Episode 1: HISTORY — The Unlikely History Of Josie And The Pussycats
From an unexpected romance during the Second World War to the Civil Rights movement of sixties in America, Josie and the Pussycat’s road to creation is an unlikely one writes Maria Lewis.
Josie and the Pussycats. Depending on who you are, where you are, even who old you are, those words will likely mean something different to you than, say, the person sitting next to you. They might be a fan of the CW’s pseudo noir TV series Riverdale, where Josie and the Pussycats are a band comprised of three women of colour trying to break out of the mould their parents and peers have fit them into. You, on the flip side, might be a die-hard obsessive of the 2001 cult classicJosie and the Pussycats, a biting satirical commentary on the music industry and capitalism at the turn of the century. Those are both two very different and very modern takes on the beloved characters, who have a far richer pop cultural history than you might think. And to understand where we are, it’s important to understand where we’ve come from …
Josie and the Pussycats was a spin-off within Archie Comics, a world that was first birthed by comic book artist and writer Bob Montana. “You know, my father always used to say Archie was famous, not him,” says Montana’s daughter, Lynn, from her home in New Hampshire. “He was the kind of guy (who) was more happy in the background in his jeans and t-shirt, riding in his pick-up truck to go get his mail and talking to people in the street... But you know, he did do something that is a wonderful legacy because it made people laugh and it brought a little cheer and pleasure into people’s lives. That’s what he wanted to do for a living, as well as satisfy his own desire to be an artist of a sort, that was always his dream: to create his own cartoon strip.” For Lynn – along with her siblings – Montana’s “legacy is worth remembering” and Archie’s legacy is one of the richest.
Comic books are considered one of the great American inventions and Archie Comics – which started out as MLJ Comics in 1939 – was right there at the very start of the medium. The Archie characters – which included the red-headed title guy himself, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, the whole gang – first appeared on the page in the early 1940s thanks to Montana and publisher John L. Goldwater. Everything from the personalities and physicalities of the cast to the geography of the town of Riverdale and the high school itself was said to be drawn very heavily from Montana’s own experiences. First appearing in Pep Comics, Archie soon got his own title called – quite simply – Archie. And ever since then, he has become a mainstay of pop culture.
“It’s quintessential white middle America so it has been popular in those circles basically since the forties,” says Tim Hanley, comic book historian and author of several books including the forthcoming Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale. “I mean, any character at a certain point will sustain a life of its own: Batman and Superman tend to, Archie kind of hit big in the forties and snowballed from there.” Bob Montana passed away at the age of 54 in 1975 after having a heart attack while cross-country skiing near his home, but his legacy has lived on largely thanks to the hard work of his family like Lynn and her siblings, Archie obsessives and his hometown of Meredith in New Hampshire, which inspired so much of his work.
The town has certainly kept his memory alive with monuments built to honour Bob himself and the colourful cast of characters, including an Archie bench which is currently wearing a face mask right now to fight Coronavirus. Montana’s Archie universe was so unique, it has been able to endure without him and constantly regenerate as other creators added fresh spins, takes, and characters of their own. Enter stage left: Dan DeCarlo. “At the time, Dan DeCarlo was an artist for Archie, not the head lead artist he would become down the road,” says Hanley. “Even though comics were big in the fifties, most people were still trying to get into comic strips. If you could get a comic strip in a newspaper that’s where the money was. DeCarlo had done a strip and Stan Lee wrote it in 1959, it lasted about a year. Through those contacts, he came up with some more strips after that one ended and one of the ones he pitched was an early version of Josie and the Pussycats, which was at that time basically Archie with a female lead more or less.”
The story of how DeCarlo ended up creating Josie within the Archie Comics universe itself is the stuff of legend and it goes a ‘lil something like this: in his early twenties, he was drafted into the US Army. During the Second World War, he drew a weekly military cartoon for the allies and painted mascots on the noses of airplanes. It was during this time that he Josette ‘Josie’ Dumont: she was French, a former model, and she had been set up with DeCarlo on a blind date in Belgium in 1945 just after the Battle Of the Bulge. And they had it – whatever ‘it’ was - it sparked between the two of them despite DeCarlo not speaking French and DuMont not speaking English. They learned. They fell in love.
“We communicated with drawing,” Josie told the Chicago Tribune. “He would draw things for me to make me understand what he had in mind. He was really so amusing. Instead of just using words, he would use cartoons to express himself. Right away, we knew that we were meant for each other.” The war ended and they got married, had twin boys who would later go on to work for Archie, something something something, next minute they’re on a cruise in the Caribbean. There was a dress-up party, champagne was bubblin’, and Josie - who was now Mrs Josie DeCarlo - dressed up as a pussycat: the ears, the tail, the whole thing. That’s where the first seed of what would become Josie and the Pussycats was planted in DeCarlo’s mind.
