Tag: Hardy Boys

Streaming Review: The Hardy Boys, Season One

The latest Hardy Boys series was released in December 2020 by Hulu and in the Spring of 2021 on YTV in Canada. The series itself was filmed in Canada.

The Plot 

The Hardy brothers: Sixteen-year-old Frank (Rohan Campbell) and twelve-year-old Joe (Alexander Elliott) live in “The City” (No word on whether they’ve ever met The Tick). Their world is shattered when their mother is killed.

Their detective father (James Tupper) decides the best possible thing he can do is to dump the boys on his wife’s sister Trudy (Bea Santos) in his wife’s hometown, so he can go investigate a case that relates to his wife’s killing. The hometown is dominated by their mother’s estranged mother Gloria Esterbrook (Linda Thorson, The Avengers) and she has plans of her own for Frank and Joe. Frank and Joe begin to find what they believe to be clues to their mother’s death.

What Works

In my initial review of the first episode, I was not happy that the show’s creators saw fit to back away from the typical close ages that Frank and Joe share in the books, but I can’t help but feel the age gap works.

In the books, Frank and Joe are essentially peers. Frank’s a Senior, Joe’s a Junior, and that’s about it. By putting four years between them, they do a lot of things. They more easily have the two go to separate locations. They each have their own distinct friend group, with Joe particularly close to the adopted daughter of a local police lieutenant Biff Hooper (Riley O’Donnell) The decision also adds a level of drama and conflict between the brothers that you just don’t get in the books. So for a series like this, I can look back and see they made the right decision.

The era of the series is not discussed but it’s clear it’s set before the Internet which makes for a lot more interesting adventure. They have to actually find out things rather than ask Google or search an app. They can’t just be called on a cell phone. Watching this series makes you realize how hard our device-saturated world makes the work of the writer.

The story also does have some consequences and dwell on things that were rarely addressed in the kid’s mysteries I saw. Frank, Joe, and their friends tell lies and deceive a lot of people, including the local police, in order to continue their investigation. There are consequences to this that do pay out and they have to deal with these consequences. Also, Fenton leaving his grieving boys alone for weeks on end is also called out.

In that vain, I think Trudy’s an interesting character. In years past, she’d be the typical clueless adult that the Hardy Boys would run rings around. While initially she fills that bill, she’s not a fool and while she’s not a detective, you don’t have to be one to figure out the Hardy Brothers are hiding something. The way her character is handled is interesting as well as who she is by the end of the story.

Linda Thorson is always a delight and her performance as Gloria Esterbrooke is intriguing. Esterbrooke is written as a character you’re not supposed to figure out what exactly she’s up or or where she stands, and Thorson’s performance is pitch perfect. She makes every scene she’s in better.

The mystery itself has some good twists and intriguing elements that definitely keep the guessing going. Also compared to the storyline of the Nancy Drew TV series, this series didn’t go near as dark.

What Doesn’t Work

With a single storyline for a kids/teen show told over thirteen forty-five minute episodes, this series is too long. While there are some interesting features of this series as we talked about above, the major approaches to the making the series last longer is padding out the story or making it more convoluted than it needs to be.

The great example of both points is the effort by Frank’s grandmother to recruit him into an elite private school. This is a huge focus of Gloria’s efforts for several episodes, quite a bit of time spent there by Frank and the story goes….nowhere. It’s a tedious plot point that’s given so much airtime because we’ve got more than nine hours of story time to fill.

It’s also what we’re told the stakes of the adventure might be. A typical kids mystery will have the kids save a town or a farm. By the end of this, the fate of all humanity hinges on what three guys found in a cave near a small town and what the Hardys do about it. And because this plays into the solution, the solution to the mystery is also ludicrous.

That’s just ridiculous and what’s even more ridiculous is having the kids go around and enroll in school (because Fenton’s long absence pressed through Summer.) Then there’s the question of which girl Frank likes, is it Callie or the new girl at school? These sort of questions are trivial when the fate of the world is at stake. As it is, these just get added to the padding and there’s a lot of it.

