I am suddenly curious about Archie’s Weird Mysteries. I had little interest in the show when it originally aired from 1999-2001—my cable provider didn’t carry the PAX channel on which it aired, I had tax liens which affected how much I could spend on comics (not to mention food) in general, and the cartoons were kind of an Archie aberration in terms of style and flow.
Having finally felt ready to partake of this curious precursor of such recent supernatural Archie adventures as Afterlife With Archie and Chilling Tales of Sabrina, I found that I could buy a box set of the complete 40-episode series for less than eight dollars on Amazon.
I watched the entire first disk—three hours and ten episodes long, plus a bonus episode of Sabrina the Animated Series—in two sittings, while doing listings work at my desk. It makes for excellent background viewing: colorful, easy to follow and, at least to me, effortlessly appealing because it involves Archie characters.
There are in-jokes for fans, such as a reference to Archies vocalist Ron Dante. The central Archie characters maintain the characteristics of their comic book counterparts, as distilled through golden age of Hollywood stereotypes: everyteen Archie is the hero, Jughead his goofy sidekick, Dilton the scientist who explains things, Betty the damsel in distress, Reggie and Veronica the wild cards who, when afflicted by supernatural phenomena, may use their newfound powers for evil or egocentric means.
Not nearly as bad as I’d always feared, Archie’s Weird Mysteries ends each episode with a reminder that all these horror scenarios are happening in the supposedly sleepy town of Riverdale, and that small-town nature is neatly conveyed in a manner which the old Life With Archie adventure comic books couldn’t always manage.
Still, Archie’s Weird Mysteries has some weird premise: Archie is a teen journalist who writes a weekly column about strange doings in his hometown. The column is popular and well-read (it’s even followed by an X-Files-like duo of government agents who appear in the episode “The Jughead Incident). Yet in every single episode, Archie’s friends remain incredulous that there could be such things as, say, werewolves, when they’ve already apparently dealt with mummies, ghosts and demons, and been affected by spells or potions that have rendered them gigantic, invisible or zombie-esque. Unlike the original Scooby Doo series, where there was good reason for the Mystery Machine gang to be eternally skeptical of supposed supernatural chicanery, in Weird Mysteries actual monsters, ghouls and space aliens commonly cross paths with Archie et al.
Archie’s Weird Mysteries is second only to the golden age Archie radio program as the longest-running broadcast series to feature the Riverdale characters. It’s far-fetched and a truly bizarre use of this largely reality-based comic book ensemble, but somehow it doesn’t hurt the legacy at all.