posted
This passage struck me as interesting when I read OSC's column currently on the front page:
quote:But Rehak's book is not really about Edward Stratemeyer, mostly because he died only a few books into the most famous and successful and enduring of all his series: Nancy Drew. [Emphasis added.]
Would you say the bolded part is true? I would not have. I was aware of Nancy Drew (and read a few of the books), and the Bobsey Twins, for that matter, but I was much more familiar with the Hardy Boys. This could quite possibly be merely because I was a boy, but it seems to me that a lot more girls have read the Hardy Boys than boys have read Nancy Drew.
I did some poking around to see if this startling claim was true. Here is what I found:
A Google search for "Nancy Drew" returns about 2,460,000 hits. A Google search for "Hardy Boys" returns 638,000.
There were a total of 134 books which featured the Hardy Boys alone. There were 393 which featured Nancy Drew.
Of the 41 storylines created for The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, four featured Nancy and the Hardy Boys working together. Of the remainder, 27 featured only the Hardy Boys, while 10 featured only Nancy Drew.
While there were several Nancy Drew movies in the 1930s, the Hardy Boys also appeared in The Mickey Mouse Club and in a Saturday morning cartoon series.
I was not able to get anything like sales figures for either work--compiled or average--to know whether one series tended to outsell the other.
This certainly suggests that my impression was incorrect. Color me shocked. I guess I learned something new today.
Which series of books were you more aware of? Would you say that in your recollection, the Nancy Drew books were more successful and enduring than the Hardy Boys books?
EDIT TO ADD: I'd be curious to see if this simply breaks down along gender lines, so if your gender is not obvious, could you state it?
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posted
I read all the Hardy Boys books as a kid, and still have them all sitting on the top shelf of one of my bookcases in my room. I loved them, and plan on giving them to my kids one day (when I have kids). It took me forever to collect all the hardcover books, though they've released more recently in hardcover that I have to add to the collection. But I loved each one of them. It's one of the first series that really got me interested and excited about reading.
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What's the name of the sidekick in Nancy Drew? I bet Chet could out sidekick her any day of the week.
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I was very relieved to read that the reprints were drastically edited. I bought a few of them recently, and they were no where near as good as I remembered.
I though it was just nostalgia.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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I never read a single Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew story.
But then, why would I read that stuff when Mark Twain was cranking out his wonderful yarns and Charles Dickens was available serialized in our monthly magazines for 5 cents?
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I read all the Bobsey Twin books and all the Nancy Drew books and only a few Hardy Boys books. There were just more Bobsey Twins and Nancy Drews at the library. My son reads The Hardy Boys, though and he's never read a Bobsey Twin or Nancy Drew.
But I'm really surprised that there were that many more Hardy Boys shows than Nancy Drew. I thought it was more like Disney, you know, an every other week type thing. (Was it my imagination? I would have sworn that they alternated weeks. I loved Hardy Boys weeks because of my crush on Shaun Cassidy. And the way I remember it, Disney did a cartoon and a live action switch off every week. Is it possible that it only seemed that way now?)
Does anyone else watch Shaun Cassidy's Invasion? Or is that just me, too? Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
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I had to save up for these books when I was a kid. Six bucks a pop, they weren't cheap. Mostly got them for Christmas and birthday presents.
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posted
I read Hardy Boys, one Nancy Drew, several Trixie Belden, some Bobsey Twins, and a few others. Of those, I think my favourite was either Hardy Boys or Trixie Belden.
Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2004
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I read Babysitters' Club when I was a kid, though it was a secret, as guys aren't supposed to read the BC. Mostly I liked the secret passage that was in the barn in, I think Dawn's barn? or Mary Ann, or were they step sisters?
That and I liked that the last name of one of the clients was the same as mine Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Was it my imagination? I would have sworn that they alternated weeks.
They alternated weeks faithfully for tyhe first season, after which Nancy Drew episodes became less and less frequent. (I can only imagine they were less popular.)
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posted
Yup. Oh, and Bess and George's boyfriends were Dave and Burt. *read way too much trashy fiction as a kid* Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I read Nancy Drew. I'm the crossover. I never got into Hardy Boys. My big sister got all the Nancy Drew books, so that's what I read too.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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I never read any of them, but I know that more people I know read Nancy Drew. My mom discouraged them because she really didn't like ghost authors, I only read about 10 of the Boxcar Children, and no Babysitters clubs though everyone else was. I read Narnia, Betsy-Tacy, Laura Ingalls Wilder, everything by Elizabeth Endright, and lots and lots of horse books. My mom was a middle school english teacher and i'm a girl if that helps.
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I read all of the Hardy Boys, but my sister started me out by reading the Nancy Drew books to me.
Although I must say that I stopped reading them after they made Viola, Iola? Whatever Morton, Chet's sister, die in a car bomb. Gave Joe much too big a complex. Frank's girlfriend was Callie Shaw.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: George's boyfriend was Burt?
This was a socially progressive kid's book.
You're probably being deadpan, but George was a girl.
Nancy Drew all the way, here. I read the occasional Hardy Boys book also, but didn't like it as much.
It's worth noting that Nancy Drew was a far more groundbreaking iconic figure. Nancy was independent and active, could do anything the boys could do and more -- riding horses, flying planes, playing tennis, sleuthing around town, you name it -- while always keeping her femininity. She made one heck of a role model.
