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| An article about reading, from Cracked: People Were Apparently Reading ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’ Novelizations in the ‘70s  Possibly the most surprising thing about the Welcome Back, Kotter series of tie-in novels is that they… kinda sound good? Now, Cracked has declined from its peak. Most of their articles are about celebrities, which I have no interest in reading about, and besides, you can get that anywhere. But even in the website's heyday, its target demographic was much younger than I am. That still seems to be the case. That's okay; not everything is about me, but those are the main reason I rarely link to them anymore. I still get their newsletter, though, for the occasional article of relevance to me, like this one. Relevant, because I'm of an age where I saw "Welcome Back, Kotter" when it first aired (contemporary, if I recall correctly, with shows like M*A*S*H and Happy Days), and because... I read the books. In my defense, I was a kid at the time. Ken Jennings has brought us many things: the secrets to Jeopardy!, an increasingly confusing series of patterned suits, and now, awareness of the existence of a series of Welcome Back, Kotter paperback novelizations. On the other side of things, I don't think I'd ever heard of Ken Jennings before this. Game show host? Okay, that's fair; I haven't watched game shows since the WBK era. All things considered, possibly the most surprising thing about the Welcome Back, Kotter series of tie-in novels is that they… kinda sound good? I can't weigh in on their quality. I know that other novel spinoffs of TV shows vary widely in quality, from utter trash (Quantum Leap) to pure gold (a few of the Star Trek novels). But I read them way too long ago to have an informed opinion on them. Certainly, I liked them at the time, but I cringe now at some of the other stuff I liked as a preteen. What they did do, even if they were trash, was keep me reading, which led to me wanting to write. There were other books, of course, mostly science fiction, but those somehow stuck in my head—if not the content, then at least their existence. It’s unclear how well these novels sold, but they ended a good two years before the series did, portending harsh realities the inhabitants of James Buchanan High School couldn’t conceive of at the height of their success. Well, the inherent problem in running a show about a high school (or about kids in general) is that, if it's not a cartoon like South Park or The Simpsons, it has a short lifespan. And, honestly, I don't know what it is about that show (and the books) that made it memorable in the first place. Perhaps it was the diversity of the cast/characters, which I didn't really notice at the time, but, in hindsight, might have been groundbreaking for TV (though, as usual, Star Trek did it first, but Kotter was set in some version of the present, not some idealistic future). Maybe it was just the quality of the writing, which, again, it was too long ago for me to say anything about. Or maybe it was because Travolta went on to be a major actor. In my headcanon, his character Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction was actually Kotter kid Vinny Barbarino, grown up and turned to a life of crime (hence his surname change). That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. |
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