Of course, it would be fair to point out that by its nature, the story is not made for me. However, it’s hard for me to imagine Generation Z and Generation Alpha being into a padded thirteen episode series that’s set when their parents were kids.

The Hardy Boys wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. It teased a second season, which is coming, but I have no interest in seeing it. I could see some parents thinking this might be a good way to introduce their kids to detective stories, but I think there are better options. The series was set in the 1980s and 90s and was so authentic to the era that it could have been released then. There are a good number of kid-based detective TV shows and movies that were made in this era that are better than the Hardy Boys and available on DVD.

Rating: 3.0 out of 5

TV Episode Review: The Hardy Boys: Welcome to Your Life

The new series of the Hardy Boys kicks off with the episode, “Welcome to Your Life.”

The series makes a lot of changes to the Hardy Boys formula and characters. For those who have never read the books, the Hardy Boys were two teenage boys: Frank (age 18) and Joe (age 17) living in the upstate New York town of Bayport. Their father is Fenton, a private detective, and their mother is Laura, a librarian.

Frank and Joe are not complex characters in the book. They are distinct. Both are smart and physically capable, however Frank is more of a geek and more cautious, and Joe is more physically capable and more given to making rash, impulsive decisions.

The TV series takes things in a different direction. It looks to be set in the late 1980s where Frank and Joe (Rohan Campbell and Alexander Elliott) live with their parents in “the city.” Frank is sixteen and Joe is twelve. Frank is a nerd, but he’s also a good baseball player. We spend the first few minutes of the series seeing the boys interact with their mom who is then killed in what appears to be an auto accident. On top of that, their father Fenton (James Tupper) decides to move them back to their mother’s hometown of Bridgeport for the summer. At first blush, this seems incredibly insensitive, but its for their own safety due to information it’s implied he’s hiding.

In Bridgeport, they meet their grandmother (Linda Thorson) who is glad to see them and eager to go about the business of micromanaging their lives. They also meet the townsfolk who are mostly friendly, even though we’re given some hints of something suspicious a few times. And both a flashback prologue and a couple moments later on hint at the ongoing mystery the Hardy boys are eventually going to resolve to solve.

This first episode doesn’t do a lot for me. There’s definitely room to flesh out the Hardys and make them more three dimensional. However, the writers seemed to have approached this using the most cliched methods of modern storytelling. Killing off a parent as a plot point and in order to make the characters more relatable is the most overused tool of modern writers. And here it’s handled in such an uninspired way that it feels obligatory.

At the same time, the change in ages also changes the dynamic in ways that don’t work well. In the book, Joe and Frank were peers. Plus they’ve made Frank not only a genius nerd but a talented athlete, leaving Joe’s defining characteristic as “the younger one.” Which is a bit of a step back from the balance in the books, not a step forward.

Probably, the biggest problem with this first episode is its length. It’s over forty minutes and feels padded. It ends on a strong note, but in order to get to that note, it has a lot of time where it’s dragging through its runtime to get to the punchline. This particular episode would have been better at 20-22 minutes, which is more typical for a kid-centric TV series. Based on this episode, I’m also skeptical that the writers have enough mystery and enough twists to justify the thirteen-episode, season-long plot arc.

That said, no performances were bad. The interesting clues left me a bit curious to see what will happen next. I’ll watch at least one more episode to see if the series picks up its pace and moves beyond all the set up in this first episode. This may turn out to be a good series when it’s all said and done, but this first episode was rough.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Book Review: Deathgame

In the Hardy Boys casefile Deathgame, the Hardy’s friend Biff Hooper is big into survival games and decides to go to an exciting survival camp. Biff tells Joe the truth, but tells his parents he’s visiting his cousin.

When Biff doesn’t return as scheduled, the Hardy Boys and his parents go to Florida to look for him, but the camp claims never to have seen him. Biff’s parents insist he must be there as he doesn’t lie (apparently forgetting about the whole cousin visit thing.) The Hardy Boys set out to find their lost friend and face off against dangerous foes.

We get to see a little of the Hardy’s sleuthing but this is most a set up for them and some other teens to get involved in a take on The Most Dangerous Game. It deals a bit more heavily in the adventure/suspense elements than the typical mystery elements.

