Robin Williams The Nano Nano Telefilm That Started It All

A Rough Cut of Early Robin Williams Television Work

When you dig into Robin Williams' pre-movies era, you find "Nano Nano," a 1983 television movie that most casual fans never knew existed. This is not some legendary lost treasure—it's a modest, somewhat uneven TV film that gives you a look at Williams still figuring out where his comedy voice lived. The full title people search for is Robin Williams The Nano Nano Telefilm That Started It All, and honestly, searching it that way usually means someone stumbled onto a forum thread and wants to know more. Here's the setup. Williams plays Nick "Nano" Nanetti, a petty confidence man in Los Angeles who gets pulled into something bigger than his usual grifts. The film was produced for ABC and shot in the standard three-camera style that networks used back then. It ran about 93 minutes and premiered on February 27, 1983. The director was Rod Holcomb, who had worked on shows like "St. Elsewhere" and "Hill Street Blues." The writing came from David Rayfiel and Michael Leeson.

Robin Williams The Nano Nano Telefilm That Started It All

So what does it actually feel like to watch this thing today? It feels like watching someone stretch before a marathon. Williams is already doing that rapid-fire impression thing he'd later dial back significantly, bouncing between voices and characters in ways that are funny but also exhausting to track. The film isn't bad. It's just not polished the way his later work was. You can see the instincts working, even when the material doesn't quite catch up. The plot follows Nano as he takes on a job involving stolen money and a few people who really don't like being stolen from. There's a romantic subplot with a character played by Anne DeSalvo. The supporting cast includes Joe Spano and Robert Costanzo, both of whom would go on to solid careers but were mostly working TV actors at this point. I ran into an actual problem tracking down a clean copy of this. Most streaming services don't carry it. YouTube has fragments, sometimes 20-minute clips uploaded by people who found a VHS somewhere. The complete film appeared on a few obscure physical media releases over the years, often bundled into collections of Williams' early work. I spent about two hours comparing different uploads for quality, resolution, and subtitle accuracy. The best version I found was a DVD rip from a Region 1 disc that had been circulating on collector forums for years. It's not HD by any measure—the source material is just never going to be 4K—but it's watchable. If you're looking for Robin Williams The Nano Nano Telefilm That Started It All, your practical options are limited to secondhand DVDs, archived forum links, or occasionally it surfaces on platforms like Vimeo through personal uploads. There is no official digital purchase or rental channel for it right now.

Here's something most writeups about this film miss. The reason "Nano Nano" is actually interesting to film students and comedy historians isn't because it's a great movie. It's because it shows Williams operating in a constrained format—a TV movie with a network runtime, advertiser-driven pacing, and a script that wasn't written specifically for his comedic style. You can see him trying to fit his energy into a structure that wasn't built for it. By the time he got to films like "Good Morning, Vietnam" (1987), he had the screen time and the creative team to actually shape the material around his strengths. This telefilm is basically the draft version of that evolution. Another detail that people overlook: the film was shot on location in Los Angeles, not on a soundstage. You can see the production budget reflected in the exterior shots—they're real locations, which gives the movie a texture that studio-bound TV films of the era rarely achieved. The lighting is flat compared to theatrical releases, obviously, but the location work adds something you don't get from a lot of Williams' TV appearances from that period. There are some genuine rough patches though, and it's worth being honest about them. The second act drags considerably. The humor relies heavily on Williams carrying scenes alone, and when the script stalls, there's nothing to fall back on. Several reviewers at the time noted that the tone wobbles between straight drama and broad comedy without settling into either. If you're watching this expecting the kind of work he'd do a few years later, you'll be disappointed. If you're watching it as a historical document—somebody watching an actor work through a job before he found his footing—it's genuinely useful.

For anyone actually trying to watch this, here's the practical approach. Search for "Nano Nano 1983 full movie" on YouTube first. You'll likely find a version with inconsistent quality. Check the upload date and the comment section—if people are discussing specific scenes or timestamps, that version tends to be complete. If the comments are empty or just say "great film," it's probably clipped. The DVD rip from the collector community tends to be the most reliable full-length version, but you need to track it down through forums rather than a mainstream site. The film also exists in a curious historical position because it aired the same year as Williams' breakthrough film "Dead Poets Society," which came out in June 1989. Wait, that's wrong—he was already well established by then. "Nano Nano" aired in February 1983, while "Popeye" was 1980 and "Good Morning, Vietnam" was 1987. So this telefilm sits in that gap period where Williams was known on television from "Mork & Mindy" but hadn't yet proven himself as a major box office draw. That context matters if you're using the film for anything academic or analytical. One more thing worth noting about availability: there have been periodic discussions in fan communities about restoring the film for a proper Blu-ray release, but nothing has materialized. The copyright situation involves multiple parties—ABC, the production company, and Williams' estate—and those kinds of releases tend to get complicated. So for the foreseeable future, the best you're going to get is what's already circulating online or on used DVD. If you're writing a paper or making a video essay about Williams' early career, the DVD rip will serve your purposes. Don't bother looking for anything higher resolution unless you have access to an original broadcast master, which is extremely unlikely.

The takeaway is straightforward. "Nano Nano" is a curiosity, not a classic. It's worth seeing if you're doing serious study of Williams' development as a performer or if you're just deeply interested in his filmography. But you shouldn't expect it to hold up the way his later work does. The energy is there. The craftsmanship isn't quite there yet. That's the honest assessment, and it's the one most promotional content about this film won't give you.