So I've been keeping track, recently, of how Riverdale stacks up against other Archie continuities (specifically, adaptations in non-comic media). I equate one minute of running time with one page of prose and also with one comic page, even though the amount of content in a comic page is probably significantly less than what can be conveyed in one page of a novel or one minute of a show.

I've found, as of last night's episode (and including all Riverdale comic issues), Riverdale has surpassed, individually:

the 1962 and 1964 pilots
the 1976 and 1978 pilots
Josie and the Pussycats (HB cartoons)
The New Archies (episodes + comics)
Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again
Riverdale High (novels, although this one's kinda debatable)
Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996 Showtime movie)
Archie's Weird Mysteries (all episodes, all comic issues (including Archie's Mysteries), and the Jugman movie)
Josie and the Pussycats (2001 film)
Kevin (novel)
xoxo, Betty and Veronica (novels)
Betty: Diary of a Girl Next Door (novel)
Sabrina: Secrets of a Teenage Witch
New Riverdale (all issues of every series, although it might briefly regain the lead during the summer)

I'm not sure how long that the old-time radio show ran, but most episodes seem to no longer exist, so should that be counted as another win?

The loose continuity of Sabrina: The Animated Series, Sabrina in Friends Forever, and Sabrina's Secret Life will be equaled by episode 12 of season 3 of Riverdale and surpassed by episode 13. It will take longer if you factor in the issues of the corresponding Sabrina comic series.

The Filmation series is confusing. A lot of episodes seem to consist of recycled stories. There was even an iteration that consisted of nothing but repeats. Also, the majority of Archie's T.V. Funnies can be removed from competition, since it's mostly non-Archie content. So I'm not sure exactly how much content is in this "continuity", but it seems to be the next milestone for Riverdale to surpass after all of the DiC Sabrina stuff.

Obviously, the live-action Sabrina the Teenage Witch series is the most successful Archie Comics adaptation ever. Riverdale would have to last until episode 7 of season 5 in order to surpass it, and that's only if you don't count the plethora of tie-in novels.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on May 10, 2018, 05:23:58 PM

the 1962 and 1964 pilots

There were TWO 1960s pilots? I've only seen one (I think that's the 1964 one). I know there was more than one attempt made to adapt Archie to TV in the early sixties, but I'm not sure if any of the other ones actually made it to the point of having completed a finished pilot film.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on May 11, 2018, 01:26:38 AM

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on May 10, 2018, 05:23:58 PM

the 1962 and 1964 pilots

There were TWO 1960s pilots? I've only seen one (I think that's the 1964 one). I know there was more than one attempt made to adapt Archie to TV in the early sixties, but I'm not sure if any of the other ones actually made it to the point of having completed a finished pilot film.

Yes. Frank Bank starred in the 1962 pilot (which, as far as I know, has never seen the light of day, although TheDownloader on this forum claims to have it). He talked about it in an interview on one of the Leave It to Beaver DVD sets. I haven't seen the interview, but I've read about it. He gave a cast list. Only Cheryl Holdridge (Betty) was in both pilots. According to IMDb (which got the cast for the 1962 pilot wrong, so take it with a grain of salt), network execs passed on the 1962 pilot, because they thought audiences would still see Frank as Lumpy.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on May 11, 2018, 08:56:40 AM
Only Cheryl Holdridge (Betty) was in both pilots.

Oh yeah... Lumpy Rutherford. Really can't imagine him as Archie; even less than the other guy (whose name I forget). Oh, that Archie and his wacky inventions! (what th- ?!?) And what was up with William Schallert as Archie's dad in that 1964 pilot? If the pilot had sold, he could never have played Fred Andrews since he was already playing Patty's father on The Patty Duke Show!

Cheryl Holdridge was the only one who I thought completely nailed it, as Betty in the 1964 version. Veronica wasn't too bad (but she probably needed to be a little more bad, for that time period).

Although Dwayne Hickman made a pretty convincing Wilber Wilkin (the "new", Doyle/DeCarlo Wilber, I mean) in The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis.