For what is, the book is fine. It’s a light, breezy 152-page read that has great pacing, featuring short chapters that end on generally solid cliffhangers.

The book is not for everyone. Deathgame was released in 1987 and it shows as the villains and the plot feel very 1980s. The main villain (the aptly named Colonel Hammerlock) reminds me of Karate Kid villain Sensei John Krese. If the A-Team van had rolled in, it would not have been out of place.

In addition, there’s a certain conceit about the entire Case Files series that you have to acknowledge. The books were released as pocket paperbacks (as opposed to the 6″ x 9″ size of many kids books) and had action packed pictures on the front and occasionally dealt with topics like terrorism that made them seem more grown up. At their core though, they were still written for 10-year-olds.

So this is the type of book, you’ll like if you grew up with the Hardy Boys case files, enjoy 1980s mystery adventures, or if you’re a child who likes to read mystery and adventure stories and don’t mind that they were written before they had a cell phone.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Graphic Novel Review: Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys: The Big Lie

I’m a longtime fan of both the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. So, I picked up this selection, the NOIR take on the character with curiosity but also trepidation. Would they completely destroy these beloved characters in an overly gritty, grim, dark story?

To be honest, the early issues had me nervous. The book begins quite dark with Frank and Joe’s father already murdered and them the prime suspects and Frank being beaten up by the lovable Chief Colig from the novels. He’s not so lovable here. No one is to start out. The book begins with Nancy almost hard as nails as she leads the hapless Hardys through her plan to find the truth, a plan that puts the Hardys on the wrong side of the law.

The story gets better and you do feel by the end that these characters do relate to the ones in the novel, even in this grittier world. While it’s not my preferred take on the characters, it’s a respectful one that tells a compelling story with some nice emotional moments.

The artwork helps. It’s more stylized than your typical comic book art, but it uses its colors and shading intelligently to help tell the story and it succeeds in building the noir atmosphere. The cover art is particularly striking.

The book isn’t without its flaws. Anthony Del Col, like many older writers, is trying to tell a story of modern teenagers and has them using pop culture references any teenager would know–if they were alive in a decade before their time. In addition, the book tries to randomly re-imagine other books opened by the same publishing syndicate as the Hardy Boys such as the Bobsey Twins and Tom Swift as a butcher’s son (what the heck?) and occasionally I feel like the book tried too hard to be edgy. Still, these were few and far between. If you’re open to a different take on the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, this might be a good book for you.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

****Disclosure: I Received a free copy from Net Galley in Exchange for an Honest Review***

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EP1711: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Mojave Red Sequel

Bob Bailey
Convinced that an accidental death near his favorite fishing spot was actually murder, Johnny has to find the killer.

Original Air Date:  July 20, 1958

When making your travel plans, remember johnnydollarair.com
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EP1057: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Jolly Rogers Fraud Matter, Part Five and Dr. Tim, Detective: The Man from Trouble Creek

Bob Bailey

Johnny confronts the killer and faces death.

Original Air Date: March 23, 1956

Dr. Tim searches for a missing man with tuberculosis.

Original Air Date: 1948

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EP0985: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Forbes Matter, Part Five and the Widow is Willing

Bob Bailey

 

Johnny knows all except why Sheldon Forbes through his life away on a woman who didn’t want him.

Original Air Date: December 30, 1955

The first heir is dead as an insurance investigator cuts through lies to find the truth about the existence of alleged photos of a murder.

Original Air Date: 1958 or 59

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EP0956: The Line Up: The Senile Slugging Case

William Johnstone
Guthrie investigates a series of brutal muggings that have targeted elderly victims.

Original Air Date: September 12, 1951

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Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys On TV in the 1990s

The 1970s “Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” is the best known TV adaptation of the two famous stars of young adult detective novels.  However, in 1990s,  they returned to television in separate programs. For these shows, the characters aged a bit. Joe Hardy and Nancy Drew were college, and Joe Hardy had started first job as a reporter for the Bayport Eagle.

The 1990s series would not make anyone forget the 1970s version. The show was filmed and produced in Canada. Of the three leads, only Paul Popowich (Frank Hardy) would ever have much of a career. The programs were syndicated   for half hour time slots which left the writers with 21 minutes to resolve the story.

