producer: It was a terrible show. I mean, we didn’t do him justice, and it was tough. We didn’t want to do it terribly, but given the fact that we had a real interesting talent involved it was not as good as it should have been. But I will say that he wasn’t involved that much. He didn’t want to do any live material, which would have helped. I don’t think he wanted to do the voices either; publicly, we said that he said it was because his voice was not the same as it had been when he made the movies. He also didn’t want to be actively involved in the plotting or scripting, though he gave us some input, of course. Jerry suggested a guy named David Lander for his voice. I think he was working as Jerry’s chauffer. Ironically, he was a graduate of Carnegie Tech as well. This is about five years or so before he got cast on Laverne & Shirley and really hit big. This may have been one of his first jobs. He certainly could do the Jerry Lewis character voice, so we used him principally for that. We used Jane Webb in the female roles, including the girlfriend, Rhonda, and Howard Morris played the rest of the characters other than Jerry specifically. The funny thing was that Howie had played Lewis’s father in The Nutty Professor in 1963, and here he was playing the Professor! The plot was that Jerry’s character worked at the Odd Job Employment Agency. Out on jobs, he would meet characters he had played in his movies like The Family Jewels, The Nutty Professor, The Bellboy, and others. One important change about the Filmation shows, starting with Jerry Lewis, I believe; in the closing credits, Hal Sutherland’s name got written with a fancy script. Since Norm and I got the circle, he got his own bit of style, and believe me, he earned it! Before we get into our next big hit show, I’m going to backtrack for a bit to cover where The Archies had been this year and where they went. On January 4, 1970, The Ed Sullivan Show featured its third
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LOU SCHEIMER: CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION
appearance of The Archies, with Ed introducing the animated clip for “Jingle Jangle.” On February 7th, the song hit #10 on the pop singles chart. By mid-March “Jingle Jangle” had gone gold, and the next single, “Who’s Your Baby?” had already sold 600,000 copies. On Sunday, March 22nd, CBS aired its third Archie primetime special, titled The Archie Sugar, Sugar, Jingle Jangle Show. This was mostly a rebroadcast of Archie and His New Pals, but with a different opening title and the songs “Sugar, Sugar,” “Jingle Jangle,” and “Who’s My Baby?” mixed in. It would be the final time this particular show was repurposed, though the music would survive for many decades thereafter. Archie Comics was still supporting us in a big way. In addition to featuring blurbs about the shows on their covers and relentlessly pimping them in their news pages in the books, Everything’s Archie featured the band regularly. And in Archie’s Pals ’n’ Gals #57 in April 1970, they did a third story that referenced the show and music directly, called “The Big Hit Fit,” in which the halls of Riverdale High became awash with the sounds of “Sugar, Sugar.” Meanwhile, RCA pumped out more Archies records, with a new album called Sunshine, a re-release of the first Archies album under the new title “Sugar, Sugar,” and, eventually, The Archies Greatest Hits. “Sunshine” was the sixth single, and by August the cumulative total for the six Archies singles was over ten million copies sold! This was better than The Hardy Boys were faring, who only managed two albums and three singles before fading away into bubblegum pop history. As we began work, the Archie entry for the 1970 fall television season was given an unwieldy full title of Archie’s Fun House Featuring the Giant Juke Box—though everyone called it simply “Archie’s Fun House”—and the hour-long show was set to feature three new songs per episode. We also filmed a live-action opening with kids in the audience watching The Archies onstage by the Giant