Frank and Joe Hardy were brothers
living in the city of Bayport on Barmet Bay with their father, police detective
Fenton Hardy, their mother, Laura, and their Aunt Gertrude. However, they were
more than just your average American teen boys; they were amateur detectives
with a penchant for getting involved in one mystery after another.
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| A first edition of The Rover Boys. |
Realizing
there was a large untapped market for children’s books, Edward
Stratemeyer began to create books to fill
that void with purely entertaining stories rather than the moral instruction
dominating that market. He first created the Rover Boys under the
pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield. The resulting series proved a success, selling
five million copies over 30 volumes from 1899-1926. In 1904, he
began writing The
Bobbsey Twins as Laura Lee Hope and Tom Swift in 1910 as Victor Appleton. In 1906, Stratemeyer founded of the book-packaging
firm The
Stratemeyer Syndicate, realizing that he could
produce more books a year through different publishers under different
pseudonyms under his control as books with his real name on it failed to sell
as well. After a time, Stratemeyer could no longer juggle multiple series and
decided to hire ghostwriters to take over some of the books under the established
pseudonym for that title. In 1911, Stratemeyer developed a talent for writing
mysteries, published under the name Chester K. Steele.
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| The very first edition of The Hardy Boys. |
In 1926,
the Syndicate began focusing on mysteries geared towards its younger base when
Stratemeyer created The Hardy Boys. He pitched the
series to publisher Grosset
& Dunlap, who had come up with the name for
the series. Under Stratemeyer’s model,
the books were created by making a detailed outline of the plot, which was then
given to a ghostwriter to flesh out under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon,
edited in-house, and then released. Stratemeyer and his daughter, Edna, had a
hand in developing some of the early outlines for the series, while his other
daughter, Harriet, took over the duties in 1934 with Andrew Svenson. Other outliners included Vincent Buranelli, James Duncan
Lawrence and Tom Mulvey. A large part of the
early foundation for the franchise came from the series’ first writer, Leslie McFarlane, who penned 19 volumes before eventually allowing himself
to quit a series and working conditions he despised (aside from the strict anonymity
of its authorship, the Syndicate had stringent rules to be followed for each
book and vastly underpaid for the amount of work being done).
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| The 1959 revision of the first book. |
In 1959, the series underwent an
extensive revision in content, prompted by Harriet, now the sole company head,
and Grosset & Dunlap. Harriet wanted to modernize the stories to bring them
up to contemporary times as well as simplify the writing style to appeal to a
younger audience. Grosset & Dunlap also wanted racial slurs and stereotypes
removed as many parents were complaining about the content of the books they
published. Slumping sales also contributed to this decision. However, instead
of fixing any minority characters, the cast of the books was completely
whitewashed until the 1970s. While a number of the original stories were
maintained and modified, several plots were entirely rewritten from scratch to
become virtually new stories with the same titles. A greater emphasis was
placed on fast-paced action rather than mood building.
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| Animation cels from Filmation's series. |
Along with
these story changes, the characters themselves underwent some revisions. Many
of McFarlane’s original stories featured Hardy Boys who were skeptical of
authority figures--including law enforcement--as a means to convey that those
in charge were sometimes not above board. The Hardys also received compensation
sometimes for their sleuthing, which went towards their college educations, and
their devotion to their Aunt Gertrude stemmed from the fact she was rich. With
the revisions, the Hardys were entirely respectful of authority to the point
that they wouldn’t go beyond the speed limit, even to chase down a villain.
Villains no longer smoked or drank, nor possessed many of their unique
character quirks (Pedro Vincenzo, for example, branded his victims in the
original 1934 text of The Mark on the
Door, but not in revised editions), and often
surrendered in lieu of the shoot-outs that dominated the original stories.
In
1956, Disney contracted the production of two serials that aired
during The
Mickey Mouse Club. Starring younger versions
of the Hardys to appeal to the show’s audience, The Mystery of the
Applegate Treasure was based on the series' first book, The Tower Treasure. The Mystery of the Ghost Farm was an original
story by screenwriter Jackson
Gillis. After the Syndicate conducted a survey to
determine why sales were falling on the series, they discovered a large factor
was due to the high cost of the books and competition from television. The
Syndicate quickly approved an hour-long pilot based on the book The
Mystery of the Chinese Junk with the Hardys portrayed as young adults. It aired
on CBS,
but the show was never picked up due to the pilot’s poor ratings.
