In addition, at the end of the early episodes, the gang typically joins in their North Philadelphia junkyard to play a song on their cobbled-together instruments, summarizing the show's lesson.
[4] Little Bill was intentionally designed to be visually different from Fat Albert, while retaining similar educational lessons and roots in Cosby's childhood experiences.
The music for the special was written and performed by jazz pianist/keyboardist Herbie Hancock in 1969[7] and was released on the Warner Bros. album Fat Albert Rotunda.
Paliwoda not only created all the Gang's characters, but painted a "group portrait" which was eventually shown on the front page of TV Guide magazine shortly before the showing of the special.
[citation needed] The producers wanted NBC to bring Fat Albert to Saturday mornings, but the network programming managers rejected this because the series was too educational.
The Fat Albert gang's character images were primarily created by the artist Randy Hollar, with the assistance of one-time Disney animator Michelle McKinney, under the direction of Ken Brown.
[10] Like most Saturday morning cartoons of the era, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids contained an adult laugh track, which was eliminated during the final season.
(Fat Albert voice) Hey, hey, hey!During each episode, Fat Albert and his friends (aka The Junkyard Gang), dealt with an issue or problem commonly faced by children, ranging from stage fright, first loves, medical operations, and personal hygiene to more serious themes (though toned down for younger children) including vandalism, stealing, racism, rape, smoking, being scammed by con artists, sexually transmitted diseases, child abuse, kidnapping, drug use, gun violence, and death.
When Fat Albert entered syndication, some of the episodes produced prior to 1979 had their songs removed in favor of a Brown Hornet story.
In 1979, the show was re-titled The New Fat Albert Show and featured a new segment titled "The Brown Hornet" detailing the adventures of a black crime fighter in outer space whose design resembled a caricature of Bill Cosby, who also performed vocal talents on the character.
The gang would watch the program at the beginning of each episode, and then they would invariably face a situation that forced them to apply the object lesson.
A notable episode ("Busted") featured the kids having an inadvertent brush with the law and given a Scared Straight!-style tour of an occupied maximum security prison; it even contained utterances (by the jail's inmates) of the words "damn" and "bastard" (Cosby had appeared in the beginning of the episode advising viewers that those words would be used as part of the story's dialogue to realistically depict jail life).
[11][13] A cover of the show's theme song, performed by Dig, is included on the 1995 tribute album Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits, produced by Ralph Sall and released on MCA Records.
In 1993, TV Guide magazine named Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids the best cartoon series of the 1970s in its issue celebrating 40 years of television.
[15] In 2002, Fat Albert was placed at number 12 on TV Guide's list of the 50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time.
[16] In 2020, Joyce Slaton of Common Sense Media argued that the series is an "old-school cartoon...[with] strong positive messages."
She noted that while the show's themes like kidnapping, racism, and child abuse may cause parents to be concerned, there is "fresh humor, funky music, and the strong positive messages".
[19] During the mid-1980s, Thorn EMI Video released several volumes of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids on VHS as part of their "Children's Matinee" line of animated programs, with each cassette typically containing three episodes.
The film acts as a sequel to the series where Fat Albert and the boys journey into the real world after jumping out of a television in order to help a lonely girl named Doris (Kyla Pratt) with her social anxiety.