#SPANISH SINGER SUGAR SUGAR ARCHIES UPDATE#
#SPANISH SINGER SUGAR SUGAR ARCHIES SERIES#

The naysayers of the time, like the emerging rock press that dismissed the Archies records as disposable junk, weren’t completely wrong. (And let’s not forget the way the Gorillaz inherited the cartoon-band legacy decades later, or that Bored Ape Yacht Club, those cartoon monkeys that are the talk of the NFT world, are venturing into music.) In that context, the existence of Sugar, Sugar - The Complete Albums Collection (Goldenlane)– which boxes all five of the Archies LPs (minus their obligatory Christmas record) - makes some sort of crazy sense.

#SPANISH SINGER SUGAR SUGAR ARCHIES UPDATE#

Riverdale, the self-consciously somber update of Archie, revived the Archies as a “band,” albeit as a predictably gloomier one playing dour pop like “Midnight Radio.” Last month, Netflix announced a “live action musical” film version of The Archies, to be directed by Zoya Akhtar and set in India.

#SPANISH SINGER SUGAR SUGAR ARCHIES SERIES#

The series is hardly remembered as a high watermark of animation, and neither are the five Archies albums -billed to the cartoon characters but sung and played by uncredited studio players - recalled as anything but forgettable cash-in product for a Saturday morning cartoon show.Īnd yet the Archies continue being reanimated.

But of all the Sixties artifacts to survive and prosper five decades on, it’s doubtful that anyone, even Kirshner, would have predicted the Archies would make that list. The cartoon series, which launched in 1968, just as The Monkees was being cancelled, had its dopy charms. 1 spot, where it stayed for four weeks it also became the biggest-selling hit of that year. Kirshner knew a hit when he heard it: In 1969, “Sugar, Sugar” (cowritten by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim) wound up knocking the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” out of the No. “That’s all because the Monkees wouldn’t do my song and that got me pissed off.” The band’s musical gatekeeper, the one most preoccupied with the TV-generated combo being allowed to write its own songs and play on its own records, Nesmith famously rejected “ Sugar, Sugar” - a bubblegum pop song as basic as it gets, brought to them by producer Don Kirshner.Īs the late Kirshner told RS in 2009, Nesmith’s dismissing of the song inspired him to turn to animation: “Mike said, ‘It’s a piece of junk–I’m not doing it.’ I came home and my son Ricky was reading Archie comic books.” Inspired by that sight, Kirshner flashed on turning the comic into a cartoon series - and having Archie, Jughead, Veronica and the gang perform the songs, instead of actual three-dimensional humans with opinions. Earlier this month, we lost the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith.

In an utterly accidental way, a box set devoted to the Archies, the infamous TV cartoon band of the Sixties, couldn’t have arrived at a timelier moment.

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