Sabrina And The Groovie Goolies

There has been a misconception which has been endlessly repeated for 50 years that states "The Groovie Goolies" was a spin-off of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch." It wasn't actually a spin-off; it was a companion show. But to fully explain this, let's begin with a light history of Sabrina's character since there's an excessive amount of misinformation about her too...

From Comics to Television

The October 1962 issue of "Archie's Madhouse" introduced Sabrina Spellman to the world. Although the creators only intended to showcase her in a single story, it concluded with the teaser "More adventures of Sabrina-the-Teen-Age Witch to follow!" Readers were eager for her further exploits, so she returned to the comic in February 1963, and immediately became a staple of the series, garnering her first cover story in August.

Filmation had begun producing "The Archie Show" in 1968, and it was an overwhelming success. The next season, CBS expanded the show by 30-minutes and retitled it "The Archie Comedy Hour." Needing material to bloat the running time with reruns from the previous show, Filmation decided to relocated Sabrina from Greendale to nearby Riverdale so she could interact with the Archie gang. She made her TV debut on September 13, 1969, in two shorts that introduced characters from her world, and the following day CBS aired a prime-time special entitled "Archie and His New Pals," which was set on Sabrina's first day at Riverdale High.

Enter the Groovie Goolies

Not only was the new incarnation of Archie a ratings winner, but it featured a lead-in from a brand new ghost-chasing hound named Scooby-Doo. CBS decided to spin Sabrina off into her own series, and the success of Scooby-Doo prompted the network to pick up an original show that Filmation had been developing, "The Kookie Spookies" (although it was later renamed "Groovie Goolies" to avoid confusion with Hasbro's "Spooky Kooky" toy line). They decided to put the two shows together in an hour-long block, which was becoming customary on Saturday mornings.

Pairing Sabrina with the Goolies gave them an instant boost in popularity and dropping them into her show provided additional comedic conflict with the Archies. The monster trio (Drac, Frankie and Wolfie) were referred to as Aunt Hilda's nephews and Sabrina's cousins, although their bizarre family dynamic was never explored.

Each episode of "Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies" began with a 15-minute Sabrina short featuring her adventures with the Archie gang. Then there was a half-hour installment of "Groovie Goolies" which included sporadic Sabrina appearances. Finally, the show would conclude with another Sabrina short in which the Goolies appeared.

The show premiered in September 1970 and was so successful that Archie Comics finally gave Sabrina her own book, which began in April 1971 and ran until February 1983.

The Break-Up

In the fall of 1971, "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" retained a spot on the Saturday morning schedule and "Groovie Goolies" were moved to Sunday mornings in an hour-long cartoon block alongside "Tom & Jerry." Their Sunday morning cartoon experiment was a failure, so CBS dropped the Goolies in 1972 (although ABC aired them again from 1975-76). Meanwhile, the stand-alone Sabrina show had a long run on CBS from 1971-74. Unfortunately, this seems to be the root of a lot of misinformation. There were no original cartoons produced for the stand-alone "Sabrina" show; the episodes merely consisted of repackaged shorts from "The Archie Comedy Hour" and "Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies." There were 64 shorts in total (16 guest-starring her monstrous cousins), which equaled 32 half-hour reruns. On the surface, "Sabrina" seemed to be infinitely more popular, but both shows were about equally successful.

The Groovie Goolies made two final appearances on NBC's 1977 ratings-challenged "New Archie/Sabrina Hour," which was later split into two shows ("The Bang-Shang Lollapalooza Show" and "Superwitch") before being rebranded as the half-hour "Archie and Sabrina Surprise Package." Soon after, Filmation lost the rights to the Archie Comics characters, and although they did some preliminary work on two Goolies reboots in the early '80s, the shows never materialized.

Afterward

Sabrina found a new lease on life in a 1996 Showtime original movie starring Melissa Joan Hart, which was spun-off into a long-running sitcom later the same year. Although that series was technically based on the comics, it bore more than a passing resemblance to 1993's "The Elvira Show," a pilot which spent five years in development and generated a hefty buzz in Hollywood but inexplicably never got picked up as a weekly series.

Due to the success of the sitcom, Sabrina has remained in the public consciousness ever since, with a revival of the comics, a series of novelizations and a vast array of other tie-in merchandising, several more animated shows, and Netflix's "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina."

Similarly, the Archie gang appeared in numerous pilots, an animated DIC series, and most recently, CW's "Riverdale." Unfortunately, with Filmation out of business since the early '90s, the Groovie Goolies have mostly been relegated to a minor postscript in the history of Archie Comics.

The Hallmark Debacle

Thanks to Filmation's knack for recutting and retitling their shows, Hallmark was overwhelmed by what appeared to be countless duplicates when they acquired Filmation's library in 1995. Instead of properly researching and comparing materials from each of the shows, the company foolishly threw away the original negatives for many of Filmation's titles. They made the bizarre choice to primarily retain inferior PAL (European) transfers which are slightly sped-up because they run at a different frame rate. Thankfully, they kept the NTSC (American) negatives for the stand-alone edits of "Groovie Goolies," but "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" wasn't so lucky, and "Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies" seems to be lost.

That's not to say that all hope is gone for ever seeing the show in its original hour-long format again. The same day that "Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies" premiered, Billboard magazine ran a story concerning Filmation's switchover to videotape. Although the story targeted 30-minute shows, TV stations had pretty much abandoned Kinescope in favor of video for broadcast. Granted, a lot of early tapes were wiped and re-recorded over, but lost programs seem to surface on YouTube every day, so here's hoping that someday someone will discover a tape with the original cut of the show.

Episodes

I may someday expand this to include information about all 64 Sabrina shorts, but for the time being, I'm only focusing on the 16 that guest-starred The Groovie Goolies.