Editor Ira is here today to talk about a topic near and dear to his heart: Archie comics!

Fair warning that you’re about to read the saddest sentence you’re likely to see today.

I consider myself an Archie Comics originalist.

Let me explain that stance as long-windedly as possible. You’re probably at least passingly familiar with “Archie,” the comic book franchise that began in 1941 as a humorous portrait of “America’s typical teenager” and his circle of friends. The original intent was to cash in on the popularity of Andy Hardy, a clean-cut teenager played by Mickey Rooney in a series of box office hits that sometimes co-starred Judy Garland as the smitten girl next door. The template for Archie comics was set early on: Archie Andrews was a good-hearted teen who constantly got himself and his best pal Jughead Jones into mild trouble while romancing both local “good girl” Betty Cooper and wealthy snob Veronica Lodge.

The public’s interest in Andy Hardy movies waned at about the same pace as Mickey Rooney’s adolescent cuteness, but Archie was here to stay. Archie Comics eventually became a publishing house unto itself. They’ve been distributing wholesome teenage hijinks for more than 80 years. That’s a long lifespan for any media property, especially one that, at its peak, was cranking out dozens of original stories and gag strips every month.

Considering the sheer volume of Archie content, it’s no surprise that the company has sent its characters on some very strange detours over the years. In the comics alone, Archie and his “typical teenage” friends in the town of Riverdale have been recast as rock stars, superheroes, high-tech adventurers, secret agents, cave people, time cops, denizens of the 31st century, grade-schoolers, middle-schoolers, zombie hunters, friends of Jesus, soap opera characters, Max Headroom parodies, interdimensional restaurateurs, sidekicks to homicidal vigilantes, junk food advertising shills, and budding stars on the professional remote-control car-racing circuit.

I’m OK with all of that. In fact, the endless malleability of the Archie format was one of the things that made me fall in love with Archie comics at an early age. My grandmother gave me issue #57 of “Archie Comics Digest” for my fourth birthday in 1983. It stands as one of the most formative books of my life (and yes, of course I still own that copy). These characters mean the world to me. I’ve written sincerely and at length about Jughead Jones being one of the most important role models of my childhood. Even so, I don’t think I’m the kind of fanboy who demands that his favorite characters remain forever unchanged.

When I call myself an Archie originalist, I don’t mean that I only want to see the residents of Riverdale in grounded scenarios about teenage dating and high school cliches. I like when the gang mixes it up with mad scientists or space aliens or Christmas elves. (On the other hand, I could write a lot of words about how betrayed I felt by the writers’ occasional misguided attempts to change Jughead from a happily asexual teen to a ladies’ man, but that’s a whole different article.)

When it comes to translating Archie into other media, though? That’s where my originalist tendencies kick in. The recent release of the Bollywood adaptation “The Archies” got me thinking about the long, strange history of Archie on film. I haven’t viewed “The Archies” yet, but I’ve seen some mildly positive reviews. By default, that would suggest it’s one of the most successful attempts thus far to bring Archie off of the printed page. After all of that preamble, let’s look at the long and undistinguished history of Archie adaptations.

Although Archie headlined a mildly popular 1940s radio series and an unaired 1964 TV pilot, I’ll start this exploration a little later with 1968’s “The Archie Show.” This was a patently awful Saturday morning cartoon [strobing lights warning for the first minute of that video!] from the era when animated shows had nonsensical laugh tracks. The storylines are lazy idiocy with none of the sly nuance that shone through in the best of the comics. Howard Morris’s voice performance as Jughead is downright stomach-churning. Nevertheless, this one earned some major cultural cachet when several of the songs performed by the in-show version of Archie’s rock band became real-world hits. Most notably, The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” ended up topping the Billboard charts for 1969, the biggest hit ever recorded by a fictional band.