As of December 26, with the publication of the tie-in prequel novel, "The Day Before", Riverdale continuity has now reached episode 09 of Sabrina's Secret Life in the animated Sabrina continuity (which includes issues of the Sabrina tie-in comic). Riverdale will surpass the animated Sabrina continuity with episode 17 of this season (in other words, nine more episodes).
Regarding the Filmation continuity, that's a bit more complicated. As far as I know, there were no tie-in comics. As for the shows themselves, I'm not counting the Groovy Ghoulies spin-off from Sabrina, because that's just original characters. Archie's TV Funnies has little actual Archie content. The gang has a few minutes' worth of story in each episode. Mostly, they're running a TV station where they play cartoons based on comic strips. Still, I'm counting each episode in full. I have no idea if I have every Filmation story segment listed in my guide (or even if they're all the same length, but I'm treating every two segments as a standard half-hour episode (with the exception of The New Archie and Sabrina Hour, where three segments seem to have air in each hour)).
Based on all of that (and taking into account the Riverdale tie-in material), Riverdale looks set to surpass the Filmation continuity with episode 12 of this season (in other words, four more episodes) and become the largest non-comic continuity featuring the Riverdale gang. However, since the Filmation cartoons also had a Sabrina spin-off, it's fair to include Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in the Riverdale continuity in this particular battle. In that case, the Riverdale/ChAoS continuity is already larger.
The last thing to beat is the Melissa Joan Hart sitcom. Going solely by televised material, Riverdale has reached season 4, episode 03. By the end of this season, it will reach season 5, episode 09. By the end of next season, it will reach season 7, episode 09. To surpass Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Riverdale would have to last until season 5, episode 07. That's doable, I guess (I'm counting only Riverdale in this case, not ChAoS, since Sabrina never had a spin-off). Counting printed material, though, Sabrina is basically untouchable, considering the sheer number of tie-in novels.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on December 29, 2018, 10:07:53 PM
As of December 26, with the publication of the tie-in prequel novel, "The Day Before", Riverdale continuity has now reached episode 09 of Sabrina's Secret Life in the animated Sabrina continuity (which includes issues of the Sabrina tie-in comic). Riverdale will surpass the animated Sabrina continuity with episode 17 of this season (in other words, nine more episodes).
Regarding the Filmation continuity, that's a bit more complicated. As far as I know, there were no tie-in comics. As for the shows themselves, I'm not counting the Groovy Ghoulies spin-off from Sabrina, because that's just original characters. Archie's TV Funnies has little actual Archie content. The gang has a few minutes' worth of story in each episode. Mostly, they're running a TV station where they play cartoons based on comic strips. Still, I'm counting each episode in full. I have no idea if I have every Filmation story segment listed in my guide (or even if they're all the same length, but I'm treating every two segments as a standard half-hour episode (with the exception of The New Archie and Sabrina Hour, where three segments seem to have air in each hour)).
Based on all of that (and taking into account the Riverdale tie-in material), Riverdale looks set to surpass the Filmation continuity with episode 12 of this season (in other words, four more episodes) and become the largest non-comic continuity featuring the Riverdale gang. However, since the Filmation cartoons also had a Sabrina spin-off, it's fair to include Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in the Riverdale continuity in this particular battle. In that case, the Riverdale/ChAoS continuity is already larger.
The last thing to beat is the Melissa Joan Hart sitcom. Going solely by televised material, Riverdale has reached season 4, episode 03. By the end of this season, it will reach season 5, episode 09. By the end of next season, it will reach season 7, episode 09. To surpass Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Riverdale would have to last until season 5, episode 07. That's doable, I guess (I'm counting only Riverdale in this case, not ChAoS, since Sabrina never had a spin-off). Counting printed material, though, Sabrina is basically untouchable, considering the sheer number of tie-in novels.

Y'know, when you use terminology like "Season 5, episode 09", it's meaningless to the rest of us in real-world numbers. Different TV shows produced in different years by different companies had a different number of episodes comprising a "Season", so unless you give us the episode's aggregate number, you're not really telling us anything in terms of milestones. And even then, shouldn't a TV series with hour-long episodes be given twice the credit for each episode as a series which only had 1/2-hour episodes? I mean, theoretically, you could split any hour-long episode into two shorter "continued" chunks. So if Riverdale has hour-long episodes, it seems in terms of running time, it should approximately equal TWO half-hour episodes of a show like Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch (either the original Filmation cartoon OR the later Melissa Joan Hart live-action series). I mean, what you're counting here isn't the number of discrete "stories". If the live-action Sabrina series had a two-part continued episode comprised of two half-hour shows, you're not counting THAT as "one episode", right? And neither are you counting a Filmation half-hour Sabrina cartoon which was comprised of two (or even three) distinct story segments as more than ONE episode, am I right? So (ignoring the variation in allotted time for commercials) what you really SHOULD be counting as a yardstick gauge is half-hour programming blocks.

