SIxty or so years ago, you could have heard the Archie radio series in Connecticut on WELI in New Haven, WNBC in Hartford and WNAB in Bridgeport.That was still the so-called Golden Age of Radio, before TV caught on. The Archie Andrews program debuted at the end of May, 1943 on the NBC Blue network, moved to the Mutual network in 1944 and then back to NBC for another nine seasons, 1945 to 1953. Considering that it ran for a decade, it’s appalling (but not that surprising, given the cavalier treatment of old tapes by their original owners/broadcasters) that only around three dozen episodes seem to still exist. You can find the shows at https://archive.org/details/ArchieAndrews.
Just as the comic book Archie was clearly derivative of literary bad boys such as Tom Sawyer and Penrod, the radio show leaned on existing film and radio awkward-teen archetypes such as Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich. Unfortunately, the radio forebears didn’t line up clearly with the radio ones. Archie Andrews, too often, was a family sitcom about a family. On many of the extant episodes, there’s way too much of Archie’s father Fred. Fred Andrews tries to take a bath, and keeps getting interrupted by Archie and his friend. Fred Andrews tries to paint a room, and the kids interfere. Fred Andrews has a cold. Etc.
It should be said that the Archie comics had this same problem when they first started. Authority figures were all over the place, defining the teenagers’ place in the world rather than letting them set their own comic boundaries. But within a few years—well before the radio show came along and made the same mistakes—the teens were largely on their own.