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| The animated band: Frank, Pete, Wanda, Chubby and Joe. |
A more
fully-realized attempt came in 1969 when Filmation acquired the rights to the franchise. Having struck a
major hit with The
Archie Show the year before on both television and the radio,
Filmation sought to duplicate that success with the Hardys. As a result,
Filmation took some liberties with the source material. Gone were the clean-cut
teens as described in the books; instead Frank (Dallas McKennon) and Joe (Byron
Kane) were given long hair and the latest mod styling to complement their new
vocation as members of a band. Fellow band mate and friend Chubby Morton
(McKennon) was a play on their friend from the books, Chet Morton. Wanda Kay
Breckenridge (Jane Webb) was the only female member of the band and loosely
based on Callie Shaw, Frank’s girlfriend from the books. Created exclusively
for the cartoon was Pete Jones (Kane). Pete received the distinction of
becoming the very first African-American character to be featured in a Saturday
morning cartoon (although his voice actor was white).
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| The live-action band: English, Soltysiak, Taylor, Kailing and Crowder. |
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| The Corgi Toys die-cast version of the band's not-quite-Silver Ghost. |
The Hardy
Boys premiered on September 6, 1969 and
became the first action-adventure mystery show on Saturday mornings. It also
became the first to deal with the concept of drugs and provided public service
announcements to its audience, such as not smoking and wearing seat belts. The
band traveled around on a worldwide tour in a brightly-colored Rolls Royce
Silver Ghost and often ended up being caught
up in a mystery, leading to confrontations with the culprits. To combat the
growing concerns of violence on television, all of the fighting was done
off-camera. Characters would be tackled and tumble off screen, sounds of
fighting would be heard, and then the camera would pan over to the victor. Any
of the conflict shown on screen would be done through comedic methods; such as
Chubby clumsily knocking their foes over while giving chase. Filmation used the
various Hardy Boys books for episode plots, but their
adherence to the books varied between episodes; some being near adaptations
while others bore only a passing connection to the story for which the episode
was named. Episodes included two different story segments and at least one
musical number. The series was written by Eric Blair, H.F. Mauberly, David Melmuth and Ken Sobol, and Ray
Ellis (under his son’s name, Marc) provided the
rest of the show’s music.
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| Here Come the Hardy Boys album cover. |
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| The Hardy Boys board game by Milton Bradley. |
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| The 1970s revised edition of the first book. |
As for the books themselves, early 1970s
revisions featured the Hardys as members of a band they formed, something that
had not been previously established in the series until then. In 1980, Harriet,
dissatisfied with the lack of creative control or recognition for the Hardys’
50th Anniversary with Grosset & Dunlap, switched over
to Simon and Schuster for further publications. A legal battle over that
move resulted in Grosset & Dunlap being awarded the rights to the original books
as they were in print in 1980, but Harriet retained all rights to the
characters and could produce new material based on them.
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| The first book in the current series by Simon & Shuster. |
58 books ran in the original
series until 1979. The
Hardy Boys Mystery Stories ran from 1979-2005, published by the imprints Wanderer Books and Minstrel Books, continuing the original numbering until #190. The first
spin-off, The
Hardy Boys Casefiles ran from 1987-98 published by Archway Parperbacks with Simon and Schuster handling collected editions
of the books. It featured a darker and grittier version of the
Hardys and their world. A younger-reader series, The
Hardy Boys Are: The Clues Brothers ran from 1997-2000, with The
Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers running from 2005-12 as a replacement for the Mystery
Stories series. In 2010, Simon and Schuster’s Aladdin imprint began annual publication of The
Hardy Boys Secret Files, which featured the
Hardys as grade-school detectives. In 2016, it was rebooted as The Hardy Boys Clue Book, which served as an
interactive experience that encouraged readers to write down clues and
predictions. Simon and Schuster launched the newest book series in 2013
called The
Hardy Boys Adventures, published three times
a year with a first-person narrative that alternates between Frank and Joe each
chapter. Between 2004 and 2011, Papercutz produced a series of new graphic novels based on the
characters; the 10th
issue of which included an episode guide and
information about the cartoon. In 2017, Dynamite Entertainment published Nancy
Drew and The Hardy Boys: The Big Lie with a follow-up, The
Death of Nancy Drew, planned for her 90th anniversary in 2020.
Originally posted in 2015. Updated in 2020.
1 comment:
This is a great page-apparently the 1969 ABC Saturday Morning Cartoon Special is a missing favorite from TV Party and You Tube, among other sites. What most people forget is that Jonathan Frid (as Barnabas Collins) made several appearances during the show and ended up pushing a membership card for the Saturday Morning Cartoon Club. I still remember how much I looked forward to that lineup (besides the Hardy Boys, they also had Hot Wheels and a couple of other shows that fed off of toy lines). Hopefully there's a tape of this show sitting in a film vault somewhere just waiting to be discovered!
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