The Fat Cats Story

You remember Fat Cats. If you watched TV in the 1970s - you loved Fat Cats. Every Saturday night at 8:00 your childhood heroes - Mack Steele, Lauryn Fox, and Jimmy Royale - would battle dastardly Batman-style villains on the mean streets of New York City.

The Fat Cats became American icons with blazing gunfights, big cars, and a distinctive campy humor that set the tone for an era.

A devoted audience responded. Fat Cats rocketed up the charts, soon becoming the highest rated cop show in American television history.

Sure, Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, Beretta, and Kojak all got monster ratings - but none of them approached Fat Cat numbers.

Thirty years later, many people still don’t realize that Fat Cats was the inspiration for such seminal films as Shaft, Superfly, and Foxy Brown.

Why was the show such a smash hit? Simple - sex and violence. What seems tame by today’s standards was highly controversial back then.

The network took an enormous amount of heat, but initially stood behind Fat Cats, choosing to cash in on its huge success.

A firestorm of mounting pressure from censors and advertisers eventually forced the network to back down.

Shockingly, almost overnight, Fat Cats was gone, unceremoniously yanked off the air after 3 short seasons for “repeated censorship violations.”

Wild stories persist to this day in Hollywood circles that maverick executive-producers, Harry Zimmerman and Dick Tarlow, stormed out of the meeting when network honchos pulled the plug on their show.

The pair allegedly acted faster than studio security could, raced to the network film vault, and made off with the Fat Cats master prints.

And just like that, the only copies in existence were gone. Vanished. Never to be seen again. No reruns. No anniversary shows. No E! True Hollywood Stories.

The phenomenon that was Fat Cats disappeared into thin air.

But like all great underdog stories, this one refuses to die.