1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

This cartoon, which debuted at 10:00 Saturday morning in 1982 on ABC, is an example of evolution gone horribly wrong.

"The Mork & Mindy / Laverne & Shirley / Fonz Hour" has it's origins back in 1980 with one of my all-time favorite time travel epics, The Fonz & The Happy Day Gang", which was then joined in 1982 by the swine-tinted Laverne & Shirley In The Army. Having had a fairly successful run at adapting sit-coms for Saturday mornings, the unholy trinity of Hanna-Barbera, Ruby-Spears AND Paramount Entertainment combined their forces to create... this.

First, they mashed Laverne & Shirley together with The Fonz, taking away the whole time-travel aspect and instead making it the story of an Army Base (with a pig for a drill sergeant) where a leather-jacket hoodlum on a motorcycle and his talking dog are allowed to com and hang out. This is where I refused to continue suspending my disbelief. Talking military pige, time-traveling greasers, yeah, I can get behind that. But civilian hoodlums allowed on base for no particular reason? NO.

And then there's the Mork cartoon. It's the same basic premise of the Mork & Mindy sit-com (alien sent to Earth in order to learn their customs and report back to his superiors), only Mork is a teen-ager. ANd he has a wacky alien dog because this *is* 1982 Hanna-Barbera and EVERYBODY GETS DOGS!!!