Nerding Day: Archie's Weird Mysteries

A lot of people consider the show Riverdale to be a departure from the popular Archie Comics franchise's typical themes, but I would strongly disagree. The theme of Archie Comics is: look at these horny teenagers, it's hilarious how horny they are. Or you might get a punchline that's just, "here's someone in pain from a horrible fall; how amusing!" Sex and Violence are the pillars propping up almost every Archie Universe, except for the 1999 TV Show Archie's Weird Mysteries, where the pillars are Horny Teens and Punishing the Teens for Being Too Horny. So, let's talk about the time a Christian media baron bought Archie so he could send him to hell as punishment for his lust.

This show aired on something called The PAX channel, a TV Network founded by the co-creator of the home shopping network, Lowell "Bud" Paxson, because he didn't think there were enough "family-friendly" TV channels after he became a born-again Christian. It was initially supposed to run alongside a show called Sherlock Holmes In The 22nd Century, which starred a resurrected Sherlock Holmes fighting a clone of Moriarty with a robotic Watson. That would have been way too radical, though; so it ended up being bookended by more spiritually approved shows like infomercials and the Billy Ray Cryus sitcom Doc.

The thing about horror stories is they tell you a lot about what the person making them is afraid of, and in this case, that thing is maaaaAAAAaaaalls, sexually aaaactive teenagers, and compuuooooouuters-- all of the things that spooked people who enjoyed infomercials and Billy Ray Cyrus.

Archie's Weird Mysteries was intended to be Scooby-Doo but with the Archie characters. The thing is, a key part of why Scooby-Doo is fun is that the monsters aren't real! Nothing scary actually happens. Shaggy wasn't really getting sucked off by that guy in the dog costume. That's comforting to children. The moral of Archie's Weird Mysteries is monsters are real, they're terrifying, and if you're bad, they will get you. So it ends up being the German fairytale version of Scooby-Doo.

Archie writes a column for the school newspaper about all the weird mysteries in Riverdale. Every episode has a little wrap up with him telling the viewers what he learned in the episode. "It turns out the real villain was the erosion of small town values all along! Oh, and also that real Babadook, which I did actually stab to death. Sleep well, kids!"

Archie is allowed to chastely date both Betty and Veronica because that's the whole deal with Archie comics. We have to sympathize with Archie's struggle to choose between Betty, who is hot and nice, and Veronica, who is hot and kind of bitchy, an impossible choice to make for Archie Andrews, grand marshall of the clown parade. However, if Archie gets horny for a single non-approved girl, she is always a monster.

Archie invites the new girl to a beach party; she's secretly a sea monster. Archie meets a beautiful girl who's super into vampires; uh oh, she's a vampire. That's the danger of dating goth chicks. Archie dreams of a beautiful girl who massages his shoulders and tells him to dump Betty and Veronica; she turns out to be a horrific nightmare from another dimension in disguise. That's right, even being horny in your dreams will get you in trouble, kids!

There's also an episode where Reggie becomes obsessed with a woman in a movie and uses a magic spell to bring her to life. The evil monsters in her movie come to life as well, and in the end, Reggie learns the same lesson we've already seen Archie learn at least three times. It's okay to date two women a month, but three will cause unimaginable destruction.

When they aren't giving Archie monster girlfriends, they're using the monsters to teach children to listen to their parents and fear technology. There's an episode where Archie refuses to continue a family tradition of dancing in a kilt on a certain date because he finds it embarrassing. It turns out the ceremony was keeping away an enormous ancient worm beast. They stole the plot of tremors and made it into a morality play about respecting your family traditions.

My favorite moral panic weird mystery is the mall episode. It was dated in 1999, and has only aged poorly since then. All of the kids get credit cards at a mysterious new mall that eventually turns them into mannequins when they can't pay the bill. The villain reveals that he is "The most selfish shopaholic that ever lived." He sold his soul to the devil when he ran out of money and now he's bound to the mall forever to repay his debt TO SATAN. It's a mall demon.

All of the small businesses in town are shutting down because the evil mall is taking all of their customers. Jughead is able to defeat the evil mall by gaining strength from one of Pop Tate's burgers which reminds him of, "friendship and small town values." After Jughead frees all of his friends from being mannequins, the solution to the episode is for the teenagers to stay away from the evil mall because the mall demon can't leave it. Hey, this anti-mall propaganda worked great!

Along the same theme of, "the spooky modern world" is an episode where Pop Tate decides to add automation to his Chock'lit Shoppe to make it more efficient. It gains sentience, goes rogue, and tries to crush Betty, Veronica, and Dilton Doiley to death in a trash compactor. Archie's speech at the end says, "Giving personal attention may sometimes be inefficient, but it makes everyone feel good. Efficient machines are great! But so are friendly people, and we need a balance of both." A fucking robot tried to kill his friends and he's both-sidesing the issue of killer robots!

I can almost hear Lowell "Bud" Paxon saying, "The modern world moves too quickly! We need a show with those good wholesome children from Riverdale to complain to about the customer service at Ruby Tuesday's for me! If I want to order a single coffee and sit in a six person booth for four hours, I should be able to! Write an episode about that and also at least three episodes about vampires, but not the horny kind. I hate that!"

Even though Archie is the Carrie Bradshaw of this series, he often tells us that Riverdale is now safe, and he's always completely wrong. The writers must have had a directive to give each episode a happy ending, but that means when they cover the same monster across several episodes, Archie ends the episode with something like, "And Riverdale's vampire problem was completely solved!" Only for the next episode to open with the same vampire revealing he's alive and well and about to make some unsexy mischief.

Archie is an unreliable narrator. This makes me think the ending of each episode is wishful thinking on his part. He says he loves the weird mysteries that keep happening, but he never learns the lesson he needs to (like that all women other than Betty and Veronica are evil monsters). Why does he keep pretending things are wrapped up at the end even though the same issue plagues the town over and over again?

Some people think hell is underground, but I personally can't think of a worse place to be than sandwiched between infomercials and a Billy Ray Cyrus sitcom. That's the place where Archie's Weird Mysteries lives for all eternity.

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