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Fact #69847

When:

Short story:

A new animated childrens' tv series about the adventures of bubblegum pop group The Archies, begins on CBS-tv in the USA. Their No1 hit single Sugar Sugar will sell over six million copies.

Full article:

"When those records first hit the charts," says Ron Dante, "I just hid."

Dante's path to the coveted No1 slot on both sides of the Atlantic started on 14 September 1968, when a new Saturday morning Filmation Studios cartoon series debuted on the CBS network in America. Entitled The Archies, it followed the adolescent adventures of all-American teenager Archie Andrews and his friends Jughead, Betty, Veronica, plus their loveably shaggy dog.

Archie and Co had been successful comic book teens in America since the 1940s, but with the late-60s growth of bubblegum pop, CBS TV was convinced that The Archies could also become an ideal property to market at the teenybopper audience. They called in Brill Building publishing mogul Don Kirshner and asked him if he could provide suitable music to launch a bunch of non-existent characters as a pop group.

Kirshner loved the concept. Indeed, he'd done it before. It was Kirshner who had provided songwriters and session players to make The Monkees sound like a real band, and he was in the process of watching that particular tv merchandising dream go sour. The Monkees were selling truckloads of vinyl, but they were also developing inflated egos and creative aspirations to match. Those rockin' muppets wanted not only to control their own destiny but to make their own music, and Kirshner knew that was the kiss of death.

Secure in the knowledge that cartoon characters cannot develop egos, Kirshner set to work with gusto. First he pulled in Jeff Barry, celebrated author of both Da Doo Ron Ron and Do Wah Diddy Diddy, to write and produce Archies' material. Unwilling to abandon a winning formula, Barry knocked up Bang-Shang-A-Lang which was released to coincide with the tv series debut and peaked at No22 on the Billboard chart.

Ron Dante, who had warbled on many demos produced by such Kirshner-employed writing partnerships as Goffin-King, Sedaka-Greenfield and Mann-Weil, was the voice of Archie on that first hit and, more significantly, on the following year's Sugar Sugar, which Barry put together with Andy Kim (later to top the charts with Rock Me Gently).

For each vocal performance, Dante was paid a standard session fee. "I did the singing for The Archies, yes, but I didn't want to become a star from that," he insists. "I just wanted to earn some money to pay some rent."

Sugar Sugar sold over three million copies in America, six million worldwide, and became the No1 single of the year. Needless to say, it also helped generate tv advertising income for the show and, as intended, it sold loads of comics. In 1969, the best-selling American comics did well to sell 300,000 copies but, in the wake of Sugar Sugar's success, the Archie comic was shifting over a million units a month.

To make matters even more interesting, while Sugar Sugar was at No1, another new band called the Cuff Links went Top Five with their debut single, Tracy. Ron Dante was also the perpetrator of that deathless vocal performance, before going on to front numerous other equally fictitious recording combos including Dante's Inferno, Ronnie And The Dirtriders, The Webspinners and Bo Cooper. Indeed, Dante can probably lay claim to being one of the most heard but unseen singers of the rock era, having featured prominently in ads for Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, Coppertone, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Lifesavers, to name but a few.

The Archies, however, remains his crowning achievement. "We must have done a hundred tunes during that first Archies season," remembers Dante. "Over the years I must have done three or four hundred songs for them."