That show got a semi-reboot in 1974 with the short-lived series “The U.S. of Archie,” one of those lame sort-of-educational shows that plugs familiar characters into surface-level lessons on U.S. history. All that needs to be said about that one is that the first episode covers the Underground Railroad and features a song called “Friendship Train,” all of which is exactly as cringe as you’re imagining.

Things were quiet on the Archie animation front until 1987, when “The New Archies” hit Saturday morning TV. The only really noteworthy thing about this series is how un-noteworthy it is. It’s basically a bunch of rehashed high school escapades, except this time the kids are in middle school and have “hip” character redesigns — get a load of Archie’s mullet and Veronica’s pre-Siwa bow game. As a child I watched every episode, hated every second, and currently remember zero specifics of this show.

Probably the most successful of the Archie cartoons landed in 1999 with “Archie’s Weird Mysteries,” which found the gang investigating paranormal activity around Riverdale in sort of a pre-teen “X-Files” format. Despite being created for the little-watched, vaguely religious PAX network, this show garnered a strong cult following amongst its Millennial target audience and probably paved the way for some of Archie’s edgier comic book spin-offs, such as the well-liked “Afterlife with Archie” horror series.

Now let’s turn to live action. If you had an existing IP in the 1970s, odds are that somebody turned it into a hacky hour-long TV special at some point, and that goes for Archie. 1976 saw a failed “Archie” pilot get repurposed as a one-night TV special, of which I’ve never found a trace online. I have, however, found clips from 1978’s "The Archie Situation Comedy Musical Variety Show" [warning for strobing images], which brought back the same cast for a nigh-unwatchable hour of purported comedy. The best thing I can say about it is that the guy who plays Jughead was also the lead in the hugely underrated 1976 thriller “Massacre at Central High,” which is probably funnier than this special.

And then there’s (sigh) “Hot Times,” also known as “A Hard Day for Archie.” This is a truly bizarre 1974 sex comedy in which horny bootleg versions of the Archie characters (including, um, “Mughead”) get naked and trade smutty one-liners that were stale in the days of vaudeville. It’s unsettling to say the least, and I haven’t even seen the version that splices in hardcore sex scenes. Anyway, Mad Magazine already set the bar for “What if Archie was dirty?” humor back in 1954 with their bracingly brutal “Starchie,” and “Hot Times” doesn’t come close to topping it.

On a less salacious but somehow almost as unpleasant note, there’s the 1990 TV movie “Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again,” also known as “Return to Riverdale.” This one finds Archie and the gang returning home for their 15-year high school reunion and dealing with all the pressures and disappointments of adulthood. Jughead’s a single dad with emotional issues, Veronica’s a four-time divorcee, Betty’s an out-of-work school teacher… fun stuff! I have no idea what possessed anyone to greenlight “What if Archie was a ‘Thirtysomething’ knock-off?” but at least it gave us Lauren Holly playing Betty Cooper, plus this absolutely mortifying bit where adult Jughead teaches his son to rap.

And then there’s the show you already know about. When “Riverdale” debuted in 2017, I got a lot of messages assuming I’d be excited about Archie finally getting a high-profile TV spotlight complete with name-brand actors and decent budgets. I never could bring myself to watch an episode, though. I followed the buzz closely enough to know that the show wasn’t made for me.

I don’t begrudge anyone their trashy teenage TV fix, but the timeless wholesomeness that made me a lifelong Archie fan just doesn’t allow for seeing my childhood heroes get entangled in sex and drugs and gangs on a weekly basis. Call me a prude, but the only thing I want to see Jughead addicted to is inhuman quantities of hamburgers. (I do appreciate that “Riverdale” worked in a bunch of comic book in-jokes, like making Little Archie’s neighborhood rivals the South Side Serpents into an actual gang, or naming a street drug after an old Archies single.)

So yeah, maybe I’ll tune into “The Archies” one of these nights to see if this is the adaptation that finally grabs my fancy. More likely than not, though, I’ll give it a pass and just re-read my bookshelf full of decades-old Archie comics for the umpteenth time. I am a very old man and your newfangled ways frighten and disturb me.