

#VERONICA CARTOON FULL#
Veronica Lodge has been retconned to have grown up in Riverdale, and she has become a full blown character in her own right. In the decades since her first appearance, almost all of this initial background has disappeared. Similarly, many of her earliest appearances with Betty focused entirely on Betty's jealousy of her attractiveness and privileged background, with Veronica less a character than a maguffin for Betty's latest zany schemes to enthrall a disinterested Archie.

Many of her earliest appearances with Archie focused entirely on his worshipful desire for her and his impotent jealousy of all other young men that might attract her attention often, she had no dialogue at all but simply appeared there, evoked Archie's desire for her followed by jealousy over another male that came near her, and then allowed herself to be played as a pawn by whichever male came out on top. Initially, Veronica was clearly a secondary character who functioned most often as nothing more than a plot device - an object of desire for Archie and an object of envy for Betty, who was depicted as an energetic schemer at the time. Her original personality had more than a little in common with the 1950s "sophisticated yet naive heiress" film type played by such actresses as Veronica Lake, Katherine Hepburn, and Grace Kelley (Hepburn starred as a very Veronica Lodge character in *The Philadelphia Story* and Kelley as the same character in the musical remake *High Society*). Her surname comes from one of the most prominent of the real life Boston Brahmin aristocratic families. Veronica Lodge first appeared as a wealthy debutante from another part of the country than Riverdale, sometimes Boston and sometimes New York, an exotic stranger whom Archie asks out in a letter as an act of daring and who surprises him by travelling all the way to Riverdale to accept his date.
