I think you’ve got Betty and Veronica mixed up. Sure, the hair color is right, but Thalia is the rich, glamorous girl, whereas Zelda, like Betty, is the less spectacular one who is nonetheless a better person and a better match for our hero.
It’s interesting to remember that Max Shulman completely recast the Dobie Gillis story when he created the tv series. The orignal book The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was a 1953 collection of short stories featuring a college student Dobie. (A movie, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis was made from it in 1953.) Shulman did a follow-up, I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf, in 1959. It’s been many, many years since i read these but I’m pretty sure that everything we know and love about the tv series were invented specifically for it.
A scholarly but readable article on the history of the show is available here.
I personally just can’t put too much belief in the Archie/Dobie connection. It smacks too much of one of those fake lists of pairs that you see in magazines occasionally.
As a kid I loved the tv series and I still do. It had about a million original aspects and didn’t resemble anything else on tv at the time. Zelda, if you’re out there, forget Dobie. I’m married but I’ll make room for you.
[Yes, I know in real life that Sheila James is a lesbian.]
I didn’t mix them up, the cross-comparison is inherent in the two sets of characters. I was going to point out how the blonde in one corresponded to the brunette in the other, and vice versa. But you explained it well, thanks.
What I want to know about Archie and Dobie is: Who cribbed from whom? Can these parallels be merely pure coincidence???
I think these are pretty much standard characters and you’re making too much out of them.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Archie = Jimmy Stewart
Jughead = Clarence (bumbling, etc, comic relief)
Two women - Donna Reed (brunette) and the blonde girl (I forget her name) whom Jimmy Stewart doesn’t go with but helps out. (This is a single movie, not a series, so the hero winds up with one of the women; in a series, there would be a ongoing competition.)
Rich opponent - The banker
STANDARD WESTERN
Archie - Hero
Jughead = sidekick, comic relief
Two women, the brunette and the blonde (usually the blonde is the prostitute with heart of gold who dies in the end, but oh, well)
Villian - the rich cattle owner
THE HONEYMOONERS
Archie = Ralph
Jughead = Norton (comic relief side-kick)
Blonde = Alice
Brunette = Trixie
OK, no villain per se.
My point is that there are standard, stereotype situations.
The short story collection THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS was published in 1953, as our friend Harpo-in-Russian points out above…again, they were tales of a horny student at a large co-educational university, and had little to do with the teevee program. The Archie comics go back to the 1940s.
And sorry, again, because The Many Loves was actually published in 1951, not 1953, which was the date of the movie. My fingers get behind my mind at times. Or is it that my mind gets ahead of my fingers?
And I say again that the Archie comparisons are spurious. Zelda was not introduced as a recurring character until Thalia was off the show, so there never was a foursome and the two females were never foils of one another. To say that Maynard-the-jazz-buff’s only passion was for food is just silly. Dobie was superficially similar to Archie mostly because that’s the way teen culture was thought of in those pre-60s days but it’s all surface and nothing more.
