I was just reading the entries for the various series on Wikipedia, and it's...incomplete (to say the least). I was wondering if someone could provide detailed info on these episodes, especially regarding which episodes were later recycled into which later packages, what the "Archie and His New Pals" 1969 TV special was about, and exactly what "Archie's Funhouse" (1970) and "Everything's Archie" (1973) consisted of.

Archie's Funhouse is on DVD, so I don't know what needs explaining. Between that, and the previous seasons of The Archie Show and Sabrina, most of the Filmation cartoons (about 75%) are on DVD. Archie sold DVDs in its house ads some years back with some sample episodes from the ones you don't see, like the U.S. of Archie and Archie's TV Funnies. One of the last iterations, the Archie & Sabrina Surprise Package, came out on DVD in Australia. Every season these shows mixed (mostly) reruns with some new material, kind of like an Archie digest. Scooby-Doo went through the exact sort of re-tweaking of its format every season as well. It's complicated, so don't expect to get every single detail from Wikipedia. You have to poke around, consult Imdb and other online sources if your want every precise nitty-gritty detail. Why would you expect the documenting and indexing of these shows to be any better than the comics?

I think Archie and His New Pals was the teaser special for the new season in 1969 (which had Moose running for class president against Reggie). That would have been the lead-in to the same season where The Archie Show added Sabrina the Teenage Witch and became an hour-long block. Later Sabrina the Teenage Witch spun off into her own half-hour, then added the Groovie Goolies. After Sabrina split, it became Archie's Funhouse. And so on, morphing every season. Archie's TV Funnies changed up the formula by having the gang in charge of running a local TV station. There was an overall framing story to each 1/2-hour show featuring the gang, which was broken up by them showing cartoons based on then-current comic strips like Broom Hilda, Dick Tracy, The Captain and the Kids, Smokey Stover, Moon Mullins, and others. By 1973, Everything's Archie had shrunk back to a 1/2-hour block and no new animation was produced (apart from new opening/closing credits). The U.S. of Archie had new episodes with an educational/Bicentennial theme, where every episode Archie and the gang would learn something about U.S. history.

The remainder of the new Filmation cartoons not available on DVD consist of those produced for Archie's TV Funnies and The U.S. of Archie. The rest of the new Archie and Sabrina cartoons not included on Genius Entertainment's DVD collections The Archie Show, Archie's Funhouse, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, apart from Sabrina's appearances with the Groovie Goolies, which were included on the DVD collection released by BCI/Eclipse in 2006 (later re-released by Classic Media on a budget DVD collection), were included in Archie and Sabrina's Surprise Package, released on DVD in Australia (but not in the U.S., Region 1). Those were produced for The New Archie and Sabrina Hour (1977). Some of those Sabrina cartoons had been seen in the last Sabrina re-packaging under the title Sabrina, Super Witch (the last to run on network television), and later syndication packages of the Archie/Filmation cartoons.

Very comprehensive!

Thanks for the info!

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 24, 2016, 09:48:33 PM
Archie's Funhouse is on DVD, so I don't know what needs explaining.

Plenty, since, according to Wikipedia, there are missing episodes and missing/lost footage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archie_Show#Home_release

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 24, 2016, 09:48:33 PM
Why would you expect the documenting and indexing of these shows to be any better than the comics?

Probably because there's far less of them.

I'm compiling an episode list of all of the Filmation episodes, and I want to make sure that I have all of them.

Wikipedia says "The U.S. of Archie" aired repeats until September of 1976, but "The New Archie and Sabrina Hour" didn't premiere until September 10, 1977. Did any Archie cartoons air in the 1976-1977 season?

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on August 25, 2016, 02:25:51 PM
Thanks for the info!

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 24, 2016, 09:48:33 PM
Archie's Funhouse is on DVD, so I don't know what needs explaining.

Plenty, since, according to Wikipedia, there are missing episodes and missing/lost footage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archie_Show#Home_release

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 24, 2016, 09:48:33 PM
Why would you expect the documenting and indexing of these shows to be any better than the comics?

Probably because there's far less of them.

I'm compiling an episode list of all of the Filmation episodes, and I want to make sure that I have all of them.

Wikipedia says "The U.S. of Archie" aired repeats until September of 1976, but "The New Archie and Sabrina Hour" didn't premiere until September 10, 1977. Did any Archie cartoons air in the 1976-1977 season?

