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, the Sweathogs share a story about the time that they all tried to buy a car together.

Episode 4.5 “The Sweatmobile”

(Dir by Norman Abbott, originally aired on October 9th, 1978)

Barbarino, Washington, Epstein, and Horshack sit outside of the classroom and look at the lunches that their mothers prepared for them.  Epstein has a liver burrito.  Barbarino has corn flakes and he’s happy about that because his mother is saint.  Horshack has peanut butter and prunes and he’s not happy about that because he hates peanut butter.

(For those trying to keep track of the fourth season’s already confusing continuity, this episode features Barbarino as a student at the school, even though the previous two episodes insinuated that he was no longer attending classes.  Even though Babarino now lives in an apartment by himself, his mother apparently still makes his lunch.  As for the new Sweathog, Beau is neither mentioned nor seen in this episode, which leads me to suspect that this episode was originally meant to air even earlier in the season than it did.)

Carvelli and Murray walk up to the Sweathogs and Carvelli taunts them by revealing that he was able to drive to a fast food restaurant for his lunch.  Seeing how desperate the Sweathogs are for real food, Carvelli offers to sell them his used car so that they too can actually get hamburgers.  However, the Sweathogs tell him that they learned their lesson the last time they tried to buy a used car.

Flashback time!

The Sweathogs all pooled their money so that they could buy a used car from Vinnie’s uncle.  Vinnie insisted that he would be the one who would drive the car, as he had the most experience in cars.  Everyone warned the Sweathogs about the difficulty of multiple people owning and using one car.  But the Sweathogs were determined to do it.  They arranged to meet with Vinnie’s uncle at the hospital where Vinnie works as an orderly.  However, once they arrived at the hospital, they watched as Vinnie’s uncle was wheeled in on a gurney after having wrecked the car that he was going to sell.  Vinnie’s aunt mentioned that his uncle couldn’t wait to cheat whoever was dumb enough to buy a used car from him.

This was an odd episode.  It was nice to see the original Sweathogs together again but the whole flashback structure felt strange.  Usually, a flashback means that the audience is about to see something that happened long ago.  But, in this episode, it appears that we’re watching a flashback to something that happened maybe a day or two ago.  In the flashback, Barbarino is working at the hospital, Gabe is vice principal (and away at a teacher’s conference due to the fact that Gabe Kaplan was sick of doing the show), and Julie was already Woodman’s administrative assistant.  As well, Julie has her terrible new haircut in the flashbacks.  This is all stuff that didn’t happen until the start of the fourth season.  Again, it’s hard not to feel that this was an episode that was meant to air much earlier in this season but, for some reason, it was held back and a flashback framing device was awkwardly added.

Fortunately, the original Sweathogs, despite being clearly too old to be even remedial high school students, still have the chemistry that made this show a hit during its first season.  Given everything that I’ve read about just how difficult things got behind-the-scenes on this show, it was nice to see them having fun and obviously enjoying themselves.  Though the episode’s structure was weird, this episode still presents viewers with one last chance to see the chemistry and comradery that made Welcome Back, Kotter a hit in the first place.