Bill Cosby has been a part of a lot of wonderful entertainment and television productions. From his two hit sitcoms, stand-up comedy, the “Kids Say” show, and perhaps most easily forgotten for whatever reason, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Filmation was the animation studio behind this really great cartoon+live action series that started in 1972 (although Bill Cosby first mentioned Fat Albert five years early in stand-up). Bill Cosby would introduce each episode, appear at times during the episode, and wrap it up at the end. As he would say at the start of the show, “if you’re not careful, you might learn something.” And beneath the humorous characters and their stories of growing up poor in North Philadelphia (as Cosby did himself), there always was something for viewers to learn on Saturday mornings. These morales or lessons were never too blatant or “preachy” — very young or oblivious viewers could conceivable miss them altogether, but for the average kid or adult, issues like the golden rule, racism, junk food, lying, grades in school, and many other still-practical and relevant themes today are presented with Bill’s positive insights.
To be blunt, there’s a lot to like about this old show. Beginning with it’s purpose — educating young people about real life situations and events (as opposed to counting and colors, and so forth) in a very watchable and fun way. Bill Cosby just has a certain prestige and aura about him that makes you want to take note and listen. He kept things concise, practical, and understandable, something people of all ages, including those with short attention spans, can appreciate. Making him an active part of each episode — so much so that he would literally talk back and forth with Fat Albert at times in short spurts — was a great concept and it makes the fun animation scenes merge with the live action Bill Cosby scenes seamless.
Speaking of the animation, to me it looks like a typical show from the 70s and 80s, not unlike say Johny Quest, Sealab, or Justice League. It’s a more “realistic” animation style than a lot of cartoons would use later on, and I think that’s partly why the series is still so watchable today. It’s true that Filmation was doing these episodes as cheaply as they could and astute viewers will notice repeated backgrounds and animations, but I don’t find it to be a detriment to the quality of the show.
I thought the Fat Albert series also deserves a nod for juggling the amount of characters it maintained, too. While the main star of the animated portion was Fat Albert, you still had the rest of the Junkyard Gang including Bill, Russell, Weird Harold, Dumb Donald, Rudy, Bucky, and Mushmouth that all received lots of attention, as well as other characters like Brown Hornet, the superhero in a cartoon that the Junkyard Gang liked to tune into during some episodes. Some characters are not as enjoyable as others due to their grating voices or lack of intelligence, but the sum of the parts makes for a likeable bunch of characters.
For further analysis of the series, be it history or episode summaries, I would have to point you elsewhere. However, I can offer further detail on what Shout! has done with this impressive set. The first positive that struck me was the packaging and the presentation thereof. Arriving in a sturdy outer box with five full size, labeled DVD cases (with multiple ‘pages’ holding discs within), and a nice color booklet, this fifteen disc set was put together thoughtfully, not cheaply. Each DVD case, front and back, contains nice color artwork of characters from the show. The back of each case shows the back of the characters featured on the front. It’s a simple, elegant design that trumps a lot of other case artwork I’ve seen in other box sets. Within each case, on the lower left, is a brief summary of what this case contains. For example, case five says “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1984-1985),” “Disc 5-7,” “Approx Running Time: 8 Hours.” It’s formatted better than how I just typed it here, but you get the idea.
Each disc is pressed with different color scheme depending on what number case the disc came out of (purple for case five, yellow for four, etc), which matches the color on the spine of the case artwork. The labels all look similar otherwise, with the words “Hey, Hey, Hey” written all over them. Upon firing up the discs, I’m happy to say there are no trailers or other BS keeping you from getting to the main menu, whereby options are Play All or Select An Episode. As is typical with Shout! releases, no additional language or subtitle options are available, though. Still, across the set, the presentation maintains an appreciable consistency in theme and quality.
As far as that booklet I mentioned earlier, its’ pretty slick. It’s roughly the size of a DVD case, and is in full color. It’s fourteen pages, the first four of which contain an interesting write-up on the history of the series. The other pages contain disc-by-disc breakdowns of the contents, including episode number, name, and original air date.
The image and sound quality are really what you would expect from a show of this age. The episodes are shown in 1:33:1 frame with mono sound. Technical quality of each stays rather consistent throughout and I didn’t notice any major problems that took away from the quality of this set. The lone extra is found on the last disc, and it’s a very good forty-and-a-half minute feature with interviews of Bill Cosby, Dr. Gordon Berry Ed.D, Rich Gehr (Editor) and Rowby Goren (Writer). A narrator along with some imagery and clips from the series bridges the topics and interviews (which were all recorded at different locations, i.e., this is not a roundtable format). It’s really interesting to hear these folks, especially Bill Cosby, who speaks more than the others, talk about the show and their memories, etc.
With that, let’s get to the summary…