Preceded by a 1969 animated TV special, "Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert". Prior to that, Fat Albert and other characters had been featured in a number of Cosby's stand-up comedy routines.
The series was retitled The New Fat Albert Show in 1979. Its final season (which aired concurrently with The Cosby Show) was produced for syndication and was retitled The Adventures of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.
Followed in 2004 by the live-action film Fat Albert, which puts a metafictional spin on the concept by having the fictional character Fat Albert leave the world of TV in search of his creator, Bill Cosby.
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BigBadBluesMan ● 13th Oct 2015
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Record Collector 27th Jun 2015
| | Funbusters oops sorry that just came out from no where when you mentioned J&B |
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Neil Forbes 27th Jun 2015
| | I couldn't rightly tell you what Warners or MCA(Universal) are planning, re: Cosby. I was going by what I have on LP vinyl. Actually, back in the 1980s a budget label here in Australia was issuing quite a bit of Cosby's MCA content in different mixes. That label was J. & B., which started life issuing LPs of "Bawdy Ballads" and "Dirty Ditties". I'm sure you don't need me to explain what they were..... or do you?(ha-ha) |
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23skidoo 26th Jun 2015
| | Buck Buck is my favorite of all of them. And he had the character down right from the start. I should make sure to pick up a copy of Revenge on CD one of these days while I still can as I'm not overly confident that these albums will continue to be available due to the ongoing scenario. |
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Neil Forbes 26th Jun 2015
| | I have quite a few of the Bill Cosby LPs and when first heard, you'd be on the floor, sides aching with laughter as you listen to antics of playing Buck-Buck with the kids piling on top of each other but scattering when Fat Albert appears(hey, hey hey!) ....he ain't fallin' on us!
or scaring people - setting up a monster statue in the hall of an empty apartment block, taking out all the lights and replacing them with one green light above the statue's head, then enticing Fat Albert into the "trap", Cosby forgetting he was behind Fat Albert....! Yeah! Stories that would've made for great cartoons! 5 or 6 minutes long, just the right length! |
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23skidoo 26th Jun 2015
| | Cosby was directly involved in almost every aspect of the show, so any creative decisions made by Filmation, etc, were signed off by him. However it's also clear the network had some influence. Apparently (at least according to Wikipedia) when the series went into syndication Cosby was allowed to tell more serious stories, including one episode inspired by the Scared Straight documentary and another where the gang have to deal with the aftermath of a kid being shot dead. |
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Record Collector 26th Jun 2015
| | So that's why I couldn't follow the series |
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Neil Forbes 26th Jun 2015
| | Whether Filmation or Rankin/Bass, the producers completely missed the point of Fat Albert & The Cosby Kids. If the company(companies) had bothered to listen to any of Bill Cosby's albums, and the stories he told, they'd have had plenty of material on which to base their stories, instead of turning the characters into those moralising "goodie-goodies", as I said earlier. |
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Record Collector 26th Jun 2015
| | It was produced by filmation who produced mission magic and the Brady kids among other |
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Record Collector 26th Jun 2015
| | Watched this on hey hey it's Saturday in Adelaide back in the early 1980's (no relation to the program hosted by daryl somers) great memories three hours of cartoons sadly you can't get that on commercial television any more |
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Neil Forbes 26th Jun 2015
| | As I remembered the show it was produced by Rankin/Bass, a name NOT synonymous with quality animated features! The characters, as Cosby told their stories in his sketches(issued on many Warner, and later MCA LPs) had their exploits and antics, such as playing "Buck, Buck" or going home across the "9th Street Bridge" or later, "Fat Albert's Car". These stories weren't brought to the screen in these cartoons, instead the series made them out as moralising "goodie-goodies", completely at odds with the characters as told in Cosby's albums. I wish Warners were given the task of producing the cartoons, then we'd have the characters as Cosby himself described them! |
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