Check Don Markstein's Toonpedia. I think they have complete season episodes listings. I don't think there was anything new Archie-wise. Not sure if there may have been new Groovie Goolies cartoons in that season. They tended to let a show just re-run for a season, or only add a limited number of new episodes - 6 or 8 - as a general rule, but don't forget that each season there was either an hour-long or half-hour long block of animation, so when it was an hour was when they tended to add additional new episodes. And oh yeah, now that I think of it, I think Everything's Archie had a little new animation in the form of one-minute (or so) gag lead-in/lead-outs to the commercial breaks, but the main cartoons were all re-runs.

Oh, and one more thing. In the late 70s, there tended to be a trend of the networks to move some shows that weren't popular enough to continue (even in reruns) on the Saturday morning schedule to Sunday morning reruns, and I think at one point when Archie was running out of steam the reruns got moved to the Sunday morning schedule. After the last gasps for Archie cartoons on Saturday mornings, The New Archie and Sabrina Hour and Sabrina Super Witch, that was the end -- except for syndication to UHF stations and local programming schedules.

Where some of the confusion on 'Archie's Funhouse' comes from is that originally it was an hour show. The Sabrina cartoons were part of Archie's funhouse in its first run. Hour TV shows are notoriously hard to syndicate, so after it's original run the TV show was cut to 1/2 hour & all the Sabrina cartoons became her own show.

Just want to add to this: TV shows from this era, once they enter syndication, get messy. For exampe: Total Television's 'Underdog', 'Tennessee Tuxedo & His tales' & 'King Leonardo & his short Subjects'. I have 2 x 16mm copies of Network Prints, with original commercials, of 'Tennessee Tuxedo'. I know they're not original run prints because each contain a 'Commander McBragg' episode & a 'King Leonardo' short'. Plus the General Mills commercials are with 'Rocky & Bullwinkle', a Jay Ward Production.  When you watch the 1/2 hour prints on the DVD set of 'Archie's Funhouse' watch the 'Giant Jukebox' parts. Some episodes have 1, some 3. As mentioned above, in their original hour run they each contained 2 x Sabrina cartoons. There is a push on the get 'Underdog' restored to its original NBC run. The DVD sets, while nice to have, are nothing like the original run. Tennesse Tuxedo is worse! They used the original cartoon opening credits, with a different theme song! The Horror! Quick trivia note: The voice of Commander McBragg is veteran Radio voice 'Kenny Delmar'. Kenny Delmar was famous on the 'Fred Allen Show' as a character known as Senator Beauregard Claghorn. Warner Brothers copied the voice as 'Foghorn Leghorn' & then tried to sue Delmar for copywrite infringement. They lost. Well (As Fred Allen used to say) let's head down Allen's Alley & see who we meet. . .

Quote from: Ottawagrant on August 26, 2016, 07:34:37 PM
Just want to add to this: TV shows from this era, once they enter syndication, get messy. For exampe: Total Television's 'Underdog', 'Tennessee Tuxedo & His tales' & 'King Leonardo & his short Subjects'. I have 2 x 16mm copies of Network Prints, with original commercials, of 'Tennessee Tuxedo'. I know they're not original run prints because each contain a 'Commander McBragg' episode & a 'King Leonardo' short'. Plus the General Mills commercials are with 'Rocky & Bullwinkle', a Jay Ward Production.  When you watch the 1/2 hour prints on the DVD set of 'Archie's Funhouse' watch the 'Giant Jukebox' parts. Some episodes have 1, some 3. As mentioned above, in their original hour run they each contained 2 x Sabrina cartoons. There is a push on the get 'Underdog' restored to its original NBC run. The DVD sets, while nice to have, are nothing like the original run. Tennesse Tuxedo is worse! They used the original cartoon opening credits, with a different theme song! The Horror! Quick trivia note: The voice of Commander McBragg is veteran Radio voice 'Kenny Delmar'. Kenny Delmar was famous on the 'Fred Allen Show' as a character known as Senator Beauregard Claghorn. Warner Brothers copied the voice as 'Foghorn Leghorn' & then tried to sue Delmar for copywrite infringement. They lost. Well (As Fred Allen used to say) let's head down Allen's Alley & see who we meet. . .

I always look at DVD sets skeptically. The original Transformers cartoon was released twice on DVD, each time by a different company. The first time, the company used 35mm film prints of the episodes that they've discovered. (The series' broadcast masters were on 16mm video tape.) They thought they were giving the fans a treat by presenting Transformers better than it's ever looked. Well, as it turned out, the 35mm film prints were incomplete workprints. A lot of errors had been fixed by the time that the episodes aired, so the company unknowingly made public a bunch of errors that were never meant to be seen.