And no, I don't agree that spinoff series are "all part of the same show" in some larger sense. On the one hand, you can make the self-evident statement that content-wise, there's no distinction to be made between episodes of The Archie Show and Archie's TV Funhouse (and indeed, episodes of the former were aired as re-runs on episodes of the latter). But then you yourself reject Archie's TV Funnies as not fitting that logic, and we can get into sticky determinations like "Does Sabrina (the animated series) count as a spinoff of the live-action Melissa Joan Hart series?" On the one hand, one can definitely point to a causal relationship where if the latter had not existed first, then the former would not have existed either, but... it's just makes things messy, because using that line of reasoning, you can argue that the Filmation Sabrina counts as part of the Filmation Archie. Or that Angel is in fact, essentially the same show as Buffy, with a slightly different focus. I don't buy it. In terms of popularity/longevity, each show more or less stands or falls on its own by the merits of its specific content, although the distinction of exact title (which involved some variation on the word "Archie" from one season to the next) was fairly blurry during the late-1960s/early-1970s, due to conditions mostly endemic to Saturday morning animation programming content, with the Filmation cycle. If you insist on counting them all as part of the same thing, you need to include not only ALL versions of Filmation's Archie, but anything remotely connected (that includes TV Funnies, Sabrina AND the Groovie Goolies). Unless you can point to an incarnation of new episodes of the Goolies which aired as its own distinct show in which Sabrina never appeared as a character, I don't think it's fair to disinclude those.

And then you begin talking as if tie-in novels "count"... it's just ridiculous. You're comparing apples and... golf balls. It's a story, but it's just a piece of merchandising, no different than... Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch Bubble Bath Soap. Those things have absolutely ZERO effect on the TV episodes in any way, shape or form, aside from being ignored (if they're even aware they exist) by 95+% of the TV series' viewing audience. The novels may be "based" on the TV series continuity, but it's a strictly one-way relationship. They are not so much PART of the Sabrina-TV continuity as "continuity-adjacent"... it's a little side-story parallel universe all its own, that can never really interact with the screenwriters' continuity. Nothing that happens in those has any effects felt in the broadcast episodes. The readers are free to "believe in" the stories, but television viewers literally missed nothing by not reading them.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AM
Y'know, when you use terminology like "Season 5, episode 09", it's meaningless to the rest of us in real-world numbers. Different TV shows produced in different years by different companies had a different number of episodes comprising a "Season", so unless you give us the episode's aggregate number, you're not really telling us anything in terms of milestones. And even then, shouldn't a TV series with hour-long episodes be given twice the credit for each episode as a series which only had 1/2-hour episodes? I mean, theoretically, you could split any hour-long episode into two shorter "continued" chunks. So if Riverdale has hour-long episodes, it seems in terms of running time, it should approximately equal TWO half-hour episodes of a show like Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch (either the original Filmation cartoon OR the later Melissa Joan Hart live-action series). I mean, what you're counting here isn't the number of discrete "stories". If the live-action Sabrina series had a two-part continued episode comprised of two half-hour shows, you're not counting THAT as "one episode", right? And neither are you counting a Filmation half-hour Sabrina cartoon which was comprised of two (or even three) distinct story segments as more than ONE episode, am I right? So (ignoring the variation in allotted time for commercials) what you really SHOULD be counting as a yardstick gauge is half-hour programming blocks.

