Tag Archives: The Hardy Boys

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Throwback Thursday: “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979)!

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“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.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Laverne and Shirley” (1976-1983)

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Rest in Peace, Penny Marshall.

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.