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00:00 Archie Giant Series 573.
00:04 Here's a story I missed because it wasn't mentioned on comics.org.
00:08 Sabrina comes home unrealistically wailing because she flunked spelling, as in a magic course.
00:14 She was supposed to turn a frog into a prince, and she summoned a dog called Prince.
00:21 She wouldn't screw that up.
00:23 It'd be easy to imagine a human prince, and she usually gets magic right.
00:28 This was by Sam Schwartz.
00:30 There's another Sabrina story with the full name of this writer, and I never saw another Archie story by a Sam, so I assume this is the last name.
00:38 Archie Giant Series 227 has another story about a witch, but this one isn't Sabrina.
00:45 It's just a Jughead meets a guy when playing pool who turns out to be a warlock out of nowhere.
00:51 What is this art with a giant amount of boring narration?
00:54 Jughead warns people to be careful with an old pool table they're bringing to the youth center.
00:59 And the writer even cares enough to establish where the table came from, saying it was a gift from a school.
01:05 Jughead spends time dusting it because he was on duty that day and nobody else was around.
01:11 Though I'm still feeling like it's out of character for Jughead to be here without a bribe.
01:17 Reggie, Veronica, and him are selfish, so it only makes sense for them to do charitable things if their friends were there with them.
01:24 So Jughead sees a short guy who looks distractingly similar to Reggie.
01:30 As the narration says, Jughead uttered the magic words, even though all he did was thank them.
01:36 Somehow, Jughead's never gonna point out that he looks like Reggie.
01:41 Instead, the guy says he wants to play pool, and he does so perfectly, and it's fortunately explained right away.
01:48 He's a supernatural figure. He says he's been playing pool for 900 years.
01:54 Why would he bother telling him this when witches aren't allowed to reveal their secrets to mortals and they wouldn't be believed anyways?
02:01 He's just so desperate to be honest with someone.
02:05 He explains that it's Warlock who made a mistake by beating the chief Warlock in the 11th century in a game of snooker.
02:12 I thought for a second that witches invented pool.
02:16 He explains instead that because witches can see into the future, they invented pool based off of mortals playing in the future.
02:23 The Warlock says that because of a spell, he's chained to this table until he gets beat.
02:29 So that means the reason he told a mortal his secret is that he'd rather get punished by the head witch than stay here forever.
02:35 I guess the spy witches don't care if a witch reveals her secret if no one believes her.
02:40 Jughead's friend shows up, and the predictable remarks are made by Reggie.
02:44 The pacing is too slow here.
02:46 Moose nicely holds up the Warlock and somehow ignores him, even though he's told to put him down, and he causes him to miss by accident.
02:54 This means the Warlock loses, and his celebration of this scares Jughead's friend away.
03:01 And then he tells Jughead that all of his 900 years of talent are his and warps away.
03:07 It's satisfying to see him prove he was a witch, and this is why I reviewed this story.
03:13 There's plenty of other Archie stories that suddenly have witchcraft in them for some reason, but this used it for good, and that's worth seeing.
03:21 Not like a story where Jughead gets a magic book because all he does is cause trouble with it obliviously, which rips off what Harvey did.
03:28 Archie giant series 482 has a story set in the future, and so does the next story.
03:34 And I've wanted to talk about these kinds of stories for some time because of that.
03:38 Because it's another universe, discos are still in style as Betty and her friends are watching some aliens dance there, and she says the view of Earth from the moon is beautiful.
03:47 Veronica's dialogue is stilted here and stupid. Who wouldn't think the moon would be our most important space base?
03:54 Betty suggests dancing to Archie, and it gets interesting when it turns out every male at the disco is immobilized.
04:02 It's weird that Betty says male instead of guy.
04:05 And if it's because there's aliens here too, I think people would end up thinking that refusing to call an alien a guy just because he's an alien is racist.
04:15 As I wonder how the aliens could be so sexist and think only the men need to be immobilized when they're advanced enough to do this,
04:23 Veronica has some more stilted dialogue by saying that the aliens going up to them are their enemies.
04:29 She doesn't even need to do this.
04:31 The name of their species doesn't matter when this would probably be their only appearance.
04:36 Betty says she'll switch on her automatic translator.
04:39 If it's automatic, she shouldn't need to switch it on.
04:43 She would've already done this before going here because she'd know there could be aliens here anyways.
04:49 One of the aliens calls the guy beside him Commander, and his commander gets told that females don't count, and he agrees with him,
04:56 and even calls himself stupid somehow despite being their proud leader.
