, goes into a lot of detail about the censorship problems faced by the show. But story editor David Misch also says:

“…in that second season, he would do relatively innocent lines, and put a sort of sexual smirk to them. Which got a huge laugh from the audience, but undermined the character.”

A censorship issue, or a creative decision by the production team? The true reason is almost certainly lost to time. But at least we can enjoy the cut line.

*   *   *

That Gizmodo oral history is genuinely fascinating, and well worth reading in full.¹ One thing it is particularly good at is talking about the often-discussed question of Robin’s ad-libs on the show. David Misch:

One of our lines when people asked about ad libs [was that] we’d say, “We’re up till four in the morning writing Robin’s ad libs”.

We didn’t do extended ad libs, but what he did that would be so brilliant were these little things — a line here and there, a word here or there, a face, a voice — those were the things that blew people’s minds. And they may seem very tame now, but at the time, nobody was doing that on TV. Everyone just did the script as written. And he mostly did, [but] he would throw in little things here and there.

And the other thing is, we stole from him. He stole from many people himself. And we would go see his act, and we would throw in things to the character that were things he loved doing from his act. He never objected, he loved doing things like that. So, you know, there was give and take all the way through.”

In other words: nearly all of the show was by the writers. And while there certainly were ad-libs by Robin Williams, it worked both ways, and the writers were directly inspired by what he said and did too. This all has the ring of truth, and it’s always worth remembering this when comparing the script and the final version of the episode: it’s always possible that ideas came from anywhere.

Still, some moments really do have the feeling of Robin Williams throwing things in, whether at rehearsal stage, or on the recording night itself. As an example, when Mork is trying to hide early on “Mork vs the Necrotrons”, the broadcast version goes as follows:

MINDY: They want to destroy the earth? Why?
MORK: I guess it keeps them busy, Mind, I don’t know.

HE CROSSES THE ROOM TO THE CABINET.

MORK: Well, I gotta find some place to hide, Mind.
MINDY: Yeah, but…
MORK: No, I can’t hide in there. I’ve been out the closet for a year now.

As scripted, however:

MINDY: They want to destroy the earth? Why?
MORK: They like to keep busy.

HE RUNS TO THE ARMOIRE, TAKES OUT A SUITCASE, AND STARTS THROWING SOME OF HIS BELONGINGS INTO IT.

MORK: I can’t hide here. It’s too obvious.

It really is difficult to imagine the closet line is anything other than a Robin Williams ad-lib.

All of which sets the scene for one of the most interesting changes between script and screen in the whole episode. For this one, it’s vital to watch the video in order to understand the problem:

In fact, there are two main changes here. As broadcast, when Nirvana hugs Mork, we simply get a silly little bell sound, and Raquel Welch says the immortal line “You seem to have rung my bells.” As scripted, this was supposed to be much more elaborate:

A SERIES OF HORIZONTAL LIGHTS STREAK ACROSS THE ROOM. THE LAST ONE IN THE SERIES BEING A LARGE FLASHING RED LIGHT AND ACCOMPANYING ALARM.

The broadcast version is a lot funnier, and being more direct in terms of the effect on Nirvana surely sells the joke better. This is helped by Raquel literally clutching herself just above her pubic region, an action mentioned nowhere in the script.

But that’s not the big change to this scene. As broadcast, a moment which gets a huge laugh:

NIRVANA: What are you hiding in your pocket, is that a secret weapon?
MORK: No, harmless stuff. I’m just happy to be here. No, no, it’s a yo-yo!

As scripted?

NIRVANA: What are we hiding?

HE STARTS TAKING VARIOUS OBJECTS OUT OF HIS POCKETS INCLUDING A CLOTHESPIN, A YO-YO AND A PACK OF GUM.

SHE INDICATES YO-YO AND MORK FEELS IT.

NIRVANA: Is that a weapon?
MORK: No, it’s a yo-yo.

The “I’m just happy to be here” line which gets the huge laugh is nowhere in sight. Robin Williams strikes again.

Except… that’s not exactly what he says. The actual line in the episode is “No, harmless stuff. I’m just happy to be here.” And if you watch the clip again carefully, the “No, harmless stuff” part clearly wasn’t what was said on the night – it’s dubbed on afterwards. In fact, it looks uncannily like it was dubbed onto the shot of Williams saying “I’m just happy to be here” from behind, and then they cut to the close-up of him in order to say the line again properly in-vision.

We can surely make an educated guess at what happened here. Robin Williams ad-libbed the line – either in rehearsal, or on the recording night. It then ran afoul of Standards and Practices, who considered it beyond the pale. The production didn’t want to cut the line entirely, either because they loved it (and the audience reaction), or because it was too difficult to edit out nicely. So a compromise was reached: they dubbed in the “harmless stuff” line in post-production to try and dull the impact of Robin’s erection joke, while still preserving at least some of the comedy.²

Throughout the entire production of the show, there was a constant dance with the censors. Some you win, some you lose… and some you half-win. And it’s those half-wins which are sometimes the most fascinating.

With thanks to Tanya Jones for being my usual unpaid editor.

---

1. Irrelevant to this article, but as a lover of Golden Age Hollywood, I especially like this, from director Howard Storm: “One day, I got a call from the front office, asking if Ginger Rogers could come and watch a rehearsal. She came and sat in the bleachers and watched the rehearsal, and then she talked with Robin, and then he said, ‘I want to introduce myself.’ And she said, ‘I know who you are. I watch the show every week.'” ↩

2. Notably, the phrase “harmless stuff” appears nowhere in the original script. ↩