| Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Mysteries  
  
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| Does anyone remember reading the "Hardy Boys" mysteries when they were younger? I used to get a few books every year for my birthday. Oh, how I loved those stories. I think they came out in the 30's and have been reprinted ever since.   
  
I found some Hardy Boys audio books at Audible.com. I think I'm going to get one and listen to it.   
  
I've tried to get my three daughters interested in Nancy Drew mysteries when they were younger. We got one and listened to it on a long car ride one year on vacation. I think I enjoyed it more than they did.   
  
Brad  
  
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| I was a big fan of both the "Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew" and probably read most of the books. I also remember was the show on tv with Parker Stevenson & Shaun Cassidy as the "Hardy Boys" and Pamela Sue Anderson as "Nancy Drew"! Just recently I bought a box of postcards with some of "Nancy Drew" bookcovers! I would love to find some audio shows if any are available!  
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| | I was a big fan of both the "Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew" and probably read most of the books. I also remember was the show on tv with Parker Stevenson & Shaun Cassidy as the "Hardy Boys" and Pamela Sue Anderson as "Nancy Drew"! Just recently I bought a box of postcards with some of "Nancy Drew" bookcovers! I would love to find some audio shows if any are available!  
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Welcome to the forum!   
  
Audible.com has 7 Hardy Boys audio books. I think they charge under ten dollars each.   
  
www.audible.com   
  
Brad  
  
| |  I also remember was the show on tv with Parker Stevenson & Shaun Cassidy as the "Hardy Boys" and Pamela Sue Anderson as "Nancy Drew"!  
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I think that was Pamela Sue Martin who played Nancy Drew.   
  
Pamela Anderson as Nancy would have been a different but not uninteresting idea!   
  
|  Yikes! I absolutely knew that!  That's what I get for not previewing my post!   
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| I used to read the Hardy Boys back in the 1950s and early 60s. In the 1950s, my Dad used to take me to the big Marshall Field's department store in Chicago which had a huge book department back then. They had all the Hardys Boys Books, Nancy Drew, and many others. He always bought me one or two with his earnings from the steel mills in Gary, IN. He also bought me a Nancy Drew board game, which got discarded after I went off to college (along with all my baseball cards--darn!). Only later did I discover Nancy Drew. The problem with the current Nancy Drew books is that have been rewritten and dumbed down to appeal to the current generation. You can still find the originals around in used books stores, EBay, etc., and some of the first editions have been republished.    
Also, in my opinion, the best Nancy Drew movies were those with Bonita Granville, made in 1938 and 1939. Althugh Nancy may be just a trifle too spunky, the films capture the mood of the era which modern films just don't have. If you love old time radio, you will love these Bonita Granville Nancy Drew movies, now out in a DVD package. In these movies, Ned Nickerson becomes Ted Nickerson and is played by Frankie Thomas, who also starred in the serial Tim Tyler's Luck and, later, as Tom Corbett Space Cadet, an early 1950s television show. One of the values of these old movies, books, and radio programs is they give young people historical perspective. Current publishers and producers think they have to set everything in the here and now to appeal to a homogenized young generation. In doing so, they cheat them of great lessons.  
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| Auss2004,   
  
Welcome to the forum.   
  
I spent many an hour reading the Hardy Boys in my youth. Great books. My wife got me the 1930's Nancy Drew movies DVD last year for a birthday gift. I has four shows. Very good. My youngest daughter who liked the new Nancy Drew movie that recently came out also liked the old black and white shows.   
  
Brad  
  
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| I've seen one of the Nancy Drew movies from the 30's and thought it was lots of fun!  
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| Amazon has the 4 movie pack. Here is a link if anyone is interested.   
  
http://www.amazon.com/Original-Collection-Detective-Troubleshooter-Staircase/dp/B000NVL1YU   
  
They have it for around $20 new and $14 used.   
  
Brad  
  
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| The Hardy Boys were a big part of my childhood. I must have had about 20 of those books. My parents claim they still have them, along with a handful of Tom Swift books. My grandmother and I used to read them together, starting when I was about six or seven years old. To begin with, she just read them to me but as I got older, we would trade off chapters. I can honestly say my lifelong love of reading can be traced to that experience.   
  
About the time I started reading the books, there was a Saturday morning cartoon of the Hardy Boys. This would have been around 1970 or '71--long before the Shaun Cassidy series, which I didn't particularly like. The Chet Morton character was called "Chubby" in the cartoon and they had a rock band.   
  
Although I had fewer of them, I really enjoyed the Tom Swift books. That series goes back to the WWI era and has been updated several times over the years. Most of the ones I had were the Tom Swift Jr series, published in the '50s and '60s, although had--and still have--one from the original series, Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon (or the Longest Shots on Record), published in 1917. My dad has a number of the early Tom Swift books, some of which he had as a child.  
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| Carolyn Keene did NOT write the Nancy Drew books. Shocked? I was when I first learned this. Many of the books in the genre like the Nancy Drew series are today called "juvenile series books." Mildred Wirt Bensen wrote many of them. She and other writers were part of the group hired by Edward Stratemeyer to churn out books that following a strict formula. The books are still listed under various pseudonyms such as Carolyn Keene or F.W. Dixon. Edward Stratemeyer's Syndicate provided the majority of the series books we loved as children. Now we Boomers are re-discovering the joy of reading again what we loved as kids. As large as the OTR hobby is, there is equal interest in juvenile series books. Conventions are held and many books are published every year about these books. Here' one link for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. (Google has many other pages to offer, as well.)   
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratemeyer_Syndicate [/url].   
Ebay and Amazon are some sources for finding many of the books.   
If you discover that you enjoy reading the books again, you're not alone.  
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