Archie's Weird Mysteries - Attack of the Killer Spuds - Toonstalgia

Archie's Weird Mysteries - Attack of the Killer Spuds

Toonstalgia

Real Quick

It's Pod People with potatoes.

Thoughts and Details

The theme song sounds "bleeped" with a blank where the word "Weird" should be until the end of the song. I have no proof other than my observation of an abnormally long gap between "Archie's" and "Mysteries" where "Weird" is in the title but not in the song until the last line. My guess is the word was originally "creepy" because of the beats in the blank. It sounds like they might have pulled the "Weird" from another line in the song where it says that things are getting weird and looped it into the title.

It seems like the artists and writers weren't working with a hefty budget but they made up for it by being creative and a bit fearless at times. The show is a familiar genre. It reminds me of the supernatural shows that were on the air before and around that time like "Big Wolf on Campus", "She-Wolf of London", "Weird Science", "Phantom Investigators" and many, many others. This is a positive for me. I lived for those shows. Archie's Weird Mysteries draw on a rich history of monster B-Movies and the familiar characters of the Archie series to create each plot. 

Art

The characters are unmistakably themselves (in art style, as with all adaptations there are differences in characterization). I attribute this to the characters already being visually established after over 60 years at the time of the show's production. There are aspects of the designs that are simplified for the sake of transition to animation like Archie's freckles. In this episode, the pod people are well distinguished from the characters without looking much different. They change the walk, the expression, the movements and generally make them more harsh. Jughead's Potato looks like Jughead but there's no mistaking him for Jughead. They may small differences to his model to look more harsh. It would have made for good suspense if what was happening wasn't explicit at first and we first saw the change in Jughead's behavior. But that wouldn't have fit with a Saturday morning cartoon.

Presenting Tonight's Monster

The Great Potato - A Giant multi-eyed, extraterrestrial tuber