Little Archie comics were originally produced in the 1950s. This series featured the familiar teenagers as Elementary School-age children. It is arguably the most successful of the alternate versions of Archie, and certainly the longest-running one. A number of Little Archie series were produced, and new stories are occasionally published even today.
The world of Little Archie is remarkably similar to that of his teenage counterpart. Most of the same characters are featured, albeit usually in younger versions. Miss Grundy and Mr. Weatherbee appear as a teacher and the principal at Riverdale Elementary School. Little Archie is always referred to and addressed as "Little Archie". Although stories featuring one of the other characters would be titled "Little Jughead", "Little Betty" and so on, the characters themselves were always addressed by their regular names. Keeping in mind its younger target audience, Little Archie stories tended to have more educational and moral content than standard Archie stories.
It introduced a number of characters that had never before existed in the Archie continuity. These included Archie's dog Spotty, Betty's cat Caramel, Betty's older brother Chic and older sister Polly, and new kids Ambrose Pipps and Fangs Fogarty. This made the series more non-canonical. However, around the 1990s, the creators of Archie Comics began to tie Little Archie in to the main continuity by featuring appearances by these characters. Some became recurring characters in the gang's teenage years. Additionally, stories that take place in the main continuity sometimes feature flashbacks to the gang's childhood.
A few contradictions remain between Archie and Little Archie. One is that, in Little Archie, the Riverdale High faculty is the Riverdale Elementary faculty. Archie has established that characters like Mr. Weatherbee have worked at Riverdale High too long to have ever been elementary school teachers when the gang was young.
In the 1980s, partly due to declining sales, there was a radical redesign of the Little Archie universe. Renamed as "The New Little Archie", it featured the Little Archie characters with contemporary fashions, hairstyles, and sensibilities, and with a more modern-looking art style. One notable change was that Archie was now addressed merely as "Archie" and no longer "Little Archie". This relaunch was by and large unsuccessful, and the Little Archie universe soon went back to its old style.
In 1969, Little Archie inspired a segment within the "Funhouse" segments of The Archie Comedy Hour (which is not the same as the later "Archie's Funhouse" series). This segment however was called "The Little Archies".
Read more about this topic: Alternate Universes In Archie Comics