"Hello Welcome back, Kotter": Robert Hegyes "Epstein ayudó like cambiar and TV

"Hi, Welcome Back, Kotter" star Robert died Hegyes Television Thursday, giving millions of Americans pause to think about the time until 1975, when Epstein, Fini Barbarino and the other "Sweathogs" of the governed.

Conspiracy to "greet you again, Kotter" may seem a bit familiar to Gleeks (the teacher and the student becomes the problem, return to the old stomping base). And like "happiness" and was the main fair - many controversial - when screened at the line-up in the ABC primetime.

The exhibition ran for four seasons and launched the career of John Travolta. But the prisoners and the nation with his cast of diverse races and edgy storyline involving high school misfits.

This has been perhaps explains why "hello again, Kotter" and "Epstein," Some of the terms on Google in the U.S. since news Hegyes died Thursday of a heart attack at his home in New Jersey.

Television historian Robert Thompson for "hello Welcome Back, Kotter", a program that was off the air in 1979, touched viewers, like this.

First, the show starring Gabe Kaplan as a teacher of a group of students misunderstood, controversial even before it was issued. An ABC affiliate in Boston initially refused to air the series. At that time, the city was in the midst of the busy school crisis, and it was feared that appear in the classroom and integrated fuel ethnic tensions. Elsewhere, and fears that show teachers praise and encourage student Jenks High.

Over time, the U.S. gave a slide and a variety of economic difficulties of life rarely seen on television.

"It was a" Cotter "is important in this regard. Was this ethnically diverse cast, but did little beyond. Integrated as one thing and it was natural that at a time that is not even worth a comment "he said. "It was a very progressive thing to do."

He was preparing only. Thompson said that the writers of television today know that the school is a rich area of ​​the mine to the drama. "You are at the moment between childhood and adulthood, and I was sexually mature, but the rules of childhood .... Limited can not be more dramatic than high school," after the area was untrod before almost "and said he welcomed Cotter Back" went along.

"Maybe not, and '90210 'will do later, but for the decade of 1970 was a good job, and drove in high school."

Also key life in Brooklyn, and give a new neighborhood in New York its own identity under the glitzier Manhattan. (In fact, received the highest bills in the introduction to the series Brooklyn - see above - as John Sebastian sang "Welcome Back" song).

Then there were the accents. It is not the only one that was commuted on appeal to the Eastern United States, which allowed the lead.

"Let the tone that you hear very strong," he said. "This is one of the first times that appeared in the truth as a fundamental part of all the characters."

The entire cast was arrested stages, which spread through the nation like wildfire at the time there was no social media to help speed things up, as "the nose with a rubber hose." She was known for forging Hegyes character notes, and Juan Luis Pedro de Huevos Epstein Felipo - -. "Epstein's mother" Puerto Rico, a proud Jew, as he liked to remind anyone who would listen,

"People do not talk of" Welcome Back Kotter hello "for years, but if you are in a certain age, which was always a place that bustles in the back of the brain," said Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

"There is a deep feeling of the people who have seen either in the first half, or seen in reruns, and when you hear some cast members have died, and you realize how valuable a show like this is your memory. "

Thompson said that when thinking about the 1970, I was thinking at the disco. And "Saturday Night Fever." And John Travolta. "If I had a name 10 things he says 1970's" Welcome Back Kotter hello "will be somewhere on that list," he said.