Hey kids (of all ages), it's Saturday Morning Cartoon time again!
Mickey Mouse (arguably). Bosko (definitely). Mammy Twoshoes (hilariously)... Classic cartoons were full of black caricatures and stereotypes. Of course, they also featured parodies of hillbillies, suburban whites, Asians, affluent whites, Indians (both the Geronimo and Gandhi types), etc... But, by the time Saturday Morning TV Cartoons were on the rise, the Stepin Fetchit type negro characters were NOT going to fly, so animation studios stayed far, far away from that sort of thing...
So far away, in fact, that someone looked-up circa 1970 and realized there were almost no black characters on Saturday Morning at all! So they started putting token blacks into the 'toons. But these characters had to be the opposite of the old stereotype. From Valerie in JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS well into the 1980s with Buckwheat on the animated LITTLE RASCALS, the colored characters had to be genius-level smart and generally perfect. (Despite the fact that the Buckwheat character was originally a nappy-headed pickaninny who comically mispronounced simple words in the classic live-action short films.)
One series that managed to get around this was FAT ALBERT. Since virtually all the characters on the show were black, and there were a bunch of them, they actually ran the spectrum... Some were bright, others morons. Some were forthright, others were asshats. Skinny, fat, bold, shy, ordinary, bizarre. Just like any other bunch of kids.
Following the lead of the ARCHIE SHOW and JOSIE, Fat Albert and his gang had their own band that did a musical interlude in each episode. Filmation was also planning to follow the lead of SCOOBY-DOO and others by having a semi-anthropomorphic mascot for the kids. They probably realized they had more than enough to animate with all the kids in the gang and dropped the mascot idea, but you can see the stupid duck in the credits!
FAT ALBERT had stamina for such a big dude! The show ran over a dozen years, with handfulls of new episodes being produced and added to the mix every so-often until the final year, when they cranked-out a huge batch for syndication. As was the developing trend with Filmation shows, there had to be some sort of moral or lesson with each installment. This show got a bit preachy as the years went-on, but they also started tackling darker topics.
FAT ALBERT was based on Bill Cosby's stand-up comedy. Cosby, in live action, hosted the show. He also voiced some characters and had a younger version of himself in the gang. The cartoon has been somewhat buried in recent years, as Cosby has been in trouble because various THOTs have come out of the woodwork to accuse him of drugging and molesting them decades ago. Surely this has nothing to do with the fact that Cosby had been a vocal critic of modern, Marxist "Black Culture" in the years before these accusations started flying.
From September 1972, here's the first episode of FAT ALBERT AND THE COSBY KIDS.
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