Hey, hey, hey, it's 'Fat Albert' on DVD

One of my most vivid childhood experiences is tied inextricably to the kids' cartoon

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids

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It was the first show my family sat down to watch when my dad finally, finally!, bought a color TV set. It was a hit in America, where it premiered in September 1972 as part of CBS's Saturday morning cartoon lineup.

It also was a hit half a world away in my native Iran, where my two brothers and I watched religiously as Fat Albert and his gang - seven very distinct kids and one busybody duck named Cluck - had unforgettable adventures in their North Philadelphia neighborhood.

New generations can watch the series with Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: The Complete Series, a 15-disc boxed set out Tuesday from Shout! Factory that features all 110 epiodes and includes a new, 40-minute making-of documentary featuring Cosby. (DVD information: www.shoutfactory.com/.)

Fat Albert was an indelible experience, and I challenge anyone growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s who says they can't remember the show's opening tune.

"Hey, hey, hey. It's Fat Albert," our hero said as he launched into verse with "And I'm gonna sing a song for you./ And this is gonna show you a thing or two./ You'll have some fun now. With me and the gang."

A few beats later, a live-action shot of show creator and producer Bill Cosby breaks in. "This is Bill Cosby coming out with music and fun," he said. "If you're not careful, you may learn something before it's done!"

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids ran on-and-off under slightly different titles in three distinct periods, from 1972 to 1976 and 1979 to 1981 on CBS, and in syndication from 1984 to 1985.

Running at just under 20 minutes, each episode was bookended by a live-action sequence of Cosby on a faux-junkyard set dispensing the week's ethical lesson on such topics as the toxic nature of lying and the virtue of making friends across ethnic and religious lines.

Fat Albert, who was one of the three series regulars voiced by Cosby, was based on Cosby's real-life childhood friend "Fat" Albert Robertson, who helped the funnyman be true to himself as he was growing up in the inner city.

Cosby famously drew on his childhood in his stand-up act and comedy albums in the mid-'60s, including the 1964 LP I Started Out as a Child, which had Cosby experiment with different characters. He made Fat Albert a household name in his hit 1967 album Revenge, and brought the character's stand-up run to a close in 1973's Fat Albert.

Cosby first took the character to TV in 1969 with a prime-time special on NBC that introduced its live action-animated mix. According to television industry lore, NBC, and later ABC, turned down Cosby's pitch to use Fat Albert as a weekly cartoon because it was too educational.

Cosby, who had joined the cast of PBS's educational kids' show The Electric Company that same year, wasn't about to compromise on his vision and took the show to CBS. Cosby was serious about the show's educational element. In 1976, he earned a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts with the dissertation An Integration of the Visual Media Via "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" Into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning.

Now, that's a mouthful.

Viewers today will be struck by two elements in the show: its depiction of poverty and of hard-hitting moral issues.

Like Sanford and Son, also set in a junkyard, and All in the Family, Fat Albert showed, without apology, life in a poor, working-class community. The next three decades would see the working poor all but wiped off American TV.

Cosby's series was targeted for grade-school and lower-middle-grade-school kids, but didn't shy away from incendiary issues such as the white-supremacist movement, gangs, gun violence, and drugs.

Such topics were approached with the audience's age in mind, but they were never ignored as they are in the escapist fare that now passes for kids' programming on network TV.

And let's not forget the jokes. Personal favorites include "You're so short, when you sit on the floor your legs dangle," and "You're like school on Sunday . . . no class."

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids is rich material. A little dated, perhaps, but as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.