Summary
- John Travolta’s iconic performance in
Welcome Back, Kotter
made him a pop culture icon and launched his path to film stardom. - Despite the success of the show, its decline was inevitable due to the aging cast and the departure of key actors like Travolta.
- The final season of the show saw major changes, including the absence of Gabe Kaplan and John Travolta, leading to a disheveled conclusion.
When the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter debuted on ABC in 1975, the show was intended to be a starring vehicle for Gabe Kaplan, who plays Gabe Kotter, a flippant but well-meaning teacher who returns to his Brooklyn alma mater, James Buchanan High, to teach a group of unruly remedial students known as the Sweathogs. However, the ensuing popularity of Welcome Back, Kotter is most attributable to the incomparable presence of John Travolta, whose dynamic performance as Vinnie Barbarino, the resident heartthrob and unofficial leader of the Sweathogs, quickly turned the actor into a pop culture icon.
The show’s live studio audience erupted seemingly every time Travolta appeared on stage as Barbarino, whose trademark “Up your nose with a rubber hose” catchphrase entered the public consciousness. Moreover, through his performance as Barbarino, he established himself as an electrifying performer whose undeniable star quality could enliven and redeem even the most ridiculous material. Indeed, Travolta’s star quality has perhaps never been more apparent than when he gradually disappeared from Welcome Back, Kotter near the end of the series, in which the show struggled to justify its existence without the actor, whose absence was deafening.
John Travolta Outgrew Welcome Back, Kotter
John Travolta said that while the cast and crew of Welcome Back, Kotter became like a second family, he nonetheless viewed the series as being primarily a launching pad with which he could achieve his ultimate goal of attaining feature film stardom. The first major film role that Travolta received, following the debut of Welcome Back, Kotter, came in the 1976 supernatural horror film Carrie, in which he plays Billy Nolan, a vicious bully who agrees to play a diabolical prank on the film’s titular character.
How a 1985 Flop Nearly Destroyed John Travolta’s Career
The embarrassing failure of the 1985 film Perfect put John Travolta’s career in hibernation for nearly a decade.
Also in 1976, Travolta was cast in a starring role in the touching made-for-television film The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, in which he delivers a sensitive performance as the film’s titular character, a teenage boy with immune deficiencies who is forced to live within an incubated state, inside a virtual bubble.
The third season of Welcome Back, Kotter debuted on September 10, 1977, approximately three months before the release of the blockbuster 1977 dance drama film Saturday Night Fever, which brought Travolta an Academy Award nomination for his electric, gutsy performance as Tony Manero. Saturday Night Fever made Travolta a superstar and proved that his magnetic screen presence was too important and powerful for television to be able to contain.
Welcome Back, Kotter Evokes Bittersweet Nostalgia
While the obvious greatness of John Travolta certainly heralded the demise of Welcome Back, Kotter, the show was also doomed by the fact that the show’s overage principal cast members were no longer convincing as high school students. Indeed, while Travolta, the youngest of the Sweathogs cast members, was 25 when the last episode of Welcome Back, Kotter aired in the spring of 1979, Ron Palillo was 30. The growing disparity between the ages of the Sweathogs cast members, and their characters make for an awkward viewing experience, in which the Sweathogs appear as perpetual adolescents for whom high school represents the peak of their lives.
10 Major Roles John Travolta Turned Down or Didn’t Get
John Travolta is one of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood. Here are 10 roles the actors pass on or didn’t get.
Like the similarly stunted teenage characters in the 1975 coming-of-age film Cooley High, the constant joking attitude of Welcome Back, Kotter is undercut by the grim sense that adult life is probably going to be very difficult for the Sweathogs, whose bleak Brooklyn environment, which takes the form of a virtual prison, seems eerily predictive of their future. For the Sweathogs, it seems as if the ultimate joke is on them.
John Travolta and the Sweathogs Never Finished High School
Welcome Back, Kotter experienced significant changes with the cast before the start of its fourth and final season, in which a contract dispute between Gabe Kaplan and the show’s executive producer, James Komack, led to Kaplan only appearing in eight of the final season’s 23 episodes. To explain Kaplan’s absence and move the show’s focus away from Kotter’s classroom, Kotter became vice-principal at Buchanan High.
The final season of Welcome Back, Kotter debuted on ABC on September 11, 1978, approximately three months after the release of John Travolta’s second starring film vehicle, the hit musical romantic comedy Grease. Grease became the highest-grossing film of 1978 and made Travolta arguably the biggest star in North America, if not the world.
Given the actor’s increased focus on his film career, Travolta, credited as a “Special Guest Star” in the final season’s episodes, only appears in 10 of the final season’s first 15 episodes. Besides marking his final appearance as Vinnie Barbarino, his final episode, titled “Barbarino’s Baby,” is only notable for the fact that it involves Barbarino attempting to deliver a baby inside an elevator.
Without Kaplan and Travolta, remaining Sweathogs cast members Robert Hegyes, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, and Ron Palillo had to carry the show throughout the final season’s increasingly disheveled final eight episodes. In an attempt to fill Kaplan and Travolta’s void, Stephen Shortridge joined the cast in the role of Beau De LaBarre, a handsome, silver-tongued Southerner who joins the Sweathogs after transferring to Brooklyn from New Orleans.
Because the fate of Welcome Back, Kotter was uncertain before the start of its fourth season, no plans were made regarding a proper series finale in which the Sweathogs finally graduated from high school. Instead, the final episode of Welcome Back, Kotter involves a feud between Sweathogs Epstein and Washington after Washington gets an after-school job that Epstein wanted. Regarding the Sweathogs cast members, Hilton-Jacobs and Travolta, who were 22 and 21, respectively, when the show debuted in 1975, are the only living cast members, while Hegyes and Palillo both died in 2012. Welcome Back, Kotter is available to stream for free on Tubi.
