KPop Demon Hunters: How the Netflix hit’s “Golden” finally topped the Hot 100.

In the late summer of 1969, a song debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100 that would emerge as the year’s biggest hit. The final year of the ’60s had already produced some stone classics—literally: from Sly Stone to the Rolling Stones , plus the Beatles , Marvin Gaye , the 5 th Dimension , and Tommy James and the Shondells . But this newer group’s hit topped all of them. And the “group” didn’t even exist.

The Archies were an animated garage-rock combo. As comic-book characters, the high schoolers of the Archie universe—including Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica—date all the way back to the Second World War. But in 1968 and ’69, they were also the stars of The Archie Show , a CBS Saturday-morning TV series. The Archies, the band—made up of real-life session musicians, including