Fred was a junk dealer from the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Archie was also a blue-collar worker who inhabited the Queens borough of New York City. Both were definitive characters of the era they shared — so similar, yet so entirely different.

Such everyman personalities would be overlooked, if not rejected outright, by today’s entertainment consortium, which is replete with extremist politics that has all but justified Archie’s perspective on every controversial topic, and is likely tantamount to why the general public has never cared less about being engaged by Hollywood as they once were.