Well, I guess it's appropriate for
Riverdale to be set in a stylized, timeless alternate world where nostalgia and modernity go hand in hand. That's kind of the whole point, really -- you can modernize
Archie to make it more relatable to new audiences, but the main reason to do so in the first place instead of creating something new is the nostalgia, the appeal to the timeless core elements that have endured more or less unchanged since the 1940s even alongside the striking progressivism and experimentation that Archie Comics has embraced over the past quarter-century or so.
So that kind of deliberate anachronism is the cultural-reference equivalent of something like the 1990
The Flash or
Batman: The Animated Series (both of which were emulating Tim Burton's
Batman, though
Max Headroom did it first) where you had 1940s cars and Art Deco designs coexisting with modern computers and cell phones. Netflix's
A Series of Unfortunate Events does much the same thing -- timeless setting and vintage cars and clothes alongside modern technology and wink-nudge in-jokes about streaming television.
One other blending of nostalgia and modernity: Josie and the Pussycats doing a hip-hop version of "Sugar, Sugar," the 1969 hit song from FIlmation's
The Archie Show, and not offering any excuse about it being a cover of an old song like they did at the dance in the pilot. Plus of course there's Jughead's hat, a strange attempt to approximate his original
whoopee cap (a beanie typically made by cutting the brim of an old fedora into a crown shape) using a more modern knit cap. I wouldn't be surprised if the show continued to lean into that kind of anachronism.
