"Kotter" back with book

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 12th, 2007

The Seattle Times’ Mark Rahner does the interview with Gabe Kaplan that we wanted to do back in 2003.

Kaplan is flogging his book, “Kotter’s Back — E-mails from a Faded Celebrity to a Bewildered World,” and he seems to be giving quite honest and quite detailed answers.

…So I said, “Look, let’s have Kotter get a job at a junior college and then the first day look who shows up. And we have the show move on and we try. It might not work but at least we take a shot at it.” And they were so scared of it not working and they said, “No, no, we can still do it.” And I said basically, “Look, I can’t be a major part of this anymore. It’s starting to look really strange.” And they said, “Well, that’s the way we’re going to go.” So I was only on a few episodes of the fourth year and John Travolta was only a few episodes of the fourth year, so the show sort of was like Kotter in the Twilight Zone.

The premise for the book is simple: Kotter wrote a series of emails to various folks, eliciting bizarre and humorous reactions. “Checking my inbox in the morning was an adventure, just seeing how people reacted to me. I would never write these e-mails now. It was just something I got into for that period of like a year where I enjoyed doing it.”

We wonder if we’re in the book. We received an email from him in April of 2005 in which he urged us to run a retraction of a story that we ran on a matter wholly unrelated to him. In the email, he gently chastised us, said the posting was beneath us and urged us to take back the story. At the time, it didn’t make sense. It does now!

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