How did Josie and the Pussycats get on Saturday morning TV anyway?

Philosophical minds have been asking this question for years.  As if to finally answer them, Archie Comics pulled some stories out of their archives for a Best of Josie and the Pussycats collection and thoughtfully included the story "Quiet on the Set" from Josie and the Pussycats #50 (September 1970), written by Dick Malmgren and illustrated by ace Josie artist-creator Dan DeCarlo and inker Rudy Lapick.  An example of cross-promotion, this story shows the band making a visit to Hanna and Barbera studios where they're caricatured and animated in time for their September 12, 1970 debut on CBS television.  Which I probably watched, despite being all of two years old.  Something hooked me on it, anyway.

Perhaps it was the basic idea of the Pussycats tooling around in their Chevy van improvising songs on whatever event they're currently involved in and accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars, so in tune with each other's creativity they can even do it in three-part harmony!



Josie and the Pussycats #50 (September 1970), script by Dick Malmgren, art by Dan DeCarlo and Rudy Lapick

Top that, Archies.  In fact, top that, Beatles!

The band arrives at Hanna-Barbera and none other than Joseph Barbera and William Hanna (charmingly caricatured by DeCarlo and Lapick) turn out to greet them on the homey front step.  I'm not sure who these two guys are or what their relation to the animation studio might have been, but they look very friendly.  Dapper dressers, too.  They must have been fairly important if we're to judge by the Pussycats' impressed reactions.  Generation gap be damned-- the kids take to the two smiling older gentlemen right away.  In fact, it's a mutual admiration society.  But something's amiss, as William Hanna observes.

Script by Malmgren, art by DeCarlo and Lapick

No way!  Josie, Valerie, Melody, Alan.  That's everyone!  Who could they have left out?

She's Josie #1 (September 1970), script by Frank Doyle, art by Dan DeCarlo and Rudy Lapick

Actually, missing are those squabbling siblings, Alex and Alexandra Cabot.  They show up in a sweet limousine.  Alexandra proceeds to sweep into the studio as if she's Elizabeth Taylor and starts dropping advice to all the artists and animators on how she should be depicted in the series. 

Script by Malmgren, art by DeCarlo and Lapick

And Valerie's looking back at us as if to say, "Isn't this the most?" 

The two Hanna-Barbera employees here are Ken Spears (inexplicably referred to here as "Bill") and Joe Ruby.  From what I can gather, they were writers and story editors, but the comic shows them happily working together in the storyboard department.  Barbera's description of their duties is informative and vague at the same time.

Ruby and Spears, like Hanna and Barbera, are real people, as are many of the unnamed employees throughout this story, each of whom DeCarlo has obviously caricatured from life.  Ruby and Spears are the only two important enough for the story to name, and would later create Jabberjaw for the studio.  While it's a mistake to discount the magnetic qualities of its titular character, a talking shark gifted with Curly Howard's comedic persona, 70s kids with discerning Saturday morning cartoon tastes considered that show little more than a store-brand version of Josie and the Pussycats, delicious in its own way but suffering by comparison to its fantabulous inspiration, in much the same manner as Publix Super Markets' Magic Stars cereal versus General Mills' fresher-tasting Lucky Charms.

Simply appearing in a Josie and the Pussycats comic is enough for me to nominate the duo for immortality, but a few years after that, the Ruby-Spears team would found an animation studio of their own.  There they would co-produce The Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour with former employers Hanna-Barbera, then famously team artists Alex Toth and Jack Kirby on Thundarr the Barbarian to the delight of Steve Gerber fans everywhere.  Along with their production of the revived Alvin and the Chipmunks series, It's Punky Brewster and a personal favorite of mine, Mister T (I conflated it with Marvel's The New Mutants comic), Ruby and Spears contributed the bulk of my childhood/early teen weekend entertainment that didn't involve reading about stars and wars, drawing stars and wars, or dropping quarters into video game machines and participating in stars and wars.

Back in our story, Alexandra's repeated self-aggrandizement leads only to humiliation for her animated counterpart as the Hanna-Barbera artists somehow manage to design, write, storyboard, animate, film, develop, loop, edit and print (or whatever order they do that in) for a short sequence in which she gets hit in the face with a pie during the band's visit.  Pretty fast turnaround, and it brings to mind the classic line, "Very few cartoons are broadcast live.  It's a terrible strain on the artists' wrists," from the classic eighth season The Simpsons episode, "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" (February 9, 1997).  At first angry, but then acquiescing to the joke like the good sport she secretly is (possibly), Alexandra accompanies Hanna and Barbera to an impromptu concert put on by the Pussycats, who have changed into their famous feline-themed performance attire for the occasion.

Script by Malmgren, art by DeCarlo and Lapick

A happy ending.  The original Josie and the Pussycats TV cartoon ran for sixteen episodes during the 1970-71 TV season, then mutated into Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space for another sixteen the following year.  They beat musical rivals the Partridge Family there by two hundred years.  And there you have it.

Whatever happened to Josie's friend Pepper?

