Gabe Kaplan: A Look Back at the Life and Career of TV's "Welcome Back, Kotter" Star

2023-05-16

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"Hey, Mr. Kotter!"

He wasn't really a school teacher, he just played one on TV. Very successfully. His name is Gabe Kaplan, and for five years in the 1970s, he was the "Mr. Kotter," in the famed sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter.

A Closer Look

Gabe Kaplan helped to create the high-school-based Welcome Back, Kotter comedy, which originally ran for five seasons on ABC, beginning in the fall of 1975. He based the characters on real-life individuals he knew while attending Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York. In fact, Erasmus Hall closely resembled the fictional James Buchanan high school that is featured in Welcome Back, Kotter.

Although the so-called Sweathog students are presented as a less-than-best academic group in the Kotter series, Kaplan was not really a member of that somewhat unruly (if charming!) band. As he explained to author Peggy Herz in her book TV's Fabulous Faces, Kaplan left Erasmus Hall in his senior year. He had "some happy memories of school, but mainly it was a pretty confusing time." He was unsure of what he wanted to do in life and opted not to attend college. "I saw nothing I wanted that I could get with a high school diploma," he said. "I was missing some credits, so I wouldn't have graduated that year, anyway. What I really wanted to do was play baseball."

Students in Kaplan's real-life academic hall were rated in a one-through-five system. As he continued to explain to Herz, "I was always in the fours. That was next to the dumbest. Once you tell a kid that, he stops trying."

Kaplan was 17 years old when he exited Erasmus Hall. He was a good baseball player, but "...not great." He tried out for minor league clubs in Florida and Texas, which did not require any significant funding to apply. Though he did take odd jobs to make money."

And then, years later, he made it to the big leagues, at least on TV - and struck ratings gold with Welcome Back, Kotter, which featured among others, future superstar John Travolta as one of the Sweathogs.

Conclusion

It's funny how life works, sometimes. Although Welcome Back, Kotter had been intended as a star vehicle for Gabe Kaplan, it was John Travolta who became the break-out star of the series. Kaplan certainly enjoyed success and continues to reap the rewards of that success, but it was Travolta who ultimately hit it big on a much larger scale - on the big screen. His feature films, Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978) are two of the most successful motion pictures of all time.

A similar outcome resulted with the 1980s TV show, Family Ties, which was intended as a star vehicle for Meredith Baxter-Birney. But it was Michael J. Fox, who played then-Baxter-Birney's TV son, and who later also found superstar status at the movies with the Back to the Future trilogy.

[Note: Unless otherwise noted, certain facts and information presented in this article were resourced from entertainment news/media outlets IMDb.com, and Wikipedia.org. For more information about Gabe Kaplan, John Travolta, or any of the other stars of Welcome Back, Kotter, please click here.]

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