05:00 If he's this sexist, why did he even bother pointing out that the girls weren't frozen in time?
05:05 The commander gets told that the moon's defenses were disconnected.
05:09 It makes sense that with people freezing technology they could do that, even if the defenses were guarded.
05:15 So they plan to attack Earth.
05:17 I guess the reason they didn't take over the Earth a lot earlier is that they only found out Earth was valuable after other aliens that they already knew about discovered Earth.
05:26 So they followed them here.
05:28 And I guess the reason they target Earth is because they think it's an easy target, and they just invented this technology.
05:35 And while they could've used the telescope to discover Earth could have life a long time ago, that wouldn't prove that it does.
05:42 Let alone that it has anything they want.
05:44 They're in spacesuits when no one else here is.
05:47 Betty and Veronica run ahead with space helmets on, while Veronica says that the Gorgons don't think females are capable of piloting spaceships.
05:56 So that only makes sense if Gorgon females aren't allowed to learn how to pilot them.
06:01 In the next panel they're in a spaceship without their helmets on.
06:05 Why did they think that just the helmets would be enough?
06:09 The moon is really hot when it's not in the shade, and they don't have oxygen tanks on their backs.
06:14 But it's like the helmets do something to them to make them not need to breathe, and keep their whole body at the right temperature.
06:20 That is to keep the helmets on for protection.
06:23 They find out they can't warn Earth in time because the aliens threw a communications blanket around it.
06:29 Betty gets told there's two spaceships following them, and she smirks confidently while holding something with crosshairs, and causes the spaceship to destroy both of them.
06:40 It's out of character for Betty to be happy about destroying people, no matter who they are.
06:45 She'd still feel bad about it.
06:47 And she's very lucky she accurately hit them both on the first try with no experience.
06:53 Since they don't have a weapon big enough to destroy the starship, Betty says their only chance is to make them destroy themselves.
07:01 I love how smart the main character is here.
07:04 A radar missile gets fired at them, which has the word "super" in front of it, which is silly.
07:10 Betty plans to turn the spaceship slowly at the right speed.
07:14 How does she know the right speed?
07:16 I don't think it'd matter.
07:18 She has the missile follow her on a direct course to the enemy battle station, turns just in time, and the missile's radar picks the battle station.
07:27 It sure is an inconvenience for the aliens that they didn't think to make the missile unable to choose to target their own station.
07:34 It's believable that they never anticipated this, though.
07:37 Though this would've felt more believable if Betty never said this, and instead she waited so long to turn that as soon as she did, the missile ended up hitting the station because it was too fast to turn away from it in time.
07:48 Conveniently, Archie and Reggie saw the whole thing.
07:52 Because apparently, the immobilization was just that temporary.
07:56 So they congratulate them, and the story ends with them planning to dance after all.
08:01 This story's about Betty saving the world from invading aliens by flying a spaceship and turning it at just the right time so that a missile following it blows up an alien space station instead of her.
08:12 Which she only gets to do because the aliens didn't immobilize her since they assume everyone female is forbidden from learning how to pilot spaceships.
08:20 It's nothing like an Archie story, but it's still nearly flawlessly written.
08:25 But I doubt any sentient lifeforms could get to the point of having such advanced technology without their women getting right since that was inevitable.
08:33 But fine, we only know what our planet is like.
08:36 I didn't expect this kind of plot, but it's interesting.
08:40 And while nothing about it requires these characters, that doesn't make it bad.
08:45 It did require these characters for me to even learn about the story and give it a chance.
08:50 In Archie Giant Series 485, Archie somehow calls a robot the smartest one he ever saw just for knowing how to put a jacket on him.
09:00 As he's standing near what must've been a genetically engineered cactus.
09:05 He says Veronica will flip when she sees him.
09:08 Clearly this is a robot he just bought.
09:10 You'd think it'd be too expensive for him.
09:13 And Archie should know that if Veronica's rich and he must've just bought this robot because it just went on the market, then Veronica would already have a better robot.
09:21 Of course she does.
09:23 When he says this robot could do anything he can better, I guess she's just joking when she asks if that applies to kissing.
09:30 She says a robot wants her working on the balance beam and can do all of her routines better.
09:36 Why is her servant robot programmed to do that when it won't benefit her?
09:40 I thought Archie would be disappointed that she is a robot too.
09:44 But so much for that conflict.
09:46 He says they have to practice for tonight's roller disco dance contest.
09:51 I guess the reason Veronica doubts they'll win despite being arrogant is that Archie's her partner.