Given the limitations , it’s not a surprise that some episodes were weak or not all that interesting. What’s surprising is that more of them weren’t.

Nancy Drew presented me with a few problems. The first one I encountered was that the star (Tracy Ryan) looked nothing like the Nancy Drew I’d read about in books. I’d read the Nancy Drew files of the late 80s and early 90s as well as the older novels. Nancy was a Strawberry blonde with gorgeous blonde hair. Ms. Ryan was a short-haired brunette. However, once I got used to her not looking anything like the Nancy Drew I knew, she became acceptable in the role. She did a good job capturing the inquisitive nature of Nancy Drew, so that I grew to more or less accept her in the role.  Though occasionally this crossed the line into nothing other than nosiness. After the first episode, my wife was watching and asked how the “mystery” she’d investigated (which didn’t involve any crime) was any of her business. I responded, “She’s Nancy Drew.” However, at some point that doesn’t hold water particularly in a case like, “The Death and Life of Buddy Feral.”

One big change with the series was Ned Nickerson, who had become an international aid worker, which was not a move I would predict. All Ned wants during his brief visits is to spend time with Nancy without getting involved in a mystery. Good luck with that.

Its clear that Nancy and Ned are going in separate directions. Ned is going to spend his life helping people in the third world. And Nancy-um, it’s still not clear what Nancy is doing. She wants to study criminology with a professor who appears in two episodes, but what is she going for? We never see her in class and don’t know what her major is. She’s just sitting around waiting for another mystery to pop up.  It seems to me she could do that just as easily in the third world.

Beyond her relationship with poor Ned, the series does work but leaves a lot of ground uncovered. After the first episode, Nancy lands herself a room in a mysterious hotel in the college town of Callisto. Its hotel clerk is a mysterious man named Seymour. Other than in the Billy Feral episode, the hotel setting is never fully developed which was a shame because it had a lot of potential.

Beyond these snags, the situations themselves are quite lively. Nancy finds herself battling a phony marriage racket, video pirates, international jewel thieves, and the Russian Mafia. The mysteries themselves are well-told with the possible exceptions of The Asylum” and “The Stranger on the Road” which felt like a story I’d seen before we three women running frantically around an abandoned insane asylum and haunted house respectively.  Perhaps the most amusing episode, “The Exile” ended with Nancy seated around the table with a slightly fictionalized version of the Dalai Lama eating pizza with Nancy and her friends.

The Hardy Boys met my expectations more. For starters, Popowich and Colin Gray (Joe Hardy) actually looked like what I’d imagine the Hardy Boys to look like and they also hit the character right on with Popowich’s Frank serious and responsible with Gray’s Joe much more carefree and a lady’s man. The writers also kept the series set in Bayport. Though whether they were aware that Bayport was an actual city in New York, I don’t know. The license plates with Bayport on them would indicate no.

The writers created a very believable situation for Frank. He’s a cub reporter trying desperately to get ahead and get the opportunity to write hard news and attract the attention of editor Katie Craigen (Fiora Highet).  The truths he uncovers with the help of Joe  helps him towards this goal.

The Hardy Boys Adventures are fun and intriguing. In “The Jazzman” a good friend of the boys  who runs a newspaper stand disappears before his wedding. Their search for him leads them to uncover the missing man’ s past as a jazz singer who witnessed a gangland shooting thirty years previously.  In “Play Ball” Frank Hardy seeks to uncover why a sports writer rewrote his column to viciously insults a struggling baseball star. In, “The Debt Collectors”, Joe house sits and expects to live large in a vacation doctor’s home. Instead, he’s held hostage by first-time debt collectors who think Joe is the son of the doctor who owes money to their boss.

The series also features two episodes with Tracy Ryan playing Nancy Drew. The two shows crossover in France where Nancy Drew also filmed four episodes.  Any time you can get two of the best known detective shows together for a cross-over or two, it’s a great deal, and the crossovers were both fun and intriguing, particularly the first one which had Frank filling in for his father, a well-healed policemen, and sheepishly trying to deliver a speech his father had written that was critical of the French police.

