December 14, 1977: "Saturday Night Fever" Premieres

John Travolta as Tony Manero

December 14, 1977: Saturday Night Fever premieres, launching the disco phenomenon to new heights. John Travolta, already known for playing Vinnie Barbarino, one of the "Sweathogs" on the Brooklyn-set ABC sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, sticks with type: He plays Tony Manero, a Brooklyn kid who works at a paint store, and forgets his troubles by dressing up and dancing at a discotheque.

The story was based on "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," a mostly fictional article by music writer Nik Cohn, published in New York magazine in June 1976. By that point, disco music had already been a phenomenon for about a year, boosted by such hit songs as "The Hustle" by Van McCoy.

Saturday Night Fever was never going to become the biggest film released in 1977 -- Star Wars already had that wrapped up -- but it became the biggest moneymaking film in calendar year 1978. People were attracted to the music, to the clothes, and to Travolta himself.

The film's soundtrack became, until Michael Jackson's Thriller came along, the biggest-selling album in history. It was dominated by The Bee Gees, brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb -- especially Barry, their main songwriter and lead singer. The hopped-up "Stayin' Alive" became the disco song, although "Night Fever" stayed atop the charts longer. Barry noted that The Bay City Rollers had already hit Number 1 with a song titled "Saturday Night," so he didn't want to write a song with that title. Both of those songs hit Number 1. So did the ballad "How Deep Is Your Love." So did "If I Can't Have You," which the brothers wrote for Yvonne Elliman.

"More Than a Woman" also hit the Top 5 for The Bee Gees. Disco group Tavares had also had a hit with the song, and their version was also included on the soundtrack. 

Also included were some established hits: "Jive Talkin'," which hit Number 1 for The Bee Gees in 1975; "You Should Be Dancing," which hit Number 1 for the Bee Gees in 1976; "A Fifth of Beethoven," Walter Murphy's disco reworking of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Symphony No. 5," which also hit Number 1 in 1976; The Trammps' "Disco Inferno," which also hit Number 1 in 1976; and "Boogie Shoes," a recent hit for KC and the Sunshine Band.

One major advantage that disco had was that it was inclusive. It was open to men and women, whites and blacks, Anglos and Latinos, straights and gays. All you had to do was be able to fool someone into thinking you were good-looking and able to dance. And, with all the booze and cocaine flying around in the discos, that wasn't that hard.

And at least going out to discos meant that you had to dress up. Unless you were going to a gay disco, in which case you would wear hardly anything. Not that I would know...

By the end of 1978, people were getting sick of disco. Enough was enough. On July 12, 1979, the Chicago White Sox teamed up with local disc jockey Steve Dahl to host "Disco Demolition Night": Between games of a doubleheader, disco records would be blown up on the field. But fans charged the field, chanting, "Disco sucks!" and rendered the field unplayable. With the White Sox having already lost the 1st game to the Detroit Tigers, the umpires forfeited the 2nd game as well.

In 1980, the spoof film Airplane! had pilot Ted Striker, played by Robert Hays, parody Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. As the stricken plane he pilots makes its final approach to the airport, it flies low enough to tear off the antenna of a radio station whose disc jockey had just proudly said his station was "where disco will never die!"

In 1983, Travolta starred in a sequel, titled Staying Alive, in which Tony Manero began to make it as a professional dancer, but the film was a flop. The timing was doubly bad: Not only had disco been pushed out by New Wave and synth-pop, but Flashdance had been released 3 months earlier, so Staying Alive was seen as a pale copy of not one film, but two. It is the oldest film to have a zero percent rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes, compared to the 82 percent of Saturday Night Fever. (Flashdance is only at 35 percent, as it, too, was seen as an SNF copy, with star Jennifer Beals being attractive enough to almost save it.)

UPDATE: In 2023, Travolta parodied his role by playing Santa Claus in a commercial for Capital One bank, copying some of the scenes from the movie, with Donna Pescow also appearing in it.

And it took me until 2024 to think of this, but the 1970s were Schrödinger's Decade. There was too much overwrought music, including disco; and, at the same time, not enough of it.

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December 14, 1977 was a Wednesday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. There were 8 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Indiana Pacers, 101-98 at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis.

