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Released by: Shout! Factory
Released on: August 26th, 2014.
Director: Various
Cast: Gabe Kaplan, John Travolta, Ron Palillo
Year: 1975 - 1979
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The Movie:
Debuting on ABC in 1975, Welcome Back Kotter starred stand-up comic Gabe Kaplan as Gabe Kotter, a man who takes a job as a teacher at his old high school in Brooklyn. Here he winds up in charge of a remedial class with a bunch of troublemakers known as The Sweathogs - a mouthy Italian guy named Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta), a goofball named Arnold Horshack (Ron Palillo), a cool as ice basketball loving black dude named Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) and a Puerto Rican Jew named Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein (Robert Hegyes).
Kotter has to not only try and keep these kids in line but also see if he can get them to learn something. At the same time, he's got a wife named Julie (Marcia Strassman) to confide in and a cranky principal named Mr. Woodman (John Sylvester White) to answer to when things don't go as well as maybe they sometimes should. And of course, as Gabe gets to know the guys, he bonds with them - he was a Sweathog himself, back in his younger days, so now that he's taking on his first ever teaching assignment he's at least got that in common with them.
The show starts off very strongly. Kaplan has great comedic timing and is very natural in the role. He's fun to watch and his relationship with his wife, well played by Strassman, is also pretty believable. The show gives us some insight into the tougher side of inner city schools but the focus is very definitely on the humor and Kaplan's abilities in that arena are pretty damn solid. The guy's love and obvious inspiration being culled from Marx Brothers style antics is obvious and effective. Of course, the show wouldn't be interesting if the Sweathogs weren't funny too, and they are. Ron Palillo is so off the wall as Horshack that you can't help but love the guy and both Hilton-Jacobs and Hegyes are really great in their respective roles. A young John Travolta as Vinnie Barbarino does tend to steal the show, however, so when he only appears in the a few episodes in the last season (and credited as a special guest star, no less! Hey, his star was on the rise and he got busy with bigger things), the show suffers for it.
There are other problems with some of the latter episodes as well. The guys who play the Sweathogs do get older and therefore don't really look like high school kids anymore. The writers try to distract from this with new characters, notably in the birth of Gabe's twin daughters and the introduction of a female Sweathog named Angie Grabowski (Melonie Haller). As the series moves on there's less emphasis on Kotter's class than on other aspects and they shift characters around in ways that don't really work so well resulting in Kaplan's presence in the series diminishing as well (there were some fairly serious creative direction disputes going on behind the scenes). The series ends not with a bang but with a whimper. The end result is that the series really does run out of steam and becomes wildly inconsistent once it hits the half way mark.
There's a lot to still appreciate and enjoy about the show in many ways and there are some fun guest stars that pop up here like Pat Morita, George Carlin and James Woods. Those first two seasons though, they're still very solid entertainment. The humor and writing is sharp, the idea still works and there's enough in the characters that most of us will be able to relate to at least a few of them, making the laughs mean a little bit more than they would otherwise. On top of that, John Sebastian's classic theme song (which was itself a legitimate number one hit in 1976) remains as catchy and genuinely iconic as it ever has.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Shout! Factory brings Welcome Back Kotter - The Complete Series to DVD in the show's proper 1.33.1 fullframe original broadcast aspect ratio. The image is a bit on the soft side and occasionally a bit grittier looking than you might expect but aside from that, the episodes look fine. Colors are reproduced nicely and there aren't any obvious compression issues. Detail isn't amazing but it's not terrible either. This looks fine for an older television show.
The English language Dolby Digital Mono tracks that accompany each of the episodes is also fine. They are a little bit flat at times but aside from that levels are properly balanced and there are now problems to note with any hiss or distortion.
There aren't a lot of extras here but those that were created for the standalone season one DVD release are carried over to this set. That means we get the twenty-six minute long Only A Few Degrees From A Sweathog retrospective featurette and the eleven minutes worth of vintage screen test footage that's interesting to see. Each disc also features menus and chapter selection. Inside the slipcover that holds cases for each season there's also a color insert booklet that contains a selection or archival stills from the show and episode credits and info.
The Final Word:
The first few seasons of Welcome Back Kotter are still really funny, clever and yeah, even charming bits of television even if the latter material isn't nearly as good. Shout! Factory have done a nice job bringing the entire series together with this set and if it isn't jammed with extras or one hundred percent pristine looking, the quality of the content makes up for it.