That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm counting one Riverdale episode as equal to two episodes of pretty much anything else.
To date, Riverdale has amassed:
43 one-hour episodes (so 86 half-hour blocks)
13 tie-in comics (one of which is double-length, so let's say 14 half-hour blocks)a Student Handbook (equal to about 4 half-hour blocks)a prequel novel (equal to about 12 half-hour blocks)
So let's say Riverdale has about 126 half-hour blocks.
So Riverdale (show+tie-ins) has surpassed the continuities of:
Riverdale High (12 prose novels of approximately 115 pages each plus a double-length Summer Special)
The New Archies (13 half-hour episodes plus tie-in comics)
Archie's Weird Mysteries (40 episodes + 1 movie (4 episodes) + 34 tie-in comics)
In the animated Sabrina continuity, Riverdale has surpassed all 65 episodes of The Animated Series, all 39 tie-in comics (all 37 Sabrina episodes plus the issues directly preceding and following it), the Friends Forever movie (equal to about 4 episodes), and the first 9 (of 26) episodes of Sabrina's Secret Life.
With Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Riverdale (just the show) has surpassed the first 78 (of 163) episodes and the two TV movies (about 4 episodes each). If you take the tie-in novels into account, Sabrina basically reigns supreme and will never be touched.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AM
And no, I don't agree that spinoff series are "all part of the same show" in some larger sense. On the one hand, you can make the self-evident statement that content-wise, there's no distinction to be made between episodes of The Archie Show and Archie's TV Funhouse (and indeed, episodes of the former were aired as re-runs on episodes of the latter). But then you yourself reject Archie's TV Funnies as not fitting that logic,

Actually, no. I did state I'm counting Archie's T.V. Funnies, even though they contain very little Archie content.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AM
and we can get into sticky determinations like "Does Sabrina (the animated series) count as a spinoff of the live-action Melissa Joan Hart series?"

It isn't.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AM
On the one hand, one can definitely point to a causal relationship where if the latter had not existed first, then the former would not have existed either,

Well, by using that line of reasoning, you could argue Archie's Weird Mysteries (which debuted in the same season as Sabrina: The Animated Series) owes its existence to the MJH series as well. And that both cartoons, being produced by DiC, also owe their existences to DiC's previous Archie productions, The New Archies and To Riverdale and Back Again. And that they all ultimately owe their existences to the comics, so they're all spin-offs in a sense.
But this is about continuities/universes.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AM
but... it's just makes things messy, because using that line of reasoning, you can argue that the Filmation Sabrina counts as part of the Filmation Archie.

It does. Sabrina first debuted in the TV special, Archie and His New Pals. And her own segments (prior to being repackaged as her own show), first aired in The Archie Comedy Hour, in which she attended Riverdale High and regularly interacted with the gang (although not always). This is why I count both Riverdale and ChAoS against the combined Archie+Sabrina Filmation continuity (but see below for how Riverdale fares against it without ChAoS).

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AM
Or that Angel is in fact, essentially the same show as Buffy, with a slightly different focus. I don't buy it. In terms of popularity/longevity, each show more or less stands or falls on its own by the merits of its specific content, although the distinction of exact title (which involved some variation on the word "Archie" from one season to the next) was fairly blurry during the late-1960s/early-1970s, due to conditions mostly endemic to Saturday morning animation programming content, with the Filmation cycle. If you insist on counting them all as part of the same thing, you need to include not only ALL versions of Filmation's Archie, but anything remotely connected (that includes TV Funnies, Sabrina AND the Groovie Goolies). Unless you can point to an incarnation of new episodes of the Goolies which aired as its own distinct show in which Sabrina never appeared as a character, I don't think it's fair to disinclude those.

The GG did, in fact, have their own Sabrina-less spin-off:

QuoteThe show originally aired on CBS as Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies, and also featured Archie Comics character Sabrina the Teenage Witch with her aunts Hilda and Zelda. Sabrina had had previous appearances as a supporting character on The Archie Comedy Hour the previous year. In 1971, Sabrina was spun off into her own show. Never a critical success, the Goolies had appeal, reappearing in 1971 as The Groovie Goolies on their own solo show. After one season with Sabrina, executives decided that the Goolies were strong enough to make it on their own, and thus Sabrina and the Goolies both received their own separate shows.

