The Weird Harold Special (found animated "Fat Albert" special; 1973)

From The Lost Media Wiki
Revision as of 02:08, 19 April 2016 by Gojirob (talk | contribs) (Created page; I found a possible still from this special.)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

The Weird Harold Special was an animated one-shot broadcast by NBC Television at 7:30 PM on May 4, 1973. For all intents and purposes, it was simply an episode of the already-popular Fat Albert & The Cosby Kids (which premiered in September of 1972), and featured the animation and voices of those characters. However, the main show was broadcast on CBS on Saturday Mornings. One possibility was that NBC, which had broadcast a prior animated Fat Albert piece 'Hey, Hey, Hey It's Fat Albert!', had rights to this plot and episode, or that it was a lost proto-pilot for the regular series.

The episode itself also followed a similar motif to the regular series. In it, he and Fat Albert plan a potentially dangerous go-cart race (said carts made in their junkyard hangout) down treacherous Deadman's Hill. Promptly hitting a police squad car after an out-of-control slapstick race, the kids find themselves arrested and in trouble with their parents.

While not listed with the regular Fat Albert episodes, this sequence of events seems to have been repackaged as an episode when the series hit syndication. Whether it could also be released on DVD is not known. In any event, these events were never again broadcast as The Weird Harold Special. Oddly, it is scenes from this episode that were included on the popular Fat Albert lunchbox available during the show's heyday.