“The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979) is another show that I remember fondly, if very vaguely, from my very early childhood. It ran on ABC for a scant three seasons (over a two-year period), and that sounds positively odd to me, because my memory has morphed it into something that seems like a much bigger part of the 1970’s.
I also remember it being two different shows, but that maybe makes sense — the first season of the program had a weird format in that you saw a standalone adventure of the Hardy Boys one week, and then a Nancy Drew outing the following week. (The characters, of course, were based on the young adult books written respectively by Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene.) They eventually went on to have adventures together, Wikipedia tells me, although Nancy Drew had a reduced role, and was eventually dropped altogether in the third and final season.
Wikipedia also tells me that the show’s third season portrayed the Hardy Boys as … adults? And that they were agents of the Justice Department? And that the Season 3 premiere saw the younger brother’s fiancee killed by a hit-and-run driver? I definitely don’t remember that — and it seems a little darker from what I remember of 1970’s primetime television shows.
I loved the show, even if I was too young to follow its relatively simple stories well. (I would have been in either kindergarten or the first grade.) But it was a program intended for “big kids” (my older siblings had the books), and that made it wonderfully cool to me.
I moved onto the books myself, by the early 1980’s. I loved those too. The two that I remember are “The Secret of Wildcat Swamp” (with the Hardy Boys) and “The Secret of the Old Clock” (with Nancy Drew). It was the Wildcat Swamp adventure that inducted me into the club — you see that snarling mountain lion on the cover? That was utterly enticing to me when I found the book in the bottom of the closet I shared with my brother, when I was … maybe in the third grade, I guess. (It looked a lot like the “saber tooth tiger” baddie in that Aurora model kit that I loved so much.) I kept pondering that scene and wondering what the outcome was. (Did they even have guns?! Would the dad or whoever that was protect them?!) One day, I finally accepted the challenge of reading what seemed like a very long book to me at the time, and I wasn’t disappointed. That’s the power of a good book cover, I guess.
You think that 80’s kids are old? Well, I also have memories of the 1970’s; after all, they fully occupied the first seven years of my life.
And I remember “Donny and Marie” (1976-1979), which ran on ABC. It was a sanity-challenging, Kafkaesque combination of disco, country music, family entertainment, themed-comedy skits, sequined outfits and … ice-skating. Which made it either the height of 70’s cheese or the very nadir of Western civilization — you decide.
I’m embarrassed to admit here that I loved it, even if I was a tot at the time. (Hey, if you’re five or six years old, then the sight of Donny being a non-threatening goofball on stage was the very height of hilarity.) You can see what I mean in the second clip below, if you can stomach all four minutes of it.
What’s interesting about this show is that it was kind of a dinosaur in its time … variety shows had been on the decline for a while in the late 1970’s, and were already being supplanted by the situation comedies that would become the trademark of the 1980’s. Bizarrely, NBC tried to launch Marie in her own solo variety show during the 1980-81 television season, but it just didn’t catch on. It was cancelled after seven episodes.
What’s truly crazy is that Donny and Marie are still performing in Las Vegas. I kid you not. Google it. You can even see them tonight at The Flamingo. There’s at least a chance that they’re immortal vampires.
Postscript: I at first typed “Donny and Maurie” in that blog post headline, and I feel certain there’s a terrible joke hiding there somewhere about Donny hearing the results of paternity test on “Maury Povich.” That would make a great “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
This is one of only a handful of TV shows that I can remember watching as a tot in the late 1970’s. “Laverne and Shirley” (1976-1983) was the kind of of thing I’d see in my older sisters’ room. My Dad and older brother watched war movies, westerns and monster movies, but my two sisters preferred considerably lighter fare. Two that they watched a lot at the time, if I recall, were this show and “Donnie & Marie” (1976-1979) — about the scariest thing you could find playing on their black-and-white TV was “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979). (One of my sisters had a crush on actor Shaun Cassidy; I think there was a poster of him in their room.)
I loved “Laverne and Shirley” when I was that young. Lenny and Squiggy were my favorite highlight of any episode, even if I was sometimes confused about whether they were meant to be “good guys” or “bad guys.” I was in kindergarten, and not altogether bright, and I thought that men who wore black leather jackets (Fonzie notwithstanding) were usually “bad guys.” I also remember thinking that hippies and motorcyclists were the same group of “bad guys” because they disobeyed God or something … my confusion at the time resulted from some vaguely moraled born-again Christian comic books I’d happened across somewhere.
I also remember recognizing “Laverne and Shirley” as being related to another show that a lot of kids back then loved — “Happy Days” (1974-1984), of which it was a spin-off. This might have been the first time in my life that I was aware of two live-action television properties occupying the same fictional universe; I’d already seen it happen in the movies with the various incarnations of “King Kong” and “Godzilla.”