It’s easy to draw a through-line between what the band was as a musical act and what was popular at the time. Josie and the Pussycats debuted during the height of all-female girl groups like The Supremes, The Shangri-Las, The Ronnettes, The Marvelettes and with the exception of The Andrews Sisters - who were very popular during WWII - the most successful of these acts were black. Yet this was the sixties in America: the hair was big, the eyeliner was bigger, but biggest of all was the racism: it was insidious, it was deadly, it was ever-present. Josie debuted in Archie Comics in February 1963. In August of that same year, 250,000 people campaigning for Civil Rights in America gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in what would become known as the March On Washington D.C. and Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his infamous I Have A Dream speech.
Racial segregation still existed in much of America, landmark cases were still being fought in courts to bring an end to Jim Crow laws, African Americans were still marginalised, vilified, and murdered. The Civil Rights movement was at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds and along with the Vietnam War, it was the dominant political discussion of the sixties. So … what does that have to do with a fictional trio of chicks who dress up as pussycats and play pop songs? Well, that trio was not how we recognise it today. “Josie and the Pussycats gets picked up by Archie in 1962 and it’s – there’s no Pussycats yet – it’s Josie, Melody, it’s Pepper instead of Valerie,” says Hanley. “Then with the cartoon they reconfigure it and bring in Valerie in 1969, which was kind of huge for comics. Archie would bring in some black characters later with Chuck and Nancy, but that was mid-seventies. They had Puerto Rican characters they brought in too like Frankie and Maria, years down the road though. Valerie was quite ahead of that. Even if you look at the mainstream superhero publications at the time, Marvel had Black Panther at this stage I suppose, but at DC there wasn’t a whole lot so Valerie was huge for representation in comics.”
The cartoon, of course, was the Hanna-Barbera animated series Josie and the Pussycats, which ran for just one season from 1970 to 1971 and aired on CBS every Saturday morning. There were only 16 episodes originally, but reruns the following year saw Josie and the Pussycats reach a massive, mainstream audience as they were beamed into the households of millions. It’s Valerie’s voice – sung by Patrice Holloway - you hear singing the lead in the theme song for the cartoon. In terms of representation, if you can see it, you can be it, and suddenly Archie had a very popular property where one third of the band was not white. Furthermore, the character of Valerie – if you’ve ever seen the cartoon – was the smart one in the group. She was reasonable, logical, a mechanical whizz, and really the glue that held everyone together. Playing bass and tambourine, her sheer existence broke boundaries at the time.
Valerie was the first black character in the main cast of a Saturday morning cartoon. Ever. “They got a lot of pushback for it as well, the TV show more so than the comics,” says Hanley. “Patrice Holloway sang so good that Valerie was allowed to exist.” Let’s repeat that one more time, for those up the back: Patrice Holloway sang so good that Valerie was allowed to exist. It’s the bossest thing, but it’s also true. The daughter of Motown legend Brenda Holloway, Patrice was kind of unbelievable. Among some early singles, she had with Capitol Records were tracks like Stolen Hours and Ecstasy, both of which are still highly effective earworms today. Before the Josie and the Pussycats animated series hit the small screen, Hanna-Barbera started developing an IRL Josie and the Pussycats band that would be the singing voices of the gals in the cartoon but also release an album and work as multi-platform cross-promotion.
It seems like a weird thing to imagine right now in 2020: it’s like Netflix actually staging an intergalactic song competition to tie in with the Get Schwifty episode of Rick and Morty season two. Yet in the fifties, sixties, seventies, it wasn’t actually that unusual: the first Archie Comics animated Saturday morning cartoon was called The ArchieShow and it was a colossal win for CBS in the ratings. Plus, the band in the show The Archies also had a Billboard No.1 with Sugar, Sugar which became the biggest song of 1969 and is still in high rotation today. This led to attempts at an Archie variety show, a Sabrina The Teenage Witch animated series which ran for four years in the seventies, and eventually the Josie show. To form the band, auditions took place in Los Angeles with hundreds of girls vying to be one of the final three, among them Patrice Holloway who already worked with Capitol and was so good she sings Valerie into existence.
Danny’s Janssen’s La La Productions are tasked with putting the group together and as a hit songwriter, he knows what he’s doing when he presents Josie and the Pussycats with Patrice as Valerie, Cathy Dougher as Josie, and Cherie Moor as Melody (who’s better known now as Cheryl Ladd). As mentioned, there were … issues. Hanna-Barbera were not keen on Patrice as Hanley said - they wanted an all-white trio - which Janssen refused to do and threatened to walk away from the whole project altogether. He’d written for The Partridge Family and had a lot of clout in the music industry: he had capital and he leveraged it to make sure Patrice wasn’t expendable. The arts tend to be a little more woke than other industries and folks heard about Janssen flexing and Hanna-Barbera flinching, so much so that a bunch of some of the most legendary session musicians offered their services at a major discount to show their support for the stand he’d taken – including musos from Elvis Presley’s band including Jerry Scheff (who played bass just like the fictional Valerie) and Ronnie Tutt on drums (just like the fictional Melody).