09:56 He says he knows they'll win when they turn on their rocket belts.
10:00 And when we see them at the disco, it actually matters this time that there's some four-legged aliens because it makes them better at dancing.
10:07 I guess that's the idea.
10:08 Veronica says they're impressing everyone with their routine even though the only person whose expression we can see looks concerned.
10:15 So he was rooting for the alien.
10:17 They get some applause, but the contest has a last-minute entry, which is probably gonna win because the writer thought you'd be jealous if Archie won.
10:26 So the robots enter the contest, and they win.
10:30 It sure is generous of that guy to give them the trophy and roses even though they're servant robots who get bought by humans.
10:38 It makes sense that there wouldn't be anything in the rules against robots entering.
10:42 If they're so recent.
10:44 Archie's robot hopes he's proud of him, only for Archie to go to the robot factory and say he and Veronica want to exchange these robots for ones that aren't so efficient.
10:54 So at least the people that annoyed us in the story got punished.
10:58 Even if it's still a sad ending because they wouldn't have entered the contest if they were told not to.
11:03 They could just tell them never to enter a contest again that they're planning to enter.
11:10 This story is about Archie and Veronica entering a roller skating dance contest and losing to the personal robots that somehow Archie could afford.
11:19 It's believable that they didn't think to forbid their robots from entering the contest.
11:24 Because they only thought of them as servants, not people with their own desires.
11:29 But is it really realistic that robots would even be allowed to enter the contest?
11:34 It wouldn't be fair to everyone else who'd have to spend way longer learning how to get skilled.
11:39 Well, they only had to watch someone once to pick it up.
11:42 But I assume the person who gave them the award didn't know that.
11:47 I like that the story told the story of a cunt having a regular Archie story.
11:51 While still almost being a regular Archie story.
11:54 Archie's got some other stories that take place in the future and they're under the label Archie 3000.
12:00 There's a 2019 comic too, but based on the characterization quality of the 2010 Sabrina stories I read, I'm gonna ignore it.
12:07 Because with older stories, I know they're gonna portray the characters right and draw them right.
12:13 Archie apologizes to Betty because he can't sit and talk as he's on the roof of Pop Tate's near a hologram cinema.
12:20 And his dialogue's stilted when he flies his car away.
12:23 He flies it over to heavy traffic and switches it to autopilot.
12:27 But there aren't any cars above his, so he should have known he could just fly up to go over them.
12:32 But maybe that's illegal because if any car could decide to go up at any time when no one would know when that happened,
12:38 then there could be a car accident from that at any point.
12:41 Though it being illegal wouldn't stop it from happening, but an upturn signal could solve that problem.
12:47 Archie goes to Jughead's house and sees him sitting in a chair as a robot hand pours a soda into his mouth
12:54 and another one's scratching his foot.
12:56 And another one is holding a TV.
12:59 He somehow talks like it isn't easy thinking of things for these hands to do.
13:04 And generously offers him food from his magical insta-food machine.
13:09 You'd think he'd be fat by now, but this isn't keeping with the canon established in most of Archie,
13:15 where no matter how much he eats and doesn't exercise, he almost never gains weight.
13:20 Archie has some stilted dialogue turning him down,
13:23 and out of nowhere, it turns out that the insta-food machine can still run out of hot dogs.
13:28 And why would it repeat itself when warning him?
13:31 Archie tells him that getting more hot dogs will give him some exercise.
13:35 And he flies his car to the mall.
13:38 And Jughead visits his secret shop.
13:41 If it was really a secret, it'd have gone out of business.
13:44 Jughead's not that rich.
13:47 He asks for hot dog pills.
13:49 And there's more stilted dialogue as he says that as soon as they're exposed to air,
13:54 they magically turn into hot dogs with condiments.
13:58 Archie sees a photo of Michael Jackson.
14:01 And Jughead says those are antiques.
14:04 And Archie has some more stilted dialogue he wouldn't say.
14:07 He doesn't remember which button changes the radio station somehow, despite all the times he used his car.
14:14 As the buttons aren't even labeled.
14:17 So a trap door opens on the bottom of the car and lets all the food out.
14:23 At least it's used the flying car in a new way.
14:26 Normally I'd think this comic series rips off the Jetsons.
14:30 But that series never added space mobiles have trap doors on the bottom for easy access.
14:35 Why would they when people could just open the car door to get in?
14:40 Reggie unrealistically talks to himself about his whole plan to get to Veronica's house five minutes before Archie would,
14:46 and tell him she sent him.
