I'm an Archie comics fan, so I'm familiar with the band in the context of the comics, The Archie Show and the songs in real life.

But my question is, when the songs came out, did it get promoted as:

"Archie is the lead singer"
"Jughead is the drummer"
"Reggie is the bassist"
etc

sort of like how Gorillaz had fictional personas for all the players?

Or was it just branded as The Archies, they stuck the comic image on the singles and nobody cared about the random studio musicians?

So...does that confirm the last question in my original post? Let me talk to some people from that time period, bring 'em in Groucho.

I don't know the answer to the question, but it brought back memories of records on cereal boxes.

The latter (bolded).

Thanks Ash. Now back to some more Bang Shang a Lang.

Sounds like Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.

From the grundlepedia:

YMMV, however. I watched the cartoon when it was originally aired and have no specific recollection of who 'played' what, but I was very young at the time.

In the day there was a primetime show called Music Scene. Hosted by David Steinberg. Lot of really great acts appeared and actually played live. There was lip synching too in what could be called early videos(3 Dog Night lip synching "Mama Told Me Not To Come" while at a party). Another part of the show was a weekly countdown.
There is a DVD set of several consecutive episodes. During these episodes "Sugar Sugar" is the #1 song, week after week after week. Becomes a running joke on the show that they are trying to locate The Archies to get them to come on. In the final episode of the DVD set, "We finally found the Archies! And here they are doing their #1 hit!" Then they show a clip from the cartoon show of "Sugar Sugar" It's funny when you watch all episodes back to back.

The Archie gang appeared on the first album cover. They appeared again on their Greatest Hit album. They stuck live teens on the second cover with a drawing of Archie on the back if I recall. Jingle Jangle had a picture of colorful plastic pieces on it and Sunshine just had a picture of a beach scene heavily tinted in yellow. Their last album, This is Love, had illustrations of active young couples.
They allowed the illusion that they were real, if one wanted to view it that way, without being obnoxious about it. Good old Ron Dante did the vocals.

I have that "Music Scene" DVD, they get to express their dislike for the song too- though there's a brilliant soul version done by some real performers on one episode. When they show the cartoon clip they say "They may appear a bit 2-dimensional, but so is the song."

The latter part. As with a lot of "bubblegum" music from that era, people just liked the tunes, and didn't particularly care who wrote or performed them. Such was the case with The Archies. As a musical group, The Archies were the brainchild of Don Kirshner. After being fired as the Musical Coordinator from The Monkees - who wrested musical creative control of the group from him - Kirshner decided his next musical venture would be with a group he had complete creative control over. Since the "stars" of The Archies existed only in comics and animation cels, with the music done by studio musicians, there was nobody who could try and sieze control from him over the records issued under their name.