Veteran comic writer Alan Sacks had seen stand-up comic Gabe Kaplan’s act a few times and thought that there might be a viable sitcom to be mined out of Kaplan’s tales of his days in remedial high school classes. When previewing Welcome Back, Kotter in front of test audiences, network brass noted that John Travolta (whose character was then known as “Eddie Barbarina”) elicited unsolicited random squeals from the crowd and decided on the strength of a possible teen heartthrob plus Kaplan’s jokes to green light the series. Travolta, for his part, didn’t discourage the Tiger Beat aspect of his fame, but he also craved acceptance as a bona fide actor, and he spent much of his Kotter salary on a high-priced agent, who landed him progressively larger film roles, from The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, to Carrie, to Saturday Night Fever. By the fourth (and ultimately final) season of Welcome Back, Kotter, John Travolta was billed as a “special guest star” and appeared in less than half of that season’s episodes.

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I think hijacked is too strong a term. Clearly there was some high charged chemistry between Travolta and the audience which allowed the series to catapult into strong ratings early. And clearly the studio understood this so Travolta was going to have that spotlight on him. That's hardly what I would call a detriment.

What Travolta did is use that salary to pay for a good agent who got him involved in trendy projects. How was anyone to know those projects would go on to define the decade? But like all trends, they rise to brief supernova brightness, then burn out. And since Travolta was so closely defined by those images, his career went with those trends and he was typecast for a very long time.

But like Kotter, Travolta was simply part of a period piece that had a very small window of opportunity to shine. And shine bright it did. I don't think there was a wrong decision to be had here. And I don't really think the show defined his character with any more credibility than what the others had in those stories. I just think there was a wave of mania going on and society picked from that lot what they wanted to embrace. Story-wise I think everyone had a solid role in the series. No one got left out.