When an announcement was made last year that Universal Studios was making a movie about Archie Andrews produced by Hollywood heavyweights, it should have been a victory for one of comics’ most enduring franchises. Instead, it triggered a legal war which ties up a Beverly Hills mansion, accusations of threats fit for an “organized crime figure” and a much-awaited movie on the line.

With a UCC foreclosure auction set for June 15, the fate of Archie Andrews — and the Archie Comics empire — hangs in the balance.

In this episode, 9fin’s global head of distressed and LevFin, Max Frumes, sat down with distressed debt reporter Maria Heeter and LME legal analyst Laurie Tomassian, co-authors of a recent investigation into the dispute between lender Raven Capital and Archie Comics co-CEO Jonathan Goldwater to break down how it all unraveled.

As a quick shoutout, the episode references and includes short audio clips from the 1969 hit 'Sugar, Sugar' by the fictional bubblegum-pop group, The Archies. The song held the #1 spot on the Billboard Top 100 for eight weeks between October and December 1969. The episode theme song is a tongue-in-cheek homage to The Archies’ second studio album, Everything’s Archie, created bespoke for this episode by our producer Chase Collum.

Clarifications: There's actually no show called “Desperate Mormon Housewives. Instead the popular reality television series was called "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives". Also, while Archie Comics did once don the wrappers of Topps bubble gum, that was in the 1950s, and the host was almost certainly referring to Bazooka Joe.

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