TOP 10 EPISODES EVER OF WELCOME BACK KOTTER [Archive] - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

TMC

11-06-2014, 07:11 PM

http://www.avclub.com/article/10-episodes-show-how-welcome-back-kotter-was-class-211035

Gabe Kaplan started doing stand-up when he was still a teenager, inspired by the comics who passed through the hotel where he worked part-time in the early 1960s. Kaplan’s act featured a lot of impressions and corny old jokes—very much like what his character Gabe Kotter would later do on the hit ABC sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter—but when trends in comedy changed, Kaplan’s schtick changed along with them. By the late 1960s, following the lead of comedians like Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, Kaplan started telling long stories onstage, mostly drawn from his own life and observations. Then in 1974 Kaplan recorded the album Holes And Mello-Rolls, featuring the title routine, all about the underachieving kids called “Sweathogs” from his old Brooklyn high school.

“Holes And Mello-Rolls” (named after the ice-cream treat that Kaplan talks about in the bit) introduced a lot of the characters and humor that Kaplan and producers Alan Sacks and James Komack would bring to ABC in the fall of 1975. Kaplan’s stand-up act was a little bluer. He talked about his socially inept classmate “Arnold Horse****,” and the Sweathogs’ go-to insult, “up your hole with a Mello-Roll,” would be softened on Welcome Back, Kotter to “up your nose with a rubber hose.” But otherwise, the main difference between “Holes And Mello-Rolls” and Welcome Back, Kotter is that Kaplan’s stage presence was looser and more relaxed than the loud, broad, catchphrase-heavy sitcom that he’d anchor for four seasons.

It’s hard sometimes to separate the phenomenon that Welcome Back, Kotter became—and how quickly and publicly it all cratered—from the show’s actual quality, which for a time was much higher than its ultimate reputation. Welcome Back, Kotter is sometimes lumped in with all the pandering sitcoms that helped end the early 1970s era of quality TV; and at its worst, the show could be lazy and crass, introducing one slim crisis per episode and then having each actor chew the scenery for a few minutes in over-reaction to it. But right from the start, and all through its first three seasons, Welcome Back, Kotter sported a comic precision that shouldn’t be underrated. Though awards are no arbiter, Welcome Back, Kotter did earn an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1976—and it was well deserved.

Welcome Back, Kotter’s polish was all the more impressive given that the cast was mostly made up of TV newcomers, Kaplan included. Kaplan played Kotter, a former Sweathog who returned to Brooklyn to teach social studies in the special education program of his old high school, Buchanan. There he’d butt heads with the conservative, Sweathog-hating vice principal Mr. Woodman (John Sylvester White) and would become a hero and mentor to the next generation of slackers and pranksters: Arnold Horshack (Ron Palillo), a nasal-voiced nerd with a childlike disposition; Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), a tall, super-cool charmer; Juan Epstein (Robert Hegyes), a “Puerto Rican Jew” and street-savvy hustler; and Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta), a dimwitted ladies’ man who was the Sweathogs’ team captain.

The first season occasionally featured a lady Sweathog, Rosalie “Hotsy” Totsy (Debralee Scott), who had a reputation for being “fast.” But for the most part the female perspective on Welcome Back, Kotter was represented by Kotter’s wife, Julie, a kind-hearted Nebraskan adjusting to life in a crumbling, crime-ridden 1970s New York. Marcia Strassman, who played Julie—and who died recently—was Welcome Back, Kotter’s unsung hero, because even though Julie’s main job in each episode was to listen to Kotter’s endless jokes and stories about his seemingly unlimited supply of “uncles,” Strassman found new ways to laugh convincingly and show affection, helping to give a foundation to the show’s overarching fantasy. Though it was set in a realistically impoverished Brooklyn, Welcome Back, Kotter trafficked in ideals: the perfect teacher, the ultimate set of best friends, and a loving marriage that could survive a tiny apartment with a fold-out bed and faulty heat. By the middle of the first season, the gentle lilt of John Sebastian’s theme song “Welcome Back” had become an actual welcome, inviting viewers in to a comfortable space.

Behind the scenes, things weren’t so cozy. Kaplan was reportedly so temperamental that by the third season he and Strassman were barely speaking to each other. Meanwhile, Travolta was being courted by the movies, Kaplan’s stand-up act was more popular than ever, and the usual 1970s temptations of drugs and sex were driving wedges between what had been a tight unit when the series began. Welcome Back, Kotter’s decline became most obvious in the fourth and final season, when Travolta and Kaplan no longer appeared in every episode, and the producers awkwardly tried to introduce a new heartthrob: sweet-talking southerner Beau De LaBarre (Stephen Shortridge).

But a certain complacency had set in even in the third season, which features some of the series’ most memorable episodes, but also has many, many examples of the Kotter writers just repeating the same jokes from week to week. The show’s well-worn catch-phrases—like “I got a note,” “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!,” “Hi there!,” and Barbarino saying “What?” or “Where?” in answer to every question—sprung from the audience’s reactions. If fans liked a line, there was a good chance they’d hear it again. And again. And again. Over time, the gags dulled from repetition. Barbarino seemed to get dumber from year to year, Mr. Woodman became less crotchety and started telling his own bad jokes, and the Sweathogs lost their underclass juvenile delinquent edge, becoming merely genial misfits (with remarkably easy access to props and costumes for their stunts).

Again though, even at its most creatively bankrupt, Welcome Back, Kotter had a rare comedic energy. Kaplan’s stand-up act may have been aping Cosby, but his sitcom was reaching back further, to The Bowery Boys and The Marx Brothers. Kotter and the Sweathogs alike would imitate Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, George Burns, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, W.C. Fields, Jimmy Durante, and The Three Stooges. The whole show was like an encyclopedia of Golden Age Hollywood comedy, and the young cast was surprisingly adept at all of the old moves. All they had to do was walk into a room, exaggeratedly stooped over, and sit down on a sofa in unison, and the studio audience would erupt.

That was the X-factor that Kaplan couldn’t have anticipated when he sold his Sweathogs routine to ABC: how the cast would bring these characters from Kaplan’s own childhood to life, in their own way. Shout! Factory’s Welcome Back, Kotter complete series DVD box set contains a featurette called “Only A Few Degrees From A Sweathog,” in which Hilton-Jacobs says that he knew the show was a hit even before the first episode aired, because the crowd at the tapings was so large and so enthusiastic. Hegyes says he knew they were onto something during the pilot, when each actor introduced his character, establishing the riffs they’d do variations on for the next four years. Hegyes watched everyone do their bit, and smiled and nodded to himself, saying, “These cats can play.”