The band Josie and the Pussycats released one album in conjunction with the first season of the animated series: it was called Josie and the Pussycats and featured the IRL girls on the cover posing in black leotards and sheer stockings, with the cartoon characters up in the corner to make the visual comparison. Now there wasn’t a big hit on the album, they cut some covers, some originals, some unreleased songs that appeared just in the show, and some Kellogg's mail-order only singles (most which were all pretty good including Inside, Outside, Upside-Down that was co-written by Janssen). They released six singles for the charts, but there was no Sugar, Sugar like The Archies, which … is okay. Honestly? Their songs were better, like the Jackson 5-esque You’ve Come A Long Way Baby.
Despite the band, the fervour, the investment, the Josie and the Pussycats animated series didn’t get a second season on per say … they got sent into space. Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Spacehad 16 episodes and ran from 1973 to 1974. It saw the trio – Josie, Melody, and Valerie – accidentally elbowed into a spacecraft by villain Alexandra and sent off into space. Being teen musicians and not astronauts, you think it would be all over, red rover, but of course Valerie takes charge and works out how to fly the spaceship. It’s wacky and it’s weird, leaning into a lot of the popular sci-fi tropes of the time with each episode seeing the Pussycats visit a different planet. The spaceship in the TV series was also modelled after the Spaceship Discovery in Stanley Kuberick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had come out only a few years earlier in 1968. The songs aren’t as good, neither are the storylines including a few towards the end of the season that try to address that ‘pesky’ Second Wave Feminism that was on the rise. There was a character called Bleep though, an alien pet thing that looked like an equally horrifying version of the Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty. Seemingly only Melody could understand it, with its only dialogue being “bleep”. Over. And over. And over again.
“I just thought Melody and Bleep Bleep were the coolest thing,” says Forrest Satchell, who grew up watching both versions of the cartoon and is a Josie and the Pussycats fanatic. “Josie and the Pussycats In Outer Space was my first encounter with the Pussycats. I was too young when it first came on TV but it was in syndication in Los Angeles on KCOP Channel 13. The first time I ever saw it they were in outer space and I was just addicted immediately to it. I was like ‘what is this?’ … I was obsessed with the spaceship, I would constantly draw it even though it looked like someone’s mother’s vibrator. It was my first, like, pop culture love – until I discovered Lynda Carter and Wonder Woman of course.” Bleep was originally designed to be manufactured and sold as a toy, of course, and there was a whole range of Josie and the Pussycats In Outer Space merchandise on the market including hairbrushes and underwear sets.
That wasn’t enough to make it a success, however, and it too was cancelled after just the one season. Yet the show – like its predecessor – ended up in syndication and those reruns of both the original Josie and the Pussycats animated series and Josie and the Pussycats In Outer Space cultivated generations of fans like Forrest as they ran on repeat right up until the late nineties. It had a big cultural impact, according to Co-President of Archie Comics and author Alex Segura. “I think they really set the stage for a lot of bands that you see in the 1970s,” he says. “The Runaways or just these all girl/all women bands that don’t need to be shepherded in by some kind of dude … They did it on their own: they wrote their own songs, they play their own instruments, it’s really empowering. And it’s been that way since the beginning! Josie starts off as a solo character and then she becomes a part of this band and that’s when it really took off, that’s when people were really attracted to the story.”
It’s something that has kept people attracted to it as a property and Josie in particular for years. Even when Archie as a traditional comic wasn’t as popular as it once was during the grunge era of the nineties, Dan DeCarlo’s spin-offs had traction: he co-created Sabrina The Teenage Witch, which after its own cartoon in the seventies became an enduring sitcom that ran from 1996 to 2003 on ABC with Melissa Joan Hart. It had a huge audience on Friday nights, around 17 million viewers in the US alone. And yes, some of them may have been old school Archie fans and familiar with the perky teenage witch and her aunts that started off in Bob Montana’s original Riverdale world, but a large chunk of them had no idea where Sabrina came from. They were an entirely new audience, an entirely new generation, and the viability of Josie as a brand with a fresh, modern spin started to look promising once again... not that it had ever stopped being just that to the fans.
This article is a written version of the Josie and the Podcats episode History. Josie and the Podcats is a limited podcast series hosted by best-selling author, screenwriter and journalist Maria Lewis, and produced by Blake Howard of One Heat Minute. New episodes release every Sunday, with bonus episodes during the week.