14:49 He says this so that it could feel more satisfying when it gets pelted with food.
14:54 But it's not enough to make me enjoy it because I still feel sorry for Jughead for having wasted money on food.
15:00 He assumes the food is garbage from a new power station for no reason.
15:05 It skips ahead in time to so much later that it's dark out.
15:09 So there's no reason Reggie would still be covered in stains.
15:13 And the food falling out of the car gets reported on the local news.
15:17 Jughead wouldn't have seen that because teenagers don't watch the news.
15:21 And even though he knows the food he bought disappeared,
15:24 the story still ends with him not knowing that Archie is responsible for what happened somehow.
15:30 I guess he thinks it happened more than once.
15:33 In the next story, Veronica throws a bone at a dog, and she's mad when it vanishes,
15:38 and says her hologram projector is malfunctioning again.
15:42 So she has to call the repair robot.
15:45 There's no reason the job of a repairman would be replaced by robots,
15:50 because that'd just drive the unemployment rate up on something humans can probably do.
15:55 Although if it gets to the point where you'd have to study for a really long time just to learn how to do something,
16:02 if it gets to a ridiculous amount of time, it would make sense that we'd just leave robots to that task.
16:09 What's interesting about this whole comic is getting to see the unique 80s hairstyles Betty and Veronica constantly have.
16:16 You might call it crazy, but it always gives me something interesting to look at, and they're pretty enough regardless.
16:22 And we don't know what the future has in store for hairstyles,
16:25 so I can sort of buy that the future could look like this.
16:29 The people of the 80s would have thought Space Beth looked crazy too,
16:33 but I do find the silly long hair of Archie immediately off-putting.
16:38 Betty suggests getting a real dog, and Veronica's smart enough to say that it'd have to be fed and wonked.
16:44 Although since she's rich, why doesn't she realize she could just get her butler or servant robot to do this for her?
16:51 I guess she knows her dad would expect her to do that herself.
16:55 Betty says that the pet store can program any pet with a personality of its potential owner,
17:00 which is just begging to backfire if the personality sucks like hers does.
17:06 So this would only still be offered if most of the personalities of their customers are good.
17:11 She sees a lot of uncommon pets.
17:14 Eventually a helmet gets put on her and a dog,
17:17 and she finds out the dog is so fussy that she won't eat until she sees a menu first,
17:22 and won't let her take a look in the mirror, and whines if she doesn't get what she wants.
17:27 So eventually, after she complains to Betty, she says she could give her Betty's personality,
17:33 when she should have expected that this would result in the dog being mad at her when Archie's around.
17:38 The story actually ends with her threatening to give the dog Jughead's personality.
17:43 The story definitely ended early this time, even if it was too predictable to need to show her trying this again.
17:51 She would get nagged at for giving the dog Jughead's appetite because of all the dog food her father would need to buy.
17:57 And of course Reggie's personality is right out.
18:00 But what harm could a pet do with Dilton's personality?
18:04 She wouldn't have the opposable thumbs to do anything anyways.
18:07 In the next story, Pop Tate entrusts his place to Archie and his friends,
18:11 instead of any other customers that aren't constantly screwing up or feuding with each other.
18:16 As if there is only customers.
18:19 He plans to take his staff to a management seminar,
18:23 and tells them to go out the kitchen door when they leave for the day,
18:26 because it'll lock all the doors and activate the invisible force field.
18:30 Why lock the doors then?
18:32 I guess it's because if there's a blackout afterwards, the doors will still be locked.
18:36 And he's just hoping that nobody knows how to lockpick anymore.
18:40 And I guess somehow it's more cheap to have the force field be invisible, for no reason.
18:46 He tells them to punch in the numbers on the card to get back in.
18:50 Gee, I wonder if they'll get themselves locked out.
18:53 He sure is desperate if he still lets them help him after he hopes he knows what he's doing.
18:58 I guess he doesn't have any family in Riverdale, so this isn't inexcusable.
19:03 Pop and his staff get warped away, and kids show up at his restaurant for a birthday party.
19:09 Since when does Pop have staff anyways?
19:13 I guess he has a whole restaurant chain.
19:16 There's a lazy fat joke as Betty runs out of room in her order computer's memory because of how much someone ordered.
19:23 Veronica's somehow able to erase the memory by accident,
19:27 and Reggie is busy flirting, saying that Two Moons is romantic on Mars.
19:33 RG tells them to take some orders instead, and Jughead orders food,
19:37 only for the machine to somehow create a flower in a pot.
