Welcome Back Kotter: Two of the Four Sweathogs Are Left

The show was originally just called Kotter. Alan Sacks wanted a theme in the style of the Lovin' Spoonful, went to John Sebastian, and Sebastian found that nothing in the English language rhymes with Kotter except otter - so he wrote a song about going home instead, and the producers renamed the entire series after it. In May 1976 that song was the number one record in America. Fifty-one years after the Sweathogs first sat down in the back row, this video follows all nine of them, year by year, from 1975 to today. John Travolta was never meant to be the star. He was one of four boys with a comb and a swagger, and within a season the audience had rebuilt the show around him. He is 72. What almost nobody watching in 1977 knew was that Diana Hyland, the woman he loved, had died in his arms at 41 while he was shooting Saturday Night Fever. Gabe Kaplan wrote the series out of his own remedial class at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn. He is 81, and he left acting to become a professional poker player with roughly two million dollars in recorded live tournament earnings. Ron Palillo built the Horshack laugh out of the sound of a man crying. He spent his last twenty years teaching drama, and died of a heart attack on 14 August 2012, aged 63 - seven months after Robert Hegyes, his Sweathog classmate, died the same way at 60. Marcia Strassman had a hit single at nineteen that stopped at number 105, played the only sane adult in the building for 94 episodes, and fought advanced breast cancer for seven and a half years before she died in October 2014, aged 66. John Sylvester White, the vice principal nobody liked, was the first of this cast to go - pancreatic cancer in Waikiki in 1988. Debralee Scott, the only Sweathog who was not a boy, died in her sleep in 2005, three days after her 52nd birthday. And two of them left the business entirely on their own terms. Stephen Shortridge, who had the worst job in television - replacing Travolta - quit acting in the late 1980s to paint, and has now been a working impressionist for longer than he was ever an actor. Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who made Cooley High the same year the sitcom premiered, is 73 and has never stopped working at all. DISCLAIMER The voice in this video is AI-generated. Every age, date and figure here was checked against published sources in September 2026 and is accurate as of that month.