Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Welcome Back Kotter, which ran on ABC  from 1975 to 1979.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime.

Horshack makes a decision about his future.

Episode 4.20 “Oo-Oo I Do! Part One”

(Dir by Norman Abbott, originally aired on May 25th, 1979)

Horshack is shocked to suddenly realize that he has a girlfriend.  To be honest, I think everyone’s a little shocked.  Horshack doesn’t exactly come across like someone that anyone would want to have a romantic relationship with.  He’s not particularly handsome, he’s got that terrible voice, he’s got those weird personal habits, and he’s like 50 years old and still in high school.

Still, when Horshack learns that he’s going to be transferred to another school because his mother married a blackjack dealer in Atlantic City, Horshack asks Mary Johnson to marry him.  And Mary says yes.

NO, MARY!  RUN, MARY, RUN!

So, let’s just consider this.  One reason why Gabe Kaplan refused to appear in much of season four is because the show’s producers refused to consider his suggestions that the Sweathogs should graduate high school and move on to City College.  But the producers were totally willing to have Horshack get married while in high school.  Sure, that makes sense.  Admittedly, people do get married in high school but few of them would marry Arnold Horshack.  Plus, most high school marriages — at least in my experience — involve an unexpected pregnancy and it’s hard to view Horshack as being anything other than asexual.  He’s just too weird a character for a episode dealing with real things, like love and marriage.  I could buy Epstein getting married.  I could buy Washington getting married.  Beau …. sure, I could buy that.  What would have been really cool would have been if one of Travolta’s episodes had featured him getting married.  Even better would have been an episode where Gabe and Julie got divorced.  Seriously, it would have made more sense than someone voluntarily saying, “I want to spend the rest of my life with the school weirdo.”

This is the first part of a two-part episode.  If I’m not saying much about this episode it’s because this episode was 75% Horshack and Horshack annoys the heck out of me.  When the show began, he was weird but he wasn’t quite as cartoonish as he became in the third and fourth seasons.  This whole marriage two-parter was apparently a backdoor pilot for a show about Horshack adjusting to married life.  Seriously, out of all the Sweathog, that’s the one they wanted to spin-off?

(What’s annoying is that occasionally –– like in this episode where Horshack was drinking — Ron Palillo would get a chance to show that he actually wasn’t a terrible actor but the show’s writers usually did him absolutely no favors.)

This episode really showed how far the show had fallen.  Horshack is getting transferred to a new school and Gabe is nowhere to be seen.  Horshack is getting married and again, Gabe is nowhere to be seen.  It’s Welcome Back, Horshack now and the Sweathogs are truly doomed.