* The New Jersey Nets beat the Golden State Warriors, 108-104 at the Rutgers Athletic Center (now the Jersey Mike's Arena) in Piscataway, New Jersey. Rick Barry, who had played for the Nets in their ABA days on Long Island, scored 37 points in defeat for the Warriors.

* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 108-99 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. Julius "Dr. J" Erving scored 31 in defeat.

* The Seattle SuperSonics beat the Detroit Pistons, 102-92 at Cobo Hall (now Huntington Place) in Detroit. Gus Williams scored 37 points.

* The Kansas City Kings beat the Denver Nuggets, 124-98 at the Kemper Arena (now the Hy-Vee Arena) in Kansas City.

* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Houston Rockets, 113-91 at The Summit in Houston. (The arena has since been converted into the Central Campus of the Lakewood Church, Dr. Joel Osteen's "megachurch.")

* The San Antonio Spurs beat the Chicago Bulls, 116-108 at the HemisFair Arena in San Antonio.

* And the Phoenix Suns beat the Buffalo Braves, 113-103 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. Billy Knight score 36 in defeat for the Braves, who became the San Diego Clippers the next season, and the Los Angeles Clippers in 1984.

There were 4 games in the NHL:

* In an "Original Six" matchup, the New York Rangers and the Chicago Black Hawks played to a tie, 2-2 at the Chicago Stadium.

* The New York Islanders lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-2 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Montreal Canadiens, 3-2 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

* And the St. Louis Blues beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 3-2 at the Checkerdome, as the St. Louis Arena was then known.

And there were 3 games in the World Hockey Association. This was an experimental season in which the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia each sent a touring team to be a league member:

* The New England Whalers beat the Soviet team, 7-2 at the Hartford Civic Center (now the PeoplesBank Arena).

* The Cincinnati Stingers beat the Indianapolis Racers, 3-1 at the Riverfront Coliseum (now the Heritage Bank Center) in Cincinnati.

* And the Edmonton Oilers beat the Czechoslovakia team, 6-1 at the Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton. (This was a year before the debut of Wayne Gretzky, so he didn't score any of those goals.)

October 14, 1994: "Pulp Fiction" Premieres

October 14, 1994: A big day for movie premieres. Pulp Fiction premieres. It has a sports connection, with Bruce Willis playing a boxer. Willis' character ends up killing John Travolta's -- but not in the ring. Willis and Travolta both made big comebacks in this Quentin Tarantino film. But both have habits of following up big comebacks with laughably bad films. The film also raises Samuel L. Jackson to superstar status.

Someone made the point that Willis, the 1988 action star, killing Travolta, the 1977 blockbuster star, was a metaphor for the action films of the 1980s ending the "New Hollywood" era that began, essentially, with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and ending with Martin Scorcese's Raging Bull in 1980.

In a 2014 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, rapper Michael "Wax" Jones played Tarantino. It became a "battle royale" of film directors, with "Nice" Peter Shukoff playing Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay, while "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Alfred Hitchcock, and rapper Ruggles Outbound played Stanley Kubrick.

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Hoop Dreams premieres. It is a documentary directed by Steve James, about two boys in Chicago who love basketball, William Gates and Arthur Agee. They struggled through their crime-ridden neighborhood and their development as high school players.

After the documentary, Gates went to Marquette University, played there for 4 seasons, and went undrafted. He became a minister. Arthur Agee went to Arkansas State University, also went undrafted, and played a season for the minor-league Winnipeg Cyclones. He went into media, and he and Gates reunited to start a podcast in 2021.

And Exit to Eden premieres, based very loosely on the novel by Anne Rice, which was not a comedy. But when you've got Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O'Donnell playing cops, what are you going to do?

There are 2 great lines in this film about a BDSM resort island. Aykroyd yells to O'Donnell, "How can we be the only people on this island without handcuffs?" And O'Donnell is faced by a shirtless, very chiseled man, who asks her, "How can I fulfill your fantasy?" She says, "Go paint my house."

She was a lot thinner then.

That's all that's worth it from this movie. There, I just saved you 1 hour, 56 minutes, 2 dollars and 99 cents.

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October 14, 1994 was a Friday. Jared Goff, the quarterback who led the Los Angeles Rams to (but not to win) Super Bowl LIII, was born.

