Monday, January 2, 2012

From out of the Recycling Bin: Super Witch (1977)

In 1977, The Archies moved from CBS to NBC after a year's break, during which time a live-action pilot had been produced for ABC by James Komack (Chico & The Man, Welcome Back, Kotter). Said pilot bombed out, and so the gang moved laterally across the dial again.

However, The Archie-Sabrina Hour, which introduced a new cast member in Carlos, a Latino teen, didn't click with viewers. It's not that hard to fathom why. The series was slotted opposite Scooby's All-Star Laff-a-Lympics on ABC, and was subsequently buried. Before the year was out, the one-hour format was scrapped, and the series split into two component parts, The Bang Shang Lallapalooza Show (Archie) & Super Witch, which, as you'll see, recycled parts of the open to Sabrina's 1971 solo series, but with a new theme song. The open also emphasizes Reggie Mantle's efforts to expose Sabrina's witchcraft to the rest of the gang.



NBC bade farewell to the Riverdale gang in the Spring of '78, and it would be more than a decade before they would return to Saturday mornings, albeit in a new incarnation, The New Archies, which we've previously reviewed. Since we already had reviewed Sabrina's 1971 show, there is no need to rate this over again.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

This used to be my alternative when a repeat of Laff-A-Lympics was running on ABC. Unfortunately, the networks canned it.

It was OK but the bit with Reggie trying to expose Sabrina just seemed like a retread of Mrs. Kravitz on "Bewitched". It bugged and even a little kid like me saw that a mile away.

hobbyfan said...

The bits with Reggie attempting to expose Sabrina were originally done back in the previous series. Sabrina got the "Super Witch" label as a means of trying to hook the superhero crowd, especially with Space/Young Sentinels rounding out what was a 90-minute Filmation block on NBC. I'm going to see if I can find an episode that ended up with Sabrina altering a pic of herself with the Goolies so that she's surrounded by multiple images of Reggie, just to get even with him and protect her secret.