The Archie Show


The Archie Show is an American musical 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 August 1969. The show featured the main characters in the Archie series, including Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle and Jughead Jones.
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. In 1970, the show became Archie's Funhouse, and featured live-action segments.
Filmation continued to produce further Archie television series until 1978, including Archie's TV Funnies, The U.S. of Archie and The New Archie and Sabrina Hour.

Overview

The show revolves around 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, beautiful, spoiled-rich girl vocalist/keyboardist Veronica Lodge, and attractive, blonde, girl-next-door tomboy vocalist/lead guitarist/percussionist Betty Cooper. On the show, the friends appeared as a bubblegum pop band featuring Archie on lead guitar. The Archies had a real-life #1 hit single in 1969 with their song, "Sugar, Sugar", written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim.
The Archie Show utilized a laugh track, the first such example of the colloquially-titled Saturday morning cartoons. 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.
A typical episode started with the first Archie story, introduced by Archie and occasionally a different character. Next was a "dance of the week" segment starting with a teaser, then after the commercial break Archie introduced the dance, followed by the song of the week performed by The Archies. After that was a short joke followed by the second Archie story. All 17 episodes were presented in this format.

Formats

The show was broadcast in different formats and under different titles.
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, these last two series were on NBC.

Voice cast

Production

The Archie Show was designed to emulate the live-action series The Monkees by including rock music into each episode.

Music

The franchise's most notable effort was the music element in the form of the animated band The Archies. 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 number 1 song of 1969 on the Billboard charts.
A cover of "Sugar, Sugar", performed by Mary Lou Lord with Semisonic, is included on the 1995 tribute album , produced by Ralph Sall for MCA Records.
The show's main composer Ray Ellis would later work on other Filmation projects.

Reception

, 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 laughtrack."

Spin-offs

The "individual" versions of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Groovie Goolies are currently offered by present owner DreamWorks Classics.
Hero High 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.

Syndication

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, followed by DreamWorks Animation's purchase of Classic Media in 2012.
Most of the episodes from all of these series were syndicated in 1976 as The Archies. The music segments from Comedy Hour were missing in this syndication package, for unknown reasons.
In 2010, the show began airing on Retro Television Network.

Home media

Single-disc DVD compilations featuring four episodes each were released in 2004. 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. According to the packaged booklet, the original film negatives for the dance /song segment on the "Kids' Day/Jughead 'Sampson' Jones" episode were lost and had to be sourced from a mediocre video transfer; not even the PAL video transfers were available. This may be due to Hallmark Entertainment purposely destroying the original film rolls, the original mag audio tracks, and other archival material related to the shows back in the '90s, due to Hallmark's short-sighted policy of only distributing the in-house Filmation shows outside of the United States. The video transfer is NTSC-based. In addition, the introduction to the dance segment which occurs before going to the commercial is also lost, along with the "joke" segment featured between the weekly song and second Archie story.
On March 4, 2008, Genius Products, LLC released Archie's Funhouse on DVD in Region 1 for the first time. Unlike the previous release however, there is no packaged booklet, and thus there is no additional information other than the bonus features contained on the discs. Additionally, while the original negatives for the "Sugar, Sugar" video were found, the "Jingle Jangle" video was sourced from an NTSC-based video transfer. The 16 episodes themselves are presented in re-edited half-hour formats. Missing are brief bumpers and repeated segments from The Archie Show, already released in their own collection. The set also includes the TV special Archie And his New Pals and seven compilation episodes culled from The Archie Comedy Hour. The seven compilation episodes account for the "Funhouse" and "Side Show" segments from 14 episodes of The Archie Comedy Hour. No other music segments from that season are included. This leaves two original episodes of The Archie Comedy Hour unrepresented altogether; that season's original opening, closing and bumpers are also absent. Genius Entertainment released the Sabrina The Teenage Witch segments from that season on DVD as part of their own set on April 29, 2008.
DVD nameEp #Release date
The Archie Show: The Complete Series17July 31, 2007
Archie's Funhouse: The Complete Series16March 4, 2008
Sabrina the Teenage Witch: The Complete Animated Series31April 29, 2008