Football was in midweek. Baseball's postseason was canceled due to the Strike of '94. The NHL was in lockout. And the NBA season hadn't started yet. So there were no scores on this historic day. 

September 9, 1975: “Welcome Back, Kotter” Premieres

Left to right: John Travolta, Ron Palillo,

Gabe Kaplan, Robert Hegyes, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs

September 9, 1975: Welcome Back, Kotter premieres on ABC. It was supposed to be titled just Kotter, but when executives heard former Lovin' Spoonful leader John Sebastian's theme song, "Welcome Back," they changed it.

Teacher turned standup comic Gabe Kaplan starred, based on his own experience at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn. (This may make him the first modern standup comic to get a sitcom based on his act.) While the real school was shown in the opening credits, it was named James Buchanan High School on the show. The same school would stand in for Millard Fillmore High School on the 1980s ABC sitcom Head of the Class. It's been suggested that the show was the first thing that made Brooklynites feel good about their home Borough since the Dodgers left a generation earlier.

(Although many NYC high schools are named for Presidents, from Washington to Kennedy, Fillmore and Buchanan are not so honored in real life. My grandmother went to John Adams in Queens, my grandfather to Theodore Roosevelt in The Bronx.)

Kaplan had been a member of a gang called the Sweathogs. So his character, Gabe Kotter, had been one as well. By the time Kotter got back to Buchanan as a teacher, the gang still existed, passed down to new kids as the older ones grew out. The ones he had to teach:

* Vinnie Barbarino, played by John Travolta. A dimwitted womanizer.

* Freddie "Boom-Boom" Washington, played by Lawrence Hilton Jacobs. (He was sometimes credited with his surname hyphenated: "Hilton-Jacobs.") A smooth-talking basketball freak.

* Juan Epstein -- in full, Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein -- played by Robert Hegyes. Half-Jewish, half-Puerto Rican, with a tremendous Afro -- or, like Kaplan himself, a "Jewfro."

* Arnold Horshack, played by Ron Palillo. The closest thing the Sweathogs had to a nerd. He had a high, nasal voice, and an obnoxious laugh that threatened to make him the show's breakout character, except that Travolta became a heartthrob.

As has usually been the case on TV shows set in high schools, the actors playing the students were way too old. Palillo was 26, although his high voice, 5-foot-7 height, and playing the character as very immature made him seem younger than that. Hegyes was 24, and while he was also 5-foot-7, he had a grownup face, so Epstein may have been held back a grade once or twice. Hilton Jacobs was 22, and Travolta was 21, and both of them were 6-foot-2. Kaplan was only 30, but the mustache made him look older.

There was never more than one female Sweathog at a time. Debralee Scott (22 at the time) played Rosalie "Hotsie" Totsie. After 1 season, she was cast as Cathy Shumway on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and Rosalie was written out. In came Helaine Lembeck (also 22 when she joined the show, daughter of Harvey and sister of Michael) as Judy Borden. Although brilliant, she becomes a Sweathog by tutoring Barbarino -- and then dating him.

Kotter realized the Sweathogs weren't dumb (except for Barbarino), they just needed to be reached. One other person who thought they could be reached was another teacher, Julie (Marcia Strassman, only 27 when the show began), whom Kotter romances and marries. One person who didn't think could be reached was the vice-principal, Michael Woodman, played by John Sylvester White.

The show had several running gags. Horshack's laugh was one. His raising his hand to answer a question, and trying to attract attention by going, "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!" was another. Another was Epstein tending to miss class, and come back the next day with a note: "Dear Mr. Kotter, please excuse Juan from class. Signed, Epstein's mother." Another was Gabe opening the show by telling Julie a B.S. story about one of his uncles or cousins. Another was Julie's tuna casserole: The one thing that Gabe and all the Sweathogs could agree on was that it was awful.

The New York accents of Barbarino and Horshack made the teacher's name "Mistah Kottah!" Washington called him "Mister Kot-tair!" as if it was French. While Kaplan was actually from Brooklyn; Hilton Jacobs was from Harlem; Travolta grew up in the nearby suburb of Englewood, New Jersey; Hegyes from another Jersey suburb, Metuchen; and Palillo from a suburb on the other side of the City, Cheshire, Connecticut;

But the show's catchphrase was a censor job. Mellow Rolls were a marshmallow-based candy, and, in real life, Kaplan's Sweathogs had a rhyming insult: "Up your hole with a Mellow Roll." The producers wanted a catchphrase, but couldn't use that in a family sitcom in 1975. So it was changed to "Up your nose with a rubber hose!" On occasion, there would also be "In your ear with a can of beer."