On top of that, they took it upon themselves to "fix" some "errors" (which weren't). Also, they wanted to remix the originally mono soundtrack into 5.1 surround sound for whatever reason. They hired a third-party company to add a bunch of new sound effects to the audio and then, when called out on it, claimed these sound effects had always been there; you just couldn't hear them until their brand-new, awesome 5.1 mix.

Finally, they seemed to recreate the closing credits sequences from scratch (I guess the workprints didn't contain them). Some actors' names were misspelled. The original three-part series premiere used a different animation sequence, but the standard one appeared on the DVD set. Also, on some season 1 episodes, the season 2 credits appeared over the season 1 animation sequence, which has absolutely no basis in historical reality.

When the series was re-released, the new company...did pretty much the exact same thing (except for the 5.1 mix and the added sound effects). They claimed the 16mm broadcast masters were too damaged to use, so they used the 35mm film workprints and then consulted YouTube videos of old VHS footage to fix any workprint errors that had been fixed prior to airing but left the "nostalgic" errors intact. Same mess with the closing credits.

I read on Wikipedia about the mess with the Filmation Archie DVDs. Sourced from PAL? Really? Footage missing? No thanks.

The most amazing thing about those DVD collections, to my way of thinking, is that they exist at all. The cartoons, as they were originally aired, were re-purposed several times. It's not like you can just hop in your time machine, and go back to get a copy of the shows the way they originally aired, because the individual segments were being remixed on a season-to-season basis, even before they went to syndication. I've heard similar complaints about Hanna-Barbera's DVD releases. Perfect releases will never exist, because everything has to be reconstructed from individual parts that were cut up long ago.

I just found a list I made of the Sabrina cartoons a while back. I don't think I ever made a complete list of the Archie cartoons, but I hope this helps.

The Archie Comedy Hour (1969-70)
1.   The Fairy Godmother
2.   Hiccups
3.   Which Witch is Which?
4.   The Basketball Game
5.   Will the Real Weatherbee Stand Up?
6.   Caveman
7.   Paint Story
8.   Aunt Zelda's Broom
9.   Cinderella Story
10.   What the Hex Going On?
11.   Wishbone
12.   Babysitter
13.   Carnival
14.   Stage Fright
15.   Pet Show
16.   Funny Bunny
17.   Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
18.   A Witch in Time
19.   When the Cat's Away
20.   Costume Party
21.   Let's Have a Hand for Jughead
22.   The New Freeway
23.   Blue Whale
24.   Football Game
25.   Town Beautiful
26.   Horse's Mouth
27.   Birdman of Riverdale
28.   Hoedown Showdown
29.   Spooky Spokes
30.   You Oughta Be in Pictures
31.   The Generation Flap
32.   School Daze

Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies (1970-71)
1.   Ug at the Bat
2.   Computerized Moose
3.   Rose-Colored Glasses
4.   Living Dolls
5.   Cake Bake
6.   Hot Rod Derby
7.   The Bear Facts
8.   Child Care
9.   Witches Golf Open
10.   Rummage Sale
11.   High School Drop-Ins
12.   Big Deal
13.   Frankie
14.   Beached
15.   Ouch
16.   Smog
17.   Dirty Pool
18.   The Grayed Outdoors
19.   Short Changed
20.   Mis-Guided Tour
21.   That Old Track Magic
22.   Moose's Alter-Falter
23.   Mortal Terror
24.   Weather or Not
25.   Flying Sorcery
26.   Too Many Cooks
27.   Ambrose's Amulet
28.   Auto-Biography
29.   Tragic Magic
30.   A Nose for News

The New Archie and Sabrina Hour (1977)
1.   Alter Ego / French Deception
2.   Goolie Sitter / Dilton's Invention
3.   Cliché Castle / Carlos' Cool Caper
4.   Witch Picnic / The Talent Show
5.   Moose on the Loose / Weatherbee-Fuddled
6.   Pot Luck / TV Witch Watchers
7.   Funny Paper Caper / Chimp Gone Ape
8.   Teenage Grundy / Talent Test
9.   Talking Bird / All Washed Up
10.   Merlin's Story / A Colorful Experience
11.   Teenie the Terror / The Last Windup
12.   Cartoonie Loonie / Bon Appetite
13.   Party Pooper / Funhouse

Thanks. I actually have all of those episodes listed. However, I have "Up at the Bat" and "Computerized Moose" as part of "The Archie Comedy Hour".

I saw conflicting sources on those two episodes, so after watching the two, I just took my best guess as to which was correct. And it is indeed UG, and not UP, "at the Bat".