The only problems I have with the series is that it occasionally veers  into political opinions which is a bit of a turn off as the  Hardy Boys has never been political. In addition, no one quite seems to know what order the episodes are supposed to be in which isn’t such a big deal except that Frank gets a goatee in the middle of the series and so if you go through it in the wrong order the goatee will be reappearing and disappearing every other episode.

Each series had 13 half hour episodes. The best way to enjoy them is to watch the shows on Netflix. (and they are available as of the writing of this piece.) The Hardy Boys set is also available through Amazon. There are some fair priced used sets, but the $33.99 retail price for 13 twenty one minute episodes is absurd.

Still, if you can find a way to watch the series without paying an arm and a leg, both the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys series are worth watching.

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Sleuths of My Youth: The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift, Jr.

The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have been keeping generations of kids reading and occasionally watching their heroic exploits.

The Hardy Boys was a series my dad talked about a lot and my older brothers read as well.  Nancy Drew I heard of in the popular culture, so I picked her books up out of curiosity. However both series’ had the same corporate owner, so can be discussed together.

There were several different Hardy Boys series’ out there when I was growing up. I had a definite preference.

There were the first 58 blue hard cover books-which I viewed as my dad’s Hardy Boys books. I read a few of them and enjoyed the classic setting and stories.

Of course, most of the Blue Hardy Boys and Yellow Nancy Drew mysteries on the market have been revised, so the ones I read in those series’ may have been a little different from what my father read growing up.  However, I was fortunate that my library had one copy each of the original Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories. These are a little bit longer and the language is a little more complex than modern readers are used to being set in the late 1920s and early 1930s respectively.

Then there was a Paperback series that started with #59 as the Hardy Boys Mystery digest. I viewed this as my older brothers’ Hardy Boys series. The books looked less interesting to me than the Blue books, so I never read them.

Then there was the Hardy Boys Case Files, a series that began in 1987 and contained far more action than the blue books. The first book began with a car bomb killing off Joe Hardy’s girlfriend and ends with the Hardy’s racing to stop the assassination of a presidential candidate.

That was my Hardy Boys series.

Each Hardy Boys Case File was a page-turner that packed as much suspense, action, adventure, and danger as would fit into a 160-page paperback. I devoured each copy of the Hardy Boys case files I could get my hands on. (Note: If you have trouble getting your boys to read, get on Ebay and buy a few of these.)

It was a little different with Nancy Drew.  I like the Nancy Drew files, but at some point got tired of the constant romantic subplots that kept springing up. Everywhere they went Nancy’s two gal sidekicks  George and Bess fell for different guys. They had Nancy break up with Ned Nickerson early in the Nancy Drew Files series, so Nancy could get in on the act for a while too.  The big problem with these love interests is they would invariably be murder suspects.  The teaser’s before the book would have a question like, “Has Bess fallen for a killer.” And I’d mentally add, “again.”

I liked golden age Nancy a little bit better with a greater focus on the mystery.

Of course, there was one thing the more modern Nancy Drew could do that the golden age one couldn’t.

If there was one thing better than a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew Book, it was a Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Super Mystery. These were always fun with a greater length (usually 220-230 pages), more detectives, and a better mystery.  The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew happened run into each other and a mystery about 30 times over ten years.

Speaking of running into the Hardy Boys, the same corporation that owns the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, also owned the Tom Swift franchise, which began in 1910 with Tom Swift, Sr. as an inventor and adventure. In the 1950s, the baton was passed to Tom Swift, Jr. who developed more space age technology. As a sci fan, I’d read quite a bit of the various Tom Swift books from the 1950s as well as a couple from the 1970s. Tom  The 1990s series was similar to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series with action-packed stories coming in at 160 pages.

They had the great idea to put the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift in the same book. While I’ve not read every Hardy Boys story, it suffices to say, that never have the Hardy Boys had a higher stake than they did in their first crossover with Tom Swift, Time Bomb.

I didn’t read all the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Tom Swift books out there as I was limited in time and to what I had available at the library. Still, the time spent with these characters were among the happiest I had growing up.

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