We've long neglected Archie Comics here and that's a huge mistake on my part.  When I was a kid, an Archie digest was a comic book bargain.  Double Digest, however, was priced out of my range.  Sure, Archies, as we called them, rarely featured superheroics (my friends and I considered cosmic crimefighting more boy-appropriate comic book subject matter than the slapstick romantic shenanigans experienced by the Riverdale bunch), but for comic-loving kids on a budget, the various Archie digests consistently provided a two or three day reading adventure full of fun and humor, and you'd return to them time and again to repeat the experience. 

They were perfect for rainy days during beach trips or keeping my imagination occupied during my oldest brother's weekend baseball tournaments, which meant getting up before sunrise, six-hour car rides, broiling days at ballparks and nights with the entire family crowded into a single motel room.  As the youngest in the family, I had no choice in the matter so I, too, became a baseball migrant.  Archie Andrews and his gang, with an occasional appearance by their friend Sabrina, the Teen-Aged Witch, helped me survive those summers.

Archie was a pal, Sabrina an acquaintance... but Josie and her band were something else entirely.  They were a personal phenomenon.  While I enjoyed the ever-popular boy redhead who provided a name for their publishing company, I was an even bigger Josie and the Pussycats fanatic back then.  I was completely in love with Josie, Melody and Valerie.  There was something more appealing about Josie and her musical adventures, some quality that really captivated me above and beyond either Sabrina's witchcraft or Archie's misadventures.

I'm referring to the TV cartoon here.  Because the tragic thing is, I don't think I ever dared step outside of gender-segregated reading to own a single issue of anything with Josie's name on the cover.  I watched the TV show every Saturday we were home, but I was too insecure about my gender expression as a sports-averse artsy-fartsy kid to dare buying the actual comic.  Therefore, despite how important the television series was to my early childhood and how influential, my present knowledge of Josie's backstory and her cast of characters is sadly lacking. 

I can sing the hell out of the show's theme song, though!

Well, times have changed, and help is here because Archie Comics just released She's Josie, an all-digital 100-page collection of Josie stories before the rock-and-roll storyline made the character a childhood sensation.  At $3.99, just like its supermarket check-out line dwelling ancestors, it also provides some major entertainment bang for buck, especially compared to the similarly-priced new superhero angst that takes about five minutes to read being put out by a couple of larger companies I could name.

And there's no denying the power of that black and white checked minidress and stacked boots outfit Josie's sporting on the cover.  That is some full-blown 1960s fashionista magic.  The outfits inside are all pretty spectacular, too, and they should be since they're largely drawn by the masterful Dan DeCarlo.

She's Josie #1 (February 1963); script: Frank Doyle; art: Dan DeCarlo and Rudy Lapick

While the cover flaunts the psychedelic looks of a few years later, throughout these stories Josie and Melody sport some adorable and hip Kennedy-era girl threads.  You know-- Patty Duke as identical cousins and Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke Show.  Leg hugging capris and white canvas sneakers.  Stuff like that.  And Josie bops around with a bouffant variation on the Jackie Kennedy flip, all Connie Stevens or Sandra Dee with a cute black bow.  But the coolest clothes have to be the ones worn by Josie's friend, Pepper.  She rocks a prep school look with a v-neck sweater and plaid skirt ensemble which she improves by adding cat-frame glasses and knee socks.  Today's so-called hipsters have nothing on her.

The best part about Pepper is she's not just a smart dresser-- she's also a smart-ass who's already fighting the battle of the sexes years before it became the basis for a full-blown political movement.  With Melody all but oblivious to her effect on boys and Josie occupying the middle ground, Pepper demonstrates an awareness and a willingness to comment directly on gender roles and expectations.  You can easily imagine Betty Friedan in her personal library at home and maybe a bootlegged copy of Sylvia Plath novel that wouldn't see publication in the US until 1971.  Or that she even has a personal library (actually, so does Josie, as evidenced by the sequence in her bedroom that leads off this collection).  Armed with this knowledge, Pepper provides wry, knowing commentary throughout, contrasted with Melody who creates chaos wherever she goes but blitheringly chalks it up to the boys being clumsy.  Pepper would certainly experience an expansion of her social and gender consciousness as she travels through the rest of the Sixties.  Pepper would have involved herself.  She would have been the woman asking, "And what did it do for the consciousness of the chick?"

Okay, that's a obviously a flight of fancy.  More than likely, if she'd made the transition to music star with the rest of the cast, Pepper would have continued to provide the same (very) mildly subversive presence she does in these stories, a vehicle for the comic to address changing times in a shallow way, kind of like how Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies or even The Brady Bunch would spend an episode clowning around about "women's lib" by having some kind of boys versus girls or women versus men competition where everyone learns a very soft lesson about how we all need to get along and play fair so we can make babies together.  Still,  I can't help but lament the creative team gave Pepper the axe when the book made the transition to hard-rockin' Josie and her music industry/crime-fighting career. 

The least they could have done was spin her off into her own title.  She's Pepper.

NOTE--  Not long after posting this, I actually bothered to do a little research and found a very informative and well-written article about Pepper and how and why Archie dropped her.  It only serves to make me wish we had more stories about Pepper in the 1970s, or Pepper today.