19:41 Somehow this is just the result of him talking with his mouth full,
19:45 even though nothing he said would make it sound like he said "flower" and "fish" with his mouth full.
19:50 Then Betty tells RG to take an order,
19:53 and Veronica tells him to take hers first for no reason with the lame excuse that it's bigger.
19:58 And RG tells Jughead to put the synthesizer on high speed.
20:02 He turns it too high up, and there really was something wrong with it because it can't stop it.
20:08 So it fills the restaurant, and RG tells everyone to get out.
20:12 But we only see him and his friends leave.
20:15 The force field goes up, and the computer codes in a jacket inside.
20:20 And RG has to explain everything to Puff as the story ends with the customers being mad,
20:25 instead of enjoying eating the food that fills the restaurant.
20:29 In the next story, someone at a mall flatters Betty into sitting in front of a mirror that compliments her
20:34 and recommends specific makeup and clothing pieces.
20:38 So they decide to buy them to get ready for a dance,
20:41 because apparently they were given advice that they wouldn't have thought of,
20:45 when the only advice that they wouldn't have known to do was the last advice for both of them,
20:50 where a white scarf was called red.
20:54 Veronica could have easily not bothered to tell RG what she bought,
20:58 since usually she doesn't tell her male friends what she buys.
21:02 But she wanted to brag, and was just as surprised as I was that he laughed at her.
21:06 Neither RG or RG explain why they're laughing at their girlfriend.
21:11 So I have to assume they think they're too vain and don't have faith in themselves to make the right decision in beauty care,
21:17 uncharacteristically.
21:19 Betty tells them that they might get the attention of every other guy at the dance,
21:23 so since she did that to try to save face,
21:26 RG plans to slip a different program into their mirrors to screw things up.
21:31 Sure is convenient for them that they already had program disks that were compatible with the mirrors they just heard about.
21:38 And they're not brilliant programmers either.
21:41 They must have just made one recording.
21:44 So the girls get lied to that they're ugly and given ridiculous advice.
21:49 There's no way they'd put purple mascara on their cheeks.
21:53 I can actually understand the rest, though.
21:55 Veronica's so pretty that she still looks good like this,
21:58 and she's so rich that people could just think she's picked up a new trend from France and follow her.
22:03 Unfortunately, it's explained why she and Betty are following this advice.
22:07 They just assume they're out of touch with today's fashions.
22:11 Still, they'd recognize Archie and Reggie's voices.
22:14 So I have to assume that the program disguises their voices.
22:18 The real plot hole is that they'd question this because Veronica just experienced a talking mirror that didn't give her any of its advice,
22:25 and then told her prankster friend about it.
22:28 And she's always up to date on the latest fashion.
22:31 So she just assumes that they just changed fashion.
22:36 I don't see the point of reading what the program's saying when it's illustrated by what they're doing anyways.
22:41 I'd feel more sorry for them if the twist wasn't so predictable.
22:45 Archie and Reggie hide behind bushes as Veronica and Betty stop themselves from insulting each other's appearances to praise each other.
22:53 There's no way they wouldn't hear Reggie and Archie.
22:56 Even if they had whispering text bubbles, Reggie was still laughing and that'd be loud anyways.
23:01 I have to assume that they think it's too late to change.
23:04 So they're ignoring them because they want to get going to the nightclub over with.
23:09 Archie finds out that the other girls at the club look weird too.
23:13 So one of the girls compliments Betty and Veronica.
23:16 And so do the guys, who call Archie and Reggie unsophisticated.
23:20 This only would've worked if we saw other girls see Betty and Veronica before they went to the dance.
23:26 If it's already common for girls to dress weird in the future,
23:30 even though most people would have trouble not laughing at the one with teacups on her head,
23:35 Archie and Reggie would've already known that their ridiculous advice would be good advice since they have seen so many other girls.
23:42 Apparently fashion changed right after their prank, so the girls were up to date on fashion by the hour it changed.
23:50 I feel like it'll take too long to summarize all the stories.
23:54 Especially since technically I have the same things to say about all of them.
23:59 They're interesting, but sometimes their plot progression is forced.
24:02 And sometimes their dialogue is stilted.
24:06 The first story was by Rex Lindsay.
24:09 The next two were by Harold Smith, who's credited as Hal Smith for some reason.
24:14 And the final story is by Dan Parent.
24:17 I guess they're good, even if they're all idiot plots.
24:20 But these characters weren't supposed to be idiots.