Here’s what makes me feel old — for both “Laverne and Shirley” and “Happy Days,” I probably watched a lot of the episodes when they were first broadcast, and not just in re-runs (although “Happy Days” was also played in syndication endlessly throughout the 1980’s — it remained a fixture of daytime television).
And I only just realized writing this that Lenny was played by the priceless Michael McKean. As an adult, I know him primarily from his brilliant turns in “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) and “The X-Files” (1998-2018). He’s 71 now. Wow.
This was another book during my grade-school days that really fed my excitement about monsters — Jerry A. Young’s 1983 children’s book, “Movie Monsters From Outer Space.” (Why does the author’s name sound so much like a pseudonym to me?)
I’m sure it’s obscure by now. If memory serves, this was another title I ordered from those classroom bulletins put out by Scholastic Book Clubs. (I was in the third grade, I think.) It gave kids a brief, fun run-down of a bunch of space-based baddies — those are the Cylons from the original “Battlestar Galactica” (1978) on the cover.
It featured a bunch of older B-movies too. I remember really wanting to see “Forbidden Planet” (1956) after seeing a picture of its monster there.
I also seem to remember reading about Ridley Scott’s original “Alien” (1979), although I suppose that I could be recalling another book. (It would be odd if Scott’s masterpiece were described here, because it was … kinda not for kids.)
This movie scared the PANTS off me when I was a little kid. It was released to theaters in 1979; I would have seen it a few years later when it played on broadcast television.
It made such a terrifying impression on me that I’m a little surprised I never developed even the mildest phobic response to mannequins. (I’ve met other adults for whom they are just too creepy.) They don’t bother me in the slightest. I feel the same way about clowns.
I just need a Halloween horror playlist, though. I’ve already seen this year’s “Castle Rock” and (of course) the second season of “Mr. Mercedes.”
“Vampire” (1979) and “The Last Broadcast” (1998) both come highly recommended by some horror-fan friends that I truly trust. I also believe that I have never seen any of the classic Universal Studios monster movies in their entirety. I’ve watched bits and pieces of a couple of them on television when I was a young kid, including “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954) and “The Invisible Man” (1933). When I was a tot in the very late 70’s, the studio’s Gothic monsters were still very much a part of the zeitgeist … my older brother even had the Aurora model kits. I finally enjoyed F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” for the first time a couple of years ago, but of course the 1921 German film preceded the Universal movies, which re-imagined Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” entirely in 1931.
I’ll probably start first by trying to hunt down a copy of “The Wolf Man” (1941). That’s the one that other everyone always recommends.
“Bigfoot and Wildboy” (1977 – 1979) is another obscure TV show that is perhaps best forgotten. It was a segment on something called “The Krofft Supershow” in 1977, I think, before the segments were re-edited into a half-hour program. I became a fan of it as second grader in the fall of 1979. (Or maybe I watched its reruns in third grade, in 1980 — to be honest, this was so long ago that I hardly remember.)
They don’t make TV shows like they used to. And that’s a good thing. “Bigfoot and Wildboy” seemed to rely heavily on three ingredients: an utra-cheesy 70’s score; truly terrible special effects (even for the time); and lots of shots of its two title characters either jumping, or running at the camera in slow motion. (I actually just watched a few minutes of the full episode you see posted below.)
I was pretty preoccupied with “Bigfoot and Wildboy” when I was very young. I remember having to make journal entries in the classroom, in which we could write and illustrate anything we wanted. (It was precisely the sort of open-ended journal writing exercise with little academic value to which I’d be subjected, occasionally, throughout my school career — even in my college poetry class.) But we were allowed to select our own topic in the second grade, and that was at least some fun for an imaginative kid. The nuns (it was a Catholic school) sometimes prodded us to write about real-world events; 1979’s Space Shuttle Columbia, for example, was high on their list of suggestions.
Given a blank slate, though, I tended to write almost exclusively about imaginary characters and monsters — peppered, perhaps, with intermittent entries about dogs. I distinctly remember drawing Bigfoot and Wildboy one day. (If memory serves, we wrote and drew in our journals after recess, maybe to get us refocused.) I drew them leaping over a fence and running toward the viewer. (Seriously, the show had a lot of shots like that. Check out the opening credits below.)
I remember a nun looking over my shoulder and inquiring delicately about the giant hairy humanoid and the half-naked boy … when I explained the characters to her, she suggested with (uncharacteristic) patience, “Tomorrow, let’s try to write about something from the real world.”
We were chatting about obscure TV shows a couple of weeks ago after I shared a post about “Manimal” (which I was surprised to find lovingly remembered by some otherwise sane people). I was shocked when someone else remembered “Cliffhangers,” which ran for a single season on NBC in 1979.
Dear God, did I love this show when I was a first grader. I hollered whenever it came on; I’m pretty sure my Mom was amused by that. I think this is technically the first prime-time show I was ever a fan of. (Yeah, I ended that last sentence with a preposition; it’s my damn blog.)
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 