| Runtime: | 22 minutes |
| Director: | Hal Sutherland |
| Composer: | Ray Ellis |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Network: | CBS |
| Related: | The Archie Comedy Hour |
| Num Episodes: | 17 |
The Archie Show (also known as The Archies) is an American musical animated sitcom television series produced by Filmation for CBS. Based on the Archie Comics, created by Bob Montana in 1941, The Archie Show aired Saturday mornings on CBS from September 1968 to 1969. The show featured the main characters in the Archie series, including Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Reggie Mantle, Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge.[1]
In 1969, the show was expanded to an hour and retitled The Archie Comedy Hour, which included a half-hour featuring Sabrina the Teenage Witch.[2] In 1970, the show became Archie's Funhouse, and featured live-action segments. After three seasons, The Archie Show stopped airing on CBS in 1971.
Filmation continued to produce further Archie television series until 1978, including Archie's TV Funnies (1971–1973), The U.S. of Archie (1974–1976) and The New Archie and Sabrina Hour (1977–1978).[3]
A typical episode would include two eight-minute stories, a "Dance of the Week" segment, a three-minute musical segment, and a Jughead joke segment. The show was targeted to both kids and young teenagers.[4]
The main characters of the show are 17-year-old vocalist/rhythm guitarist Archie Andrews and his teen-age pals from Riverdale High School, including his best friend and food fiend drummer Jughead Jones; wise-cracking bassist Reggie Mantle; attractive, blonde, girl-next-door tomboy vocalist/lead guitarist/percussionist Betty Cooper; beautiful, spoiled-rich girl vocalist/keyboardist Veronica Lodge; and Jughead's English sheepdog Hot Dog.[5] On the show, the friends appeared as a bubblegum pop band featuring Archie on lead guitar. Other characters in the show included Mr. Weatherbee, Miss Grundy, Dilton Doiley, Moose Mason, Pop Tate, Mr. Lodge, and Coach Kleats.
In 1967, Irv Wilson, Filmation's agent at the time, approached John Goldwater about licensing his comics. Lou Schiemer, founder of Filmation, received a call from Wilson on having the rights to Archie Comics. He replied to his response, "What the hell is Archie? Is it something kids know?" Shortly, he flew out to meet John Goldwater and created a deal. The concept of the show was presented to CBS daytime programming executive, Fred Silverman, with several comic books. It was considered to be one of the cheapest and successful presentations Filmation has ever made. At the time, CBS immediately liked it due to an amount of cartoons, mostly Hanna-Barbera action cartoons, being protested by parent-run organizations, including Action for Children's Television (ACT), and it was bought. Filmation also immediately conceived an idea of making music an essential part of the show's concept.
In 1968, Norm Prescott called Don Kirshner to create music for The Archies. Kirshner happily accepted it, creating a music deal with the band.
Filmation took every aspect from the comics for the concept of the show. The main characters' tone was done for children to relate to the characters. Hot Dog was also immediately created for the show.
Most of the voice cast involved have worked on Filmation shows. The main voice cast included Dallas McKennon, John Erwin, Jane Webb, and Howard Morris. Don Messick was also part of the show, temporarily replacing Howard Morris for the episode "Beauty Is Only Fur Deep".
Filmation tried to find the voice cast for the 1940s radio show Archie Andrews, but was flopped. According to Lou Schiemer, it was thought to be John Erwin's first Filmation work he ever voiced.
The team of writers consisted of Bob Ogle, Chuck Menville, Len Janson, Jim Ryan, Bill Danch, and others. None of the writers involved were writers of the Archie Comics. The writing involved the concepts of dancing, singing, dating, high school, and youth problems for its appeal to young teenagers.
The franchise's most notable effort was the music element in the form of the animated band The Archies. The Archie Show was designed to emulate the live-action series The Monkees by including rock music into each episode. All of the music included in the show were not specific to the plot of the stories.
For the process of the songs, Filmation's staff told Kirshner what they wanted to work, what the attitude should be, and what they were writing on the stories. Kirshner would work on the dance of the weeks and songs, and deliver them as a whole to the studio.[6] Norm Prescott handled all of the music with Kirshner.
