Songfacts®:

• Everybody knows about The Archies' #1 hit "Sugar, Sugar" and often dismisses that one hit as a fluke, but in fact The Archies scored four Top 40 Billboard hits - cartoon characters or not! "Jingle Jangle," the follow-up to "Sugar Sugar," was their second-highest charting hit, reaching #10 and selling enough copies to get certified Gold. In 1969, The Archies were Billboard's top group of the year, the only time a fictional band has claimed the top spot.
• A common distribution method for The Archies' singles was on the backs of cereal boxes, as a cardboard cutout that you could actually liberate from the box and play on a turntable. You'd be the king of eBay if you have one of these to sell today.
• A common misconception is that The Archies, like The Doors, had no bass player. Not so - the character Reggie was definitely identified as bass player and was credited as such on the liner notes for The Archies Christmas Album.
• The real-life Archies were generally a rotating cast of studio session musicians, including Ron Dante, Andy Kim, and Toni Wine. Don Kirshner produced them, and - if it's any clue - also produced The Monkees. The male bass voice in "Jingle Jangle," portrayed as Jughead's voice in the cartoons, is provided by Jeff Barry.
• To help you wallow in nostalgia, let's quote the immortal Lester Bangs in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll: "The phenomenal success of this funny-paper combo led to a thousand Saturday-morning kiddy-video copies in the waning sixties and early seventies, including the leggy Josie and the Pussycats (actually a spin-off), Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution (acid-crazed simians), the Bugaloos (my personal faves), the Groovy Goolies (Munsters dipped in monosodium glutamate), the Banana Splits (whose theme song with its strange imagery - "Four banana, three banana, two banana, one / Five bananas playin' in the bright blue sun." - will be in my head unto the grave)."
  
  While the Archie newspaper comic strip of today is very much a zombie franchise, the anonymous team behind it appears to be very culture-aware. The comic humor site The Comics Curmudgeon took to referring to the "Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000," abbreviated to 'AJGLU-3000,' a computer alleged to be supplying the jokes for the Archie strip that combines a dim awareness of the methods of humor without comprehending human nature. After the running gag went on for months, characters in the Archie universe actually started referring to the AJGLU-3000 themselves.