So, regarding the battle against the Filmation continuity, I have determined Riverdale (with all of its tie-in material) has reached episode 6 (of 13) of The New Archie and Sabrina Hour, meaning it will tie Filmation in 7 more episodes. Without the tie-in material, Riverdale has reached episode 14 (of 16) of Archie's T.V. Funnies and will reach episode 5 (of 16) of The New Archie and Sabrina Hour by the end of this season. If renewed for another season, Riverdale (without the tie-in material) will tie Filmation continuity with episode 8.
All of this is assuming, of course, Filmation continued to produce new musical segments well into its run and wasn't just recycling large amounts of material.

Heh. It took me so long to compose my reply that you updated your post in the meantime.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AMAnd then you begin talking as if tie-in novels "count"... it's just ridiculous. You're comparing apples and... golf balls. It's a story, but it's just a piece of merchandising, no different than... Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch Bubble Bath Soap. Those things have absolutely ZERO effect on the TV episodes in any way, shape or form, aside from being ignored (if they're even aware they exist) by 95+% of the TV series' viewing audience. The novels may be "based" on the TV series continuity, but it's a strictly one-way relationship. They are not so much PART of the Sabrina-TV continuity as "continuity-adjacent"... it's a little side-story parallel universe all its own, that can never really interact with the screenwriters' continuity. Nothing that happens in those has any effects felt in the broadcast episodes. The readers are free to "believe in" the stories, but television viewers literally missed nothing by not reading them.

Well, in that case, Riverdale (at 22 episodes per season starting with season 2) will surpass Sabrina the Teenage Witch with season 5, episode 07. And it will surpass the animated Sabrina continuity only five episodes from now.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on December 30, 2018, 01:45:16 PM
Heh. It took me so long to compose my reply that you updated your post in the meantime.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AMAnd then you begin talking as if tie-in novels "count"... it's just ridiculous. You're comparing apples and... golf balls. It's a story, but it's just a piece of merchandising, no different than... Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch Bubble Bath Soap. Those things have absolutely ZERO effect on the TV episodes in any way, shape or form, aside from being ignored (if they're even aware they exist) by 95+% of the TV series' viewing audience. The novels may be "based" on the TV series continuity, but it's a strictly one-way relationship. They are not so much PART of the Sabrina-TV continuity as "continuity-adjacent"... it's a little side-story parallel universe all its own, that can never really interact with the screenwriters' continuity. Nothing that happens in those has any effects felt in the broadcast episodes. The readers are free to "believe in" the stories, but television viewers literally missed nothing by not reading them.

Well, in that case, Riverdale (at 22 episodes per season starting with season 2) will surpass Sabrina the Teenage Witch with season 5, episode 07. And it will surpass the animated Sabrina continuity only five episodes from now.

Isn't it a little bit presumptous to be talking about a show that might not even be around for a Season 5? And what if they decide to do less (or more) episodes in a season, or there's a Very Special Christmas Episode or something that's in addition to a regular episode? Or it's a special 2-hour episode or something?

I mean, you can KNOW the stats of the shows that have finished airing. They're not coming back.

Again, it's just your terminology that's meaningless to the rest of us. Why not just say... "As of the most recent episode, Riverdale has XX hours to go to tie (or beat) Series X". That's a lot easier to comprehend.

So I understood the last part about Sabrina, but then again, you're still not counting Groovie Goolies because you don't want to, even though that cartoon was joined to Sabrina at the hip from the day it was introduced. Sabrina appeared in the Goolies segments, and the Goolies appeared in both Sabrina segments, and even ARCHIE segments. Of course there were also segments (after the Goolies were introduced) where they didn't appear in Sabrina segments and vice-versa, but it's impossible to completely slice them out of the Sabrina and Archie cartoons and still have an accurate count for those shows. So how can they not be part of the same 'continuity' (which sounds really silly applied to Saturday morning cartoons, but there you have it).

As of February 27, Riverdale has surpassed the 1999-2000s Sabrina animated continuity, excluding tie-in material on either side. As of March 27, it had surpassed it, including tie-in material on both sides. As of last night's episode, Riverdale has surpassed season 4 of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

As of last night's episode, Riverdale has surpassed Sabrina the Teenage Witch in terms of total running time.

By my calculations, as of season 6, episode 6, Riverdale has surpassed the entire Filmation Archieverse in terms of length (including Archie, Sabrina, Groovy Goolies, etc.), making it the largest televised continuity (and that's not even including Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Katy Keene, which are in the same continuity).