As a child in the seventies, I had two surrogate TV dads.
Not to say that I didn’t have or know my real dad. I did, although my parents were divorced from before I can remember, so I mostly saw him every weekend. We had a great relationship though (with rough patches here and there of course).
But I grew up watching a lot of TV. I’m a screen kid. Television, my first gaming system (and Odyssey 2), my first home computer (a Commodore-64), on through today with laptops and cell phones and tablets. Our new kitten seems to be fascinated by screens to, which worries me in the same way I’m sure it worries parents of non-furry kids. At least I don’t have to be concerned he’s going to make a TikTok account?
Right? Please tell me I’m right.
But television was my connection to the world that wasn’t my mundane school days and house chores and whatever. Television and comics. And while I loved comic books, and that’s mostly what these posts are going to be about, I’m starting with the TV dads because of a couple specific reasons. Because of who they are, both where I first saw them and where I later saw them.
My dads were John Ritter and Robin Williams. But moreover, they were Jack Tripper and Mork (from Ork).
Now, when it comes to TV dads and probably dads in general, I can’t imagine there are any better choices out there. But they taught me very different things. They were, inherently, very different characters.
Jack Tripper was cool. Yes, he was bumbling sometimes. He had some very dated ideas about women and dating, not to mention what it meant to be a gay man. But he was confident in a way I wasn’t. He was handsome. Had a great smile. And humor, to me, was about all I was ever going to be able to pull of when it comes to being “sexy.” And he was a far cry better than his neighbor and best friend Larry when it came to how to treat ladies, which may be me just excusing the show I loved as a kid now as a more educated adult. I actually followed Jack from Three’s Company to Three’s A Crowd, where he got married and became slightly more of a “grown up.”
And Ritter was just an amazing talent. I can’t think of anything I’ve seen him in where i didn’t adore him. But one thing stood out. We’ll get to that.
Mork… Mork was something else entirely from Jack. Getting his start on a Happy Days episode, which I don’t know if I saw it as it aired, but I always perked up when it played in reruns. Mork and Mindy came out and I was immediately hooked by this backwards-suit-wearing, upside-down-sitting, egg-shaped-spaceship-flying person. He said nonsense words that I took into my own forming lexicon and shook hands with split fingers and had a childlike wonder at the world around him.
Mork was cool in that he wasn’t cool. Mork was happily oblivious to how he was supposed to act, to how he needed to be normal. He was always being taught how to fit in, but in the end he would teach the value of not fitting in. And he loved everyone. He just attached to any new person brought into his reach. But he also had Mindy, and while it was obvious the show was going to lead to the eventual romantic relationship between the two, they started out with a very close friendship, and she was such an essential part of who he was as he tried to become more human. Someone who can love and support you even though you’re such a weirdo was the life lesson I needed probably more than anything else.
And Robin was so much that weirdo in real life. I think it was very hard for me to separate Mork from Robin, not only because I first “met” him and knew him best in that role. But because Mork really felt like a celebration of so many of the things that made Robin himself special. Now, I’m not blessed to have known or even met Robin in real life (I was once about five feet from him in a store I worked at and I chickened out on going up and telling him how much he’d always meant to me. I regret that choice so much). But I’ve watched all his stand-up and his appearances on talk shows, and so many places. He just radiates weirdness and silliness and fun and love. So it confused my brain when I would see him in roles that didn’t quite fit that image, especially when I was still young, like The World According to Garp, which allowed him to be weird but also tragic. Or later things like Dead Poets Society or Good Morning Vietnam (which honestly set me on the path to trying to go into broadcasting in the Air Force, something that didn’t happen but almost did). Both of those roles, again, celebrate individuality and love and life and so much that ties back to Mork, but were tempered with more adult themes that affected me so much more because it was him in the part. The kid who wanted to be Mork (I used to call myself Zork from Ork at school) had to see himself differently when he saw his role model dealing with stuff that was new and strange and scary and sad.
So what does this have to do with comics?
Because both of these actors, very soon after becoming two of my biggest influences in my young life, wound up in roles that tied to one of my other major loves. Comics or comic books.
I think, and this is grey area in my memories, but I think I remember seeing the ads for Popeye first (of the two). I knew Popeye more from the cartoon than the comics, but I had some stuff in print here and there. And I won’t say that Popeye was a favorite of mine. Until Robin played him.
And it’s such an extraordinary movie and accomplishment to think about now. Popeye is weird. Really, really weird. Without even getting into things like the Goons in the comic, the theme is just this seemingly happy-go-lucky sailor who has Olive Oyl as his best girl, but he’s constantly being challenged by this giant jerk Bluto for her affections. And he’s got a guy who just wants to eat hamburgers for free (honestly, probably the character I most related to in the strips. Wimpy was essentially Jughead taken further into his Id). He eats spinach (a food so foreign to me that I took five passes at it to figure out how to spell it just now) that makes him strong, so the payoff every episode is him getting a “high” from this stuff so he can defeat Bluto or whatever.
