Thank you Kirre for the heads up on the Archies trailer!!!! A lovely think to think about on a lovely Sunday morning.
Trailer! It relies surprisingly little on people knowing the comics. There’s the reference to Pop Tates, but that’s really it. No Jughead hat, no blonde and brunette, not even a Mr. Weatherbee. It’s more the vibe of the comics, milkshakes and bicycles and dances. I’m very curious what Zoya is going to do with all of this, if it’s going to be slightly surreal and homage-y the whole time, or if it’s going to just use Riverdale and Archie Comics as a jumping off point to tell an original story among teenagers?
Now, let’s talk Archie Comics!!! I grew up reading them, we had a family friend a few years older than us who gave us her hand me down collection, and then they were sold at the grocery store check out counter and if we were good at the store, Mom would buy one for us.
The thing that’s a little different about Archie Comics is that they have the “digests” which bring together stories from all eras. If you get, say, a Betty & Veronica digest, you would have half a dozen separate Betty & Veronica stories in one book, all from different eras of the comic, all mixed together. The world of Archies existed in every era simultaneously and never really changed. Whether a story was written in 1962 or 1992, it was still about high school and cars and dating.
Archie comics started at a very particular time in America. The idea of “teenagers” is primarily an American invention and it came from the 1940s then really took off in the 1950s. Before, you were a child, and then you were an adult. There wasn’t this limbo time in the popular consciousness when you were both at once. It’s real simple to see that shift if you just look at high school graduation rates. In 1930, only 29% of American youth graduated high school. Most of them dropped out, got married, started working, were adults (I have a couple uncles who did this). By 1940, that number had jumped to over 50%. By 1964, it was over 75%. For the first time, you had a mass culture of young adults who were still in school, still living at home, but old enough to date, drive, have part time jobs, have disposable income, do things. Thus, teenager culture!
When Archie Comics started, the characters weren’t exactly teenagers either, they were more kids torn between staying children and having crushes. Jughead’s whole “I don’t like girls” thing was because he hadn’t hit the girl-liking stage yet. Archie and Betty were best friends as children, but now they were in the “crush” age and he liked Veronica. And so on and so forth. Within a few years, however, teen culture exploded and suddenly there were fashions, songs, activities all specific to “teenagers”. And Archie comics jumped on the bandwagon.
I never really related to the specifics of the Archie storylines. Like, two girls who are friends but also competitors for a guy is a premise I could accept in fiction, but not sympathize with. However, I very much enjoyed these stories of “big kids” who DID things. They went to school, they had chores, they had siblings, they had parents, just like I did. But they also were involved in local political issues, volunteered, organized, were friends with Santa Claus, invented things, traveled in time, and so on. That was really cool! That you could be a “kid” but still do all this stuff and have all these adventures and things.
And that’s what, I hope, Zoya is going to try to achieve in her film. The feeling of being not quite an adult yet, but still caring about things, trying to make a difference, DOING real things. Maybe even setting aside your little personal storylines for the Big Reasons (I always liked how Reggie was never the Big Bad, if a developer was trying to tear down Pop Tates or something, Reggie was on the right side of things).
I do find it interesting how drastically she changed things to bring that teenage vibe to an Indian setting. For instance, no blondes. It would have been easy to give a platinum blonde dye job to one of the characters, but that wouldn’t have been a “Betty” character thing to do, so her Betty is a natural dark haired character. Also, no parents that I can see. It’s a hill station boarding school (I think), an Indian familiar concept of middle-class high school but not the same as it would be in America for the same middle-class kids. I think Zoya is going for the feel of Indian in the 1960s when pop culture was beginning to emulate that “teenage” vibe from the West, and the Archie comics were first popular.
