In retrospect, TV's animated ARCHIE from Filmation is pretty bad with annoying music, ancient gags and memorably bad voice-casting that included Dallas McKennon as Arch and Howard Morris as Jughead. In the tradition of THE MONKEES, the former producer of that series had songs recorded, this time by an anonymous studio group that couldn't argue with him. The group included Ron Dante and Andy Kim and with songs inserted in each and every episode, the novelty album release seen here sold well, even generating a minor hit with the bubble gummy "Bang-Shang-A-Lang." "Sugar, Sugar," however, from the second (of four I believe) albums, became a massive worldwide hit and beat out the Beatles to be the biggest selling record of the year in the year of Woodstock!
The show itself is cringe-worthy to me these days.
Hey, it's Filmation. Their "comedy" shows scraped bottom, especially those that ruined licensed properties... "The Brady Kids," "My Favorite Martians," "The Tom & Jerry Comedy Show," ad nauseam.
ReplyDeleteAnd all the variants on Archie... "Archie's Funhouse," "Archie's TV Funnies" (at least the Dick Tracy segments were truer to the source than the terrible UPA cartoons), "U.S. of Archie" ... then after a decade on CBS, on to NBC with "The Archie-Sabrina Hour." There was no stopping the Riverdale gang.
I agree that the voices were miscast; Dal McKennon was voicing the teenage Archie about the same time he was playing the Gabby Hayes-like Cincinnatus on "Daniel Boone." At least they could have used Bob Hastings, who played Archie on radio, and he would have done a better job (Filmation used him in their Superboy cartoons).
I asked Bob why they didn't use him for Archie and he told me he had just then had a falling out with Filmation over being hired to do one voice and then asked to do multiple voices for no additional pay.
ReplyDeleteThat's Filmation for you. Of course, SAG-AFTRA no longer permits that; now voice actors must get extra pay for each additional character they play.
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