Where Saturday Night Live offered audiences a chance to hang out with the Manhattan cool kids, Welcome Back, Kotter—which debuted the same year—afforded them a lively half-hour with four of Brooklyn's most loveable troublemakers. Both shows quickly became iconic, catchphrase-driven pop-culture phenomena, thriving on young, appealing ensembles that played off each other with the relaxed ease of a veteran jazz quartet. Kotter wasn't exactly gritty, but it was refreshingly non-slick. The schoolroom set was cheap and drab, but that just made it look like a real rundown public high school ruled by apathy and inertia. The show's big-hearted hoodlums were nevertheless cleaned up for mainstream consumption; as someone wryly comments on the DVD documentary, they were types who'd steal your television but always bring it back. And though they spent much of the show insulting each other, the catchphrase "Up your nose with a rubber hose!" was about as vicious as it got. Along with an appealing dose of pre-Giuliani New York atmosphere, Kotter sold an appealing high-school fantasy world where even the resident geek was lovingly embraced as one of the guys, and the teacher was just a big kid prone to playing the dozens.