With vocals provided by Ron Dante and Toni Wine, the fictional group released a series of real-life albums and singles. Their most successful song is "Sugar, Sugar", which stood at the top of the pop charts for four weeks in 1969. "Sugar, Sugar" became the No. 1 song of 1969 on the Billboard charts, and as of 1969, it reportedly sold six million copies worldwide.[7] [8]
The Archie Show debuted its first episode on September 14, 1968, on CBS at the 10 a.m. (EST) timeslot, competing with other Saturday-morning cartoons, such as Filmation's own The Batman/Superman Hour and reruns of The Flintstones and Spider-Man. The show was a commercial success; it regularly had a 47 Nielsen rating in the 2-11 age group. It was the most successful Saturday-morning cartoon at the time.
Most of the episodes from all of the series produced by Filmation were syndicated in 1976 as The Archies (excluding material produced for The New Archie and Sabrina Hour, which did not debut until a year later). The music segments from The Archie Comedy Hour were missing in this syndication package, for unknown reasons.
The New Archie and Sabrina Hour was later repeated in syndication, and on The Family Channel in a half-hour format as The Archie and Sabrina Surprise Package; this is the version offered by Universal Television, the current rightsholder for most Filmation programs, including the Archies franchise; a previous rightsholder, Entertainment Rights, was acquired by Classic Media in 2009,[9] followed by DreamWorks Animation's purchase of Classic Media in 2012.[10] Currently, Universal Pictures owns the rights to most Filmation programs, including the Archies franchise, since its purchase in 2016.[11]
From 2010 until 2015, the show aired on Retro Television Network.
Hal Erickson, author of Television Cartoon Shows, An Illustrated Encyclopedia described The Archie Show as "not what one could call inspired." Erickson criticized the humor that was described as "executed in a fragmented fashion" and "made doubly obvious by the overuse of a canned laugh track."
The Archie Show utilized a laugh track, the first such example of the colloquially-titled Saturday morning cartoons.[12] Owing to the success of The Archie Show, most animated series would begin using laugh tracks until the early 1980s. Previous animated series that used laugh tracks, such as The Flintstones and The Jetsons, were broadcast during prime time with the target audience being adults.
Various VHS, Betamax, and laserdisc releases distributed by companies such as New Age Video, Inc. and Embassy Home Entertainment were released in several countries throughout the late '70s and '80s. Four volumes of The Archie Show were released in the early and mid '80s by Thorn EMI Video (later Thorn/EMI HBO Video in the release of its fourth volume) as part of its "Children's Maintee" line of animated shows. Each volume consists three full episodes with some of the other segments intact. All transfers were from unrestored 16mm masters.
Single-disc DVD compilations featuring four episodes each were released in 2004. Video transfers were NTSC-based with restored quality. There were four volumes in all.
On July 31, 2007, Genius Products released The Archie Show on DVD in Region 1 for the first time. The DVD-set included a packaged booklet and a special comic strip related to the Archies.[13]
On March 4, 2008, Genius Products, LLC released Archie's Funhouse on DVD in Region 1 for the first time.[14]
Genius Entertainment released the Sabrina The Teenage Witch segments from that season on DVD as part of their own set on April 29, 2008.[15]
| DVD name | Ep # | Release date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Archie Show: The Complete Series | 17 | July 31, 2007 | |
| Archie's Funhouse: The Complete Series | 16 | March 4, 2008 | |
| Sabrina the Teenage Witch: The Complete Animated Series | 31 | April 29, 2008 |
The show was broadcast in different formats and under different titles. Some material are believed to be completely lost or destroyed after Hallmark Entertainment bought Filmation's library in 1995.[16] [17]
The New Archie and Sabrina Hour was subsequently divided into The Bang-Shang Lalapalooza Show and Super Witch during its original network run. While the earlier Archie programs were broadcast by CBS, the last series was on NBC.
Hero High (1981) was planned to be part of The Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam! featuring Archie and the gang as superheroes; however, this series was altered at the last minute because Filmation's rights to the "Archie" characters had expired during production and was not renewed.[18]
The "individual" versions of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Groovie Goolies are currently offered by Universal.