Before they were the Fat Boys, they were just three chubby teenagers from the same Brooklyn block. In 1983, they won a rap contest at Radio City Music Hall and walked away with a recording contract… and an Atari 2600.
Within a year, Kurtis Blow was producing their debut album using the same drum programmers behind Run-DMC, and Darren “Buff Love” Robinson’s beatboxing was helping pioneer a technique that would directly influence Doug E. Fresh and Biz Markie. They made four gold records.
They were part of hip-hop’s foundation, but their manager, a Swiss-born promoter named Charlie Stettler, had plans for the brand.
He renamed them, trademarked the name, and designed their entire public identity around their size. He encouraged the teens to gain weight on tour and leaned heavily into food gags, measuring tape photo ops, and physical comedy. He even brokered Swatch commercials that got them onto MTV before the network was even programming hip-hop, and leveraged their likability into a deal with Warner Bros.
Stettler understood the importance of visibility better than almost anyone in early rap, but the visibility he engineered cost the Fat Boys their cred.
Which is how three legitimately pioneering MCs from Brooklyn ended up starring in a PG-rated slapstick comedy with Ralph Bellamy.
Directed by Michael Schultz, who’d previously put them in Krush Groove alongside Run-DMC and LL Cool J where they performed as themselves in context, Disorderlies strips away almost everything that made them rap royalty. Here, they play bumbling orderlies hired by a scheming nephew to accidentally kill his wealthy uncle in a Palm Beach mansion.
It’s dumb fun, and the Fat Boys are genuinely likable in it. But one of its biggest legacies, is that the group met Brian Wilson, Bruce Johnston and Mike Love on the set, and that led directly to their cover of “Wipeout” with the Beach Boys, their biggest chart hit and the moment they crossed from pop-rap into pure novelty territory. One album later came “The Twist” with Chubby Checker. In the space of four years, they’d gone from rap pioneers to covering 60s hits for high school dances.
After their sixth album in 1989, the Fat Boys dissolved their partnership with Stettler and they went separate ways. Sadly, Buffy Robinson died of a heart attack in 1995, at 28, and Markie Dee died in 2021, the day before his 53rd birthday.
Kool Rock-Ski, the last surviving member, still insists on their place in hip-hop history. And he’s right. They opened a lot of doors, but hip-hop culture has largely filed them as a novelty act, and Disorderlies is a big reason why.
-Pop
Disorderlies arrived on Home Video this week in 1988, after an August 14th, 1987 theatrical release.