Los Cos: The original 'Fat Albert' special from 1969 has resurfaced!

Fat Albert bursts onto the screen in 1969.

A Cosby album.

Long before his name became associated with the drugging and raping of women, comedian Bill Cosby (born 1937) was known as a purveyor of warm, relatable humor about the day-to-day foibles of mid-20th-century American life. Leaning heavily on anecdotes from his own experiences, he talked about such subjects as sports, driving, childhood, marriage, parenthood, etc. in that friendly, conversational cadence of his. During a time of tremendous racial strife in this country, Cosby's act transcended color lines and appealed to a broad spectrum of the public.

In the 1960s, Cosby emerged as one of the top stand-up comics in America, headlining at nightclubs and appearing frequently on talk shows and variety shows. He also released a series of well-received comedy albums, starting with Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow... Right! (1963). Meanwhile, his acting career took off with his groundbreaking dramatic role on I Spy (1965-1968). In short, Bill Cosby was big but nowhere near as big as he'd one day become. Ironically, his next major step forward came from looking backward.

In his act, Cosby frequently talked about his youth, growing up poor in North Philadelphia in the 1940s and '50s. He would regale his audiences with stories about his rambunctious childhood buddies, including Dumb Donald, Old Weird Harold, and the jubilant but massively overweight Fat Albert, the latter of whom was known for his catchphrase: "Hey, hey, hey!" Soon, thanks to these standup routines, several of which wound up immortalized on LPs, all of America was familiar with Bill Cosby's childhood.

Albert's first special.

After the success of CBS' A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), an animated Bill Cosby special looked like a sure thing. And so, on Wednesday, November 12, 1969, NBC aired a half-hour program called Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert. The network aired the show at least twice more, once in 1970 and again in 1971, but it essentially disappeared from the airwaves after that. Fat Albert and his cronies reemerged on a new animated show, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, on CBS in 1972 and ran until 1985. But the characters had been drastically redesigned by then and were barely recognizable as the kids in the 1969 NBC special. A Fat Albert movie followed in 2004, but it was based strictly on the CBS series and took no cues from the original special.

I grew up watching Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (later retitled The New Fat Albert Show) religiously but was totally unaware of the 1969 special until I read about it in Jeff Lenburg's invaluable The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons (1991). The book includes a plot summary of Hey, Hey, Hey and a picture of Albert himself, looking very different from the version I was used to. He's quite a bit fatter, has beady eyes, and wears a suit that's too small for him instead of his familiar orange sweater and jeans. 

I was very intrigued but soon learned that the special was nowhere to be found. It hadn't been released on DVD or VHS, and no one had uploaded it to the internet. Yet. Occasionally, brief clips of Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert would surface, generally no more than a few seconds at a time. Finally, in 2024, a low-quality bootleg of the complete special was uploaded, and curious viewers like myself could at least get a sense of what the program was like.

Bill, Harold, and Russell.

And now, in 2026, a complete 1970 airing of the special, including commercials, has emerged. Regardless of how our feelings toward Mr. Cosby have changed in recent years, Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert is still something worth watching in 2026, if only to see the rather crude beginnings of a soon-to-be-iconic cartoon character. Supposedly, the reason that the special disappeared from circulation is that Bill Cosby himself was dissatisfied with it, deeming the animation too rough. But does the special deserve to be swept under the rug?

Viewers weaned on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids will immediately see how Hey, Hey, Hey is different from the show they know. Most obviously, the 1969 special combines animated characters (and occasional animated props) with tinted live-action backgrounds. While animated adolescents cavort and caper in the foreground, real footage of Philadelphia fills the background. During a climactic football game, we even see stock footage of a genuine NFL game. When the characters attend a showing of The Wolf Man (1941), we see clips from the actual movie featuring actor Lon Chaney, Jr.! Theoretically, all this should ground the show in reality; in practice, it tends to be disorienting, even surreal or dreamlike. Lou Scheimer, who produced the Fat Albert TV series, accurately described the special as "a strange-looking thing."

The character designs are also drastically different from the familiar CBS series. They are much sloppier and sketchier, and the characters tend to expand and contract wildly from one moment to the next with no real consistency. This informality extends to the voice acting, Here is where the influence of A Charlie Brown Christmas becomes obvious. That special stood out from other cartoons by having naturalistic voice acting by real children rather than overtrained adults pretending to be kids. On Hey, Hey, Hey, Bill Cosby plays a lot of the roles, including Fat Albert, but he is surrounded by a cast of young non-professionals who give the special a loose, almost improvised feel.

Cosby and his team may have also taken some inspiration from A Charlie Brown Christmas when it came time to score Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert. The Charlie Brown cartoon features an unforgettable, indelible jazz score by Vince Guaraldi. Since Bill Cosby is a known jazz devotee, it's only natural that his first animated project should also have a lively jazz score. In this case, it's by the legendary multi-instrumentalist Herbie Hancock (born 1940). Herbie's 1969 album Fat Albert Rotunda features music from the special. While Guaraldi's score is gentle, nostalgic, and bittersweet, Hancock's Fat Albert music is exuberant and hyper-confident, just as its main character usually is.

