Archie Andrews (Neo-Japanese: アーチー・アンドリュース) is one of the main protagonists in The New Archies manga series and its subsequent adaptations, including his short-lived return in the 2011 short film, “The New Archies Return!”.
He is voiced by Mari Takamine in Neo-Japanese and was originally voiced in Bloxlish by J. Michael Roncetti before the former was replaced by Daniel Mitchell starting with Episode 78 of the anime.
Development
Character design
Archie’s character design for this specific adaptation of the Archie franchise was created by Sonic the Hedgehog manga artist, Naoto Ohshima, who was commissioned to draw the character by Archie Comics, Inc.
This at-the-time new character design was because the company wanted to appeal to the Neo-Japanese market after the company had discovered through the at-the-time Neo-Japanese publisher for Archie Comics Magazine, Ro-Kadokawa that the traditional Archie stories were not as popular in Neo-Japan as they were in Robloxia.
After many character designs that were proposed by different artists, Ohshima’s character design was chosen due to the fact that the focus group had liked it better.
Voice
According to the voice director of the anime, Shigeru Asahina, Archie’s voice was very difficult to cast due to the fact that in previous animated series based on Archie, the protagonist was often voiced by an male voice actor, and female voice thespians were challenging to voice fictional male characters.
Personality
Archie is mostly depicted as a young boy with a kind personality, as he is willing to help others.
But sometimes, Archie is seen being selfish. However, his selfishness is often treated like a character flaw and is mostly used as a moral character intending to educate both the readers of the manga and the viewers of the anime to not be selfish.
In other media
This iteration of Archie Andrews also makes a appearance in all “The New Archies” media, including an video game based on it and a series of PSAs that were produced between 1988 and 1992.
He appears in a short film titled “The New Archies Return”, which was released on July 8th, 2011 as a part of Archie Comics’ 70th year anniversary.
Trivia
- Originally, like his Robloxian counterpart, the writer (Yuji Naka) was going to reveal his full name as “Archibald”. However, Naka decided to put “Archie Andrews” as his full name instead because Naka thought that writing his full name would be too difficult for him.