Tag: Nancy Drew

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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A Look at the Nancy Drew Films

1938 and 1939 saw the release of four films starring Bonita Granville as Nancy Drew. In the film, Drew is a precocious teenager who is always stumbling into mysteries.

These are light mystery comedies with typical 1930s suspense stories. The mysteries aren’t bad, but the comedy really reigns supreme. The books and the movies are like night and day. This was really standard Hollywood practice when they’d bring a detective to radio or film. They’d be far more likely to adapt the character to what was popular at the time rather than take a risk on making a movie based on what made the books work.

Thus Nancy while bright, intelligent, and brave, also makes some klutzy mistakes and can charge in too quickly to danger, making her a typical 1930s heroine.  Other changes are less clear. Why they changed the boyfriend’s name from “Ned” to “Ted” I’ll never know.

That said, the movies are good fun for what they are, light mysteries with a touch of Screwball comedy. The best of the films is the only one in the public domain: Nancy Drew, Reporter. It features a pretty intriguing plot and the comedy consistently hits with one scene where Nancy, her boyfriend, and two younger kids perform a song to get out of a tight spot in a scene that seems like an inspiration for the 80s cult hit Adventures in Babysitting.

Bottom: All four films are pretty fun but those expecting the straighter mysteries and the super competence of Nancy in the novels may be disappointed.

Rating 3.5 Stars out of 5.0

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EP0996: The Weird Circle: Murders in the Rue Morgue

The episode begins with a look at a story of the Prophet Daniel that many think is the first detective story. From Can You Imagine That?

Original Air Date: 1940

A woman and her daughter are brutally killed after withdrawing 50,000 Francs from the bank and Dupin is on the case in Edgar Allan Poe’s first detective story.

Original Air Date: January 2, 1944

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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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