The 1975-1979 Gabe Kaplan – Alan Sacks vehicle “Welcome Back, Kotter” was not originally titled simply “Kotter” (as an apocryphal story has it), but rather “So I See You’ve Finally Moved Out of Your Mother’s Basement and Gotten Yourself a Job Teaching Unfunny Retards, You Jew Loser.”
The provocative title was changed, however, when former Lovin’ Spoonful lead singer John Sebastian, who had been commissioned to write the show’s theme song, was unable to come up with a satisfactory rhyme to “unfunny retards.”
Doesn’t that rhyme with “orange” ?
Unfunny retards
No good at playin’ cards
About time to change the guards
But only in the back yards.
That John Sebastian… what a slacker.
Sebastian couldn’t even rhyme ‘welcome back’, and I think it was more that he took personal offense to the ‘unfunny retard’ reference. Another musical giant in the mold of Randy Newman.
Short people, indeed.
As you mature you will realize that there is nothing unfunny about retards.
Gabe Kaplan and Karen Valentine’s (“Room 222) righteous coolness chased high school highjinks onto the big screen. “Fast Times,” and “Porky’s”: the wonderful result.
Then the brat pack fucked it up.
Which lead inevitably to “Saved by the Bell” and other Saturday morning suckyness.
Thesis, Antithesis, and Suckass Synthesis.
Hegel would be pissed.
What would Hegel say about the “Saved by the Bell” guy ending up on NYPD blue, going through a period of drinking and f***ing every woman who said maybe?
Code name “zebra”
Hegel would say, “Sehr Gut.” But he, Hegel, would ask, in English: Do I have to pretend not to be creeped out by Dennis Franz?
A rhetorical question.