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Via BeaucoupKevin.

1 COMMENT

  1. Worst part is I remember Christopher Rich from Another World.

    “We do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand other worlds,” *

    *Original opening for Another World.

  2. First of all, in the movie, they weren’t teenagers. Archie returns to Riverdale for a high school reunion. Not too bad for a made-for-TV movie based on a comicbook.

    Second, John Byrne did the comicbook adaptation.

  3. Ouch! Whoever did the casting must have been vision-impaired.

    Glad I was in Japan at the time and missed this television “event.”

  4. Actually, Genial Gene Colan drew the majority of the comic adaptation. Byrne drew the front cover. Stan Goldberg drew some linking flashback sequences.

  5. I remember watching it, too — and *wanting* to watch it *because* of the they’re grown up premise. And then I was so totally underwhelmed by the plodding direction, the sheer miscasting of Jughead, Betty (even back then, Lauren Holly couldn’t act) and Reggie and the stupidity of the writing, which made even the dumbest of the stories in the comics look like Raymond Carver vignettes by comparison. Yes, Pop’s explosion at the end was patently ridiculous writing, even for the internal (il-)logic of the story.

    But then again, look at the date: 1990 — it was essentially still the 80’s, at least in terms of the wretched excesses and sheer kitschy (and campy) awfulness of everything having to do with hair, fashion, directing, acting and TV writing and directing. I mean, it was the age of Aaron Spelling — all-crapola, all the time. In retrospect, it’s a miracle that China Beach snuck through the wasteland of the era that produced that Archie movie.

    — Rob

  6. First of all, in the movie, they weren’t teenagers. Archie returns to Riverdale for a high school reunion. Not too bad for a made-for-TV movie based on a comicbook.

    I gathered. I was just aching to use that quote from MST3K’s “Teenagers From Outer Space” episode, and this seemed like a good a time as any. :)

  7. I have been wanting to find a bootleg of this for years.

    As a teenager, I was flying to NY the night it aired and the person I asked to record it for me completely forgot to do it. Been hoping to find someone who had it ever since.

    I saw the comic adaptation once but it was before the movie aired and wanted to not be spoiled by anything.

  8. I probably have it on tape downstairs, but it would take weeks to find it. Suffice it to say, it was both bad and better than you’d expect.

  9. Per wikipedia: “Archie Comics published a one-shot comic book adaptation of the TV movie which coincided with its premiere. Stan Goldberg and Mike Esposito drew the sections of the book featuring the characters in flashback as teens, while Gene Colan drew characters as adults, in a less cartoony style.”

    Would this be the first time the Archie characters were written and drawn in a realistic (“less cartoony”) style?

  10. Charles, Gene Colan drew many issues of Archie related titles between 1987 and 1992, but they were rendered much closer to the typical Archie house style. It is fascinating to read those stories now, and see how Colan made his style to intersect with that of Goldberg. Check out Jughead’s TIme Police 3, 4, 5 and LIfe With Archie 285, 286 to list just a few…

    I’m not aware of any other realistic depictions of Archie besides “Riverdale and Back Again”.