The series lasted 4 years, by which point Travolta had starred in Saturday Night Fever and the film version of Grease, and hardly appeared in the 4th season. And with the film Animal House having inspired failed sitcoms on all 3 major networks, the idea of "The Sweathogs Go to College" was probably shot down in at a network meeting.

With his white hair, John Sylvester White always looked a lot older than he was. When he died in 1988, he was only 68 years old. Sadly, Scott died from alcoholism in 2005, at 52; while Hegyes and Palillo both died from heart attacks in 2012, at the ages of 60 and 63, respectively. Strassman died in 2014, at 66, after a long battle with cancer.

As of September 9, 2022, Gabe Kaplan is 77, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs is 69, and John Travolta is 68; and all 3 are still acting. Helaine Lembeck is 70, and, like her brother, has mainly shifted to producing and directing.

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September 9, 1975 was a Tuesday. Also premiering on this day, on CBS, was The Bobby Vinton Show. CBS had previously brought 1960s stars back to host a variety show with Sonny & Cher, so Vinton's show, which actually debuted on Canada's CTV network (and taped in Toronto), seemed like a natural.

The series often satirized Vinton's Polish heritage, and its theme song was an oompah band rendition of his 1974 song "My Melody of Love," with Vinton also ended each episode by performing the song himself. My father, who was of Polish heritage, loved it. Vinton is still alive, at age 87, but retired from performing in 2015, after a serious case of shingles.

Singer Michael Bublé was born on this day. And these Major League Baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 9-6 at Shea Stadium. This would be the Bronx Bombers' last month in Queens, groundsharing with the Mets while the original Yankee Stadium was being renovated. George "Doc" Medich started and won. Chris Chambliss went 5-for-5 with 3 RBIs.

* The New York Mets lost to the Montreal Expos, 2-1 at Jarry Park in Montreal. Mike Jorgensen doubled Jim Dwyer home with the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning. José Morales went 4-for-4, including a home run.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-2 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Steve Carlton won it -- it was "Win Day." Mike Schmidt and Ollie Brown hit home runs for the Phils.

* The Atlanta Braves beat the Houston Astros, 4-1 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-5 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Andre Thornton and Joe Wallis hit home runs for the Cubbies. For the Buccos, Dave Parker hit a home run, and Willie Stargell went 2-for-4 with an RBI.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Red Sox, 3-2 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Alan Ashbury singled George Hendrick home with the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning. Winning pitcher Rick Waits and losing pitcher Bill Lee both went the distance. Indians player-manager Frank Robinson did not put himself into the game. Carl Yastrzemski went 1-for-4.

* The California Angels beat the Chicago White Sox, 5-4 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 9-1 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Neither the Orioles' Brooks Robinson nor the Brewers' Hank Aaron or Robin Yount played.

* The Texas Rangers swept a doubleheader from the Minnesota Twins, 3-0 and 4-2 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Jim Umbarger pitched a 4-hit shutout in the opener. Rod Carew went 0-for-2 before getting hurt, and missed the nightcap.

* The San Diego Padres beat the Cincinnati Reds, 11-2 at San Diego Stadium (later renamed Jack Murphy Stadium and Qualcomm Stadium). Willie McCovey, who never looked right in a Padre uniform, hit a home run. Dave Winfield went 1-for-3 with a walk and an RBI. Rich Folkers allowed the Reds only 3 hits: A single and a double by  Dave Concepción, and a home run by Johnny Bench.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat their arch-rivals, the San Francisco Giants, 8-3 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

* And the Oakland Athletics beat the Kansas City Royals, 2-1 at the Oakland Coliseum. Bill North singled Bert Campaneris home with the winning run in the bottom of the 14th inning. Reggie Jackson went 1-for-4 with a walk. George Brett went 0-for-6.

The A's were about to win their 5th straight American League Western Division title. The next season, with A's owner Charlie Finley having broken up his dynasty, the Royals, who replaced the A's in Kansas City, began a streak of 3 straight, 4 in 5 years, and 6 in 10.