It also does not surprise me to learn that this special was created under rather chaotic conditions. Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert is one of the few products of the Campbell-Silver-Cosby Corporation, a company Bill founded in 1967 with music executives Bruce Post Campbell and Ron Silver. Besides this special, the company released an animated short, The Door (1968), a feature film called The Picasso Summer (1969), and a number of singles and albums, including one by Deep Purple. The company folded in 1970.

For this project, Cosby recruited animator Ken Mundie (1925-2023), whose credits at the time were limited to a few animated shorts (including The Door) and some movie title sequences. Mundie and his animators labored frantically on the special, working 18-hour shifts for six months in order to get it on the air by November 1969. The special very much looks like the work of people who were scrambling against a deadline. That's not all bad; there's an urgency to Hey, Hey, Hey rarely seen in animation.

Cosby collaborator Weinberger.

Content-wise, Hey, Hey, Hey draws heavily on routines from previous Bill Cosby albums, including Wonderfulness (1966), Revenge (1967) and I Started Out as a Child (1964). If you owned those albums, you could probably have guessed most of what happens in this special. To turn this material into a half-hour story, Cosby recruited two prominent screenwriters: Jack Mendelsohn (1926-2017) and Ed. Weinberger (born 1937). 

Mendelsohn was writing for Laugh-In around the time of this special and was also one of the writers of Yellow Submarine (1968). But his resume is vast, stretching from the early 1960s to the early 2000s and encompassing sitcoms, variety shows, and many animated series. As for Weinberger, he was on his way to a spectacular sitcom career of his own (among other feats, he co-created Taxi), but many of his early credits are on Cosby's various TV projects. Cosby and Weinberger would reunite in the '80s for The Cosby Show.

Like A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first Fat Albert special is not especially plot-heavy. Not much "happens," per se, in this half hour. When we are young, however, seemingly trivial events can have a major impact on our lives and our psyches. Much of Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert is episodic, merely illustrating the funny little stories from Cosby's albums. Bill's mother forces him to take care of his bothersome little brother, Russell. The brothers complain about the lumpy food they are forced to eat at breakfast. Bill and his friend Old Weird Harold (Solomon Young) attend a horror movie triple feature and manage to scare themselves nearly to death. And Bill and his neighborhood pals generally clown around and tease each other in the street. Hey, Hey, Hey does a good job of capturing the texture of their mundane daily lives.

The main plot of the special—the equivalent of Charlie Brown's Christmas pageant—involves a rivalry between Bill's gang and another group of tough Philly kids, the glowering Green Street Terrors. Cosby and his associates are scheduled to play the Terrors in a tackle football game, and they figure that their star player, Fat Albert, will make them unbeatable due to his sheer size. At first, Albert is delighted by the prospect of participating in the game: "Hey, hey, hey! Love to play tackle!" 

But complications emerge, naturally. Albert overhears Bill and Harold make snide remarks about his weight and, saddened, decides not to participate in the game. Bill then has to apologize to his friend, and he does so in the convincingly clumsy, roundabout way that a kid might approach such a task. Does Fat Albert change his mind and save the day at the last minute? Have you seen a TV show before? It's possible that Albert's boisterous, thundering personality is merely a mask for his insecurity, but I can't say this theme is well-developed in the special.

Both A Charlie Brown Christmas and Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert can be seen as stories about the casual cruelty of children. In both specials, the title character is deeply hurt by unkind remarks from his peers and decides to withdraw from some major public event. But the Charlie Brown special is definitely told from Charlie's point of view. We know how he thinks and feels because we've spent a lot of time getting to know him. But Fat Albert is kind of mysterious, even in his own special. Hey, Hey, Hey is told from Bill's perspective; Albert is more of a supporting presence in his life. We don't really get to know him well as a person, so his third-act change of heart seems to come from nowhere. Albert forgives Bill because the script requires him to.

The original Fat Albert special is certainly the product of another era. A great deal has changed since 1969. Even though Bill Cosby never actually appears onscreen during this half-hour, many viewers will be unable to sit through it without thinking of his crimes. And that's fair. However, for those who can (temporarily) set their feelings about the man aside, Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert is well worth a half-hour of your time. I'm glad it has finally been made available in its original form.

P.S. We cannot ignore the commercials that run during the program. Mattel was the special's major sponsor, so we get spots for Hot Wheels, Chatty Cathy, and Barbie (the latter featuring Maureen McCormick of The Brady Bunch). But we also get commercials for forgotten products like Wizzers and Talking Storybooks. Maybe even more than the special itself, these commercials take us back to 1969.