How in the heck do you make this a compelling film?
Well, I guess the first thing you do is make is a musical. Right?
I mean, what was that? Other than the “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” tune, I don’t remember any singing in any of the cartoons. I would probably have paid good money not to ear some of those voice actors sing, the results might have induce ear bleeding. On the other hand, hearing Shelly Duval belt out “But he’s large” in that semi-screeching voice, as annoying as it should be, actually really works (and I find that one surfaces in my brain more that any of the other tunes in the flick, except maybe “Every Day Is Food”). The movie starts very tonally down. Which is on brand for Popeye, but this is a character and film that has to be aimed at kids, right? And it’s just so drab! It’s a town that’s being bullied into a miserable existence by Bluto and the guy he works for. Popeye comes in less happy-go-lucky and more “leaves me alonesk” with everyone. The film is packed with great character actors, but it’s just so weird.
So yeah. I adore this film. Every bit of it. It somehow did just what it needed to do for me; it showed me a Robin that wasn’t Mork at all, but was all new stuff to love and look up to him for. It showed his range, it showed more talents (singing, dancing). I watched it so much as a boy. If I’d taken that chance and talked to Robin, even beyond Good Morning, Vietnam, I think this would have been the movie I would have most gushed over.
And of course, after that we’ve seen Robin play other cartoon characters. Alladin, Ferngully, Robots, and so on. It’s not outside the bounds to see a tie between Robin and what was essentially my biggest hobby as a kid.
John did another kind of thing.
I was probably too young for it, but as soon as it hit cable or video (I think my grandparents had a Betamax copy), I watched the heck out of “Hero At Large.”
If you’re not familiar with it, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw it play on anything so why would you be, “Hero At Large” had John take on the role of Captain Avenger. Or, rather, the role of a person who took on that role.
Captain Avenger didn’t exist in comics. It was a character created to have some fame in the movie itself. But he had a costume and a cape and a cool (to me as a sub-ten year old) name. And it was John Ritter. So other than a very few TV shows and the Superman films with Christopher Reeve, I didn’t have a lot of live-action superhero movies (yet). Let alone ones starring one of my “dads.” So I was attached to this.
But this movie wasn’t a superhero movie. It was a movie about a struggling actor. It was a movie about someone who winds up taking a bit of advantage of a situation using celebrity status to win over an audience. And in the end, it becomes that person growing beyond that and learning a little more about what actually being a hero is, but also just being a good person.
If you haven’t seen it (and if it’s out there for you to see, that’s hard to say), I don’t want to take away your opportunity to enjoy the story yourself. I know, 40 year old film, the spoiler warning should be well worn off. But hey, you do your thing.
Sufficed to say, it taught me some lessons that hit me differently because of how it was dressed and who it starred. It wasn’t quite the level of “favorite” as Popeye because it’s way more time hanging out in filthy subways and what I assume is New York’s streets at night than a cartoon or superhero film should have in my mind (at the time). And at the end of the day, Captain Avenger was a costume and name that had no other property attached to it for me to build a broader mythos in my head. But it was John Ritter, who delivered in the part in a way that I don’t know many others could. And I’m totally conscious of my bias here.
So two of my biggest influences when I was a kid played what were, in some maybe stretching-it way, superheroes. Or at least cartoons. And, for me, that also vindicated everything I loved. I hear a lot about other kids that grew up feeling that they had to hide their love of comics (or other geeky and nerdy hobbies). Like comics were something they didn’t let the cool kids know they liked.
That wasn’t me. I loved comics and everyone knew it. My dad couldn’t count the number of conversations he tried to have with me about my real world day and I had nothing to say about it. But if he asked me about Batman or Shazam or Archie or Richie Rich, I could go on for hours, easy. As a teenager, when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started to gain popularity with the movie and the cartoon series, I’d already been bringing in copies of the comics and the Paladium Role Playing Game to class two years prior.
Comics didn’t make me feel weird. They didn’t make me feel like being a nerd was an insult. Yes, other people pushed that on me, and it got to me. But I never let it affect my love of the medium. When the world tried to break my spirit, comics, the characters and their stories, showed me how to fight back. And if I’d ever hesitated in that, if i felt like I was wrong to think that comics were cool, my two surrogate dads, and my real one (if somewhat begrudgingly), taught me that I was okay.
I was better than okay.
I was Zork from Ork.
