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 is currently streaming on Tubi!
This week, we learn more than we ever wanted to know about Arnold Horshack.
Episode 2.19 “There Goes Number Five (a.k.a. Has Anyone Seen Arnold Part 2)”
(Dir by Bob LaHendro and James Komack, originally aired on February 3rd, 1977)
When last we checked in with the Sweathogs, Arnold Horshack was missing and perhaps dead. This episode opens with the Sweathogs in the classroom, telling Gabe that they’re worried about their friend. Gabe says that Arnold must be having a “problem in his personal life.”
“Come on, Mr. Kotter,” Epstein says, “Arnold ain’t got no personal life.”
Suddenly, Horshack comes into the classroom and asks Mr. Kotter how one becomes a father. “Well, first you meet a girl….” Gabe starts but Horshack stops him and explains that his fifth stepfather has died, felled by a heart attack while driving his taxi on the Long Island expressway. Horshack is now the man of his family. Everyone hugs Horshack and promises to help him out if they can.
“Awwwwww!” the audience says and it actually is a pretty sweet scene.
Unfortunately, the rest of the episode is not quite as effective. After the scene with the Sweathogs, the viewer is suddenly confronted with a new tenement location, a host of new characters, and some very broad acting as the show goes from being an episode of Welcome Back Kotter to being a poorly disguised pilot for a show that presumably would have focused on Horshack’s eccentric family. We meet Horshack’s mother (played by Ellen Travolta, sister of John). We meet Horshack’s obnoxious sibilings. When meet Goldie (Susan Lawrence), who Horshack has a crush on. And we eventually meet Horshack’s uncle, the wealthy Harry Orshack (James Komack). Uncle Harry gives Horshack a part-time job and agrees to train him to be “a shark” so that Horshack will be able to take care of his family. We also meet Leonard (Robert Stoneman), who is Harry’s other protégé and who takes an immediate dislike to Arnold. One can only imagine how many conflicts they would have had if this pilot had been turned into a show.
The episode suffers from a lot of problems, the least being that a little bit Arnold Horshack goes a long way. As a character, Horshack is funny when he’s a part of an ensemble but he’s a bit too cartoonish to be effective as a lead. On Welcome Back, Kotter, Horshack is an amusing eccentric but, in this episode, he’s surrounded by characters who are equally eccentric and it really does get to be too much. Watching it, one can see why the idea of doing a show about the Horshacks never got out of the pilot stage.
For the record, this is the first episode of Welcome Back Kotter to not feature Gabe telling a joke at the beginning of the show. As it ends, when Horshack returns to school and tells everyone that he’ll be working for his uncle Harry, Gabe offers to tell Horshack about his uncle who once had a job but we don’t actually get to hear the punchline of the joke.
In this episode’s defense, I should mention that it appears that both it and the previous episode actually aired on the same night and, as such, the backdoor pilot was the second half of a one-hour broadcast. So, I imagine that viewers in 1977 didn’t find all of this to be as jarring as a viewer in 2023 would. Still, if I was going to spin-off a Sweathog, I would have gone with Epstein. He seemed like he had a wild life.
Through the Shattered Lens 