The Hardy Boys, on the other hand, were a couple of all-American boys who solved crimes. Not bad, but hardly new or unique. (Even within the Stratemeyer Syndicate, they were preceded by the Rover Boys and Tom Swift, among others... and Tom had much cooler gadgets.)
Posts: 884 | Registered: Mar 2005
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I read Nancy Drew, but it was long ago enough that there were only 50 or 60 of them back then. I tried reading the Hardy Boys, but they weren't as much fun.
quote:Originally posted by Zarex: Although I must say that I stopped reading them after they made Viola, Iola? Whatever Morton, Chet's sister, die in a car bomb.
Iola. That was in the newer ('80s, I think) series, the Hardy Boys Case Files, in which the Hardys had guns and there was lots of action and violence and stuff. I read only one or two volumes of that bunch, and wasn't impressed.
(I haven't read any of the parallel Nancy Drew Files, started around the same time. I haven't had the heart.)
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I stopped reading the Hardy Boys after I read the one where people steal rare coin collections in order to use them as blanks for counterfeiting coins.
Even at 7 I knew that wasn't the best economic use of stolen rare coins.
I did like the one where the secret surrender document was hidden in the Samurai sword, though.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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One of my uncles had a big Hardy Boys collection, and my mom and her sister together had a bunch of Nancy Drew. I always preferred the Nancy Drew by far, but I consistenly showed a definite preference for female protagonists so that's no surprise. There was that other series, too, about two sisters away at private school or college. I know one was named Jean. They weren't nearly as good either. I recall enjoying the Bobbsey Twins pretty well at an early age.
I was a much bigger fan of Trixie Beldon, though, and I have/had every book except number 36, the one about the antique doll. My aunt/cousin have them now. I also liked some Cherry Ames books.
I also love the Maida books. They weren't ghost written, though.
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There were two different, contradictory explainations given for George's name: one was that it was Georgina, and she hated it, so went by George. The other was that her parents were hoping for a boy and wanted to name him after an uncle or something, and hadn't picked out a girl's name, so when she was born, they just decided to call her George anyway.
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Now! On Pay-Per-View! The big WWF Hardy Boys vs. Nancy Drew Smashdown!
I read the Bobbsey Twins when I was a kid. And I have a few of the really really early ones, from the 1910's. What an shock to see how incredibly racist and completely politically incorrect those early volumes were.
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posted
I remember that I read at least one of each Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins. I thought the Bobbsey Twins were ok, but I disliked the other two to the extent that I won't read a book to this day if it is identified as a sleuth book, and I avoid that section of the library completely. It was many years before I realized that the box car children series, which I loved, was in its later books a sleuth type story, but the first story, which I read first, is more of a history/background and much less of a mystery, so that's my excuse.
Posts: 349 | Registered: May 2003
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Has Nancy Drew ever been adapted for the stage? Because the Seattle Children's Theater has done a Hardy Boys one every 3 years or so.
That's my exposure. Plus I read one Hardy Boys book and 2 Nancy Drew.
I was more of a Boxcar Children girl. And Babysitter's Club. Stacy sticks in my mind particularly as The Diabetic One (Type 1 represent, what what!).
Posts: 866 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Yup, Nancy's been on stage at least 5 times I know of, and probably more. *has The Nancy Drew Scrapbook, now a collector's item in itself*
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I was always a Three Investigators fan myself. Reading this thread makes me think I was the only one.
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Though I did read several of the Drew books, I didn't like that they were always a girly color.
Plus, there were two Hardy Boys and only one Nancy Drew. Clearly, the Boys have a big advantage in a fight.
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quote:While there were several Nancy Drew movies in the 1930s
And yet they don't all have Nancy Drew in them. At least the only one I've seen had absolutely no mention of anyone with a name slightly resembling Nancy or Drew outside of the Iforgetthenameofthetitle: A Nancy Drew Mystery on the box and during the intro . . .
Posts: 3801 | Registered: Jan 2000
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Hmmm. I read every single Bobsey Twin book when I was little. And then I read every single Hardy Boys book I could get my hands on, I loved them. I read two Nancy Drew books and didn't like them.
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When I was at my parents house recently, I looked for them. I only found one - The Whispering Mummy. I guess I got them all out of the library too.
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I was definately into Nancy Drew when I was little, but not so much the Hardy Boys. I feel like ND was more popular among my age group than HB was. I knew more people who liked ND than HB.
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I have about 40 ND books. I never read HB. I was always under the impression that HB was the boys' version of ND. At least, that's how I always saw it.
Posts: 7877 | Registered: Feb 2003
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See, I always though that Nancy Drew was the girls' version of Hardy Boys.
-o-
A Hardy Boys book was the first chapter book I ever read. I don't remember what grade I was in--second?--and I was bored of picture books, so I looked through the other stuff in the school library and found this book that looked vaguely interesting. My parents had always liked the Hardy Boys, so they made a huge deal about it when I brought it home, so that was pretty cool. Then I read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I was hooked. From then on I (i.e., my parents) bought them, and eventually collected all of the blue-spined books, and the detective handbook. No matter how broke we were, there was always enough money to buy me a brand-new Hardy Boys book.
The Hardy Boys had a LOT to do with my developing a love of reading.
I never did get into the first paperback series. They didn't match my other Hardy Boys books, and I'm O/C enough for that to bother me.
I ready the first HD: Casefiles book when it came out, though by then I was much too old, but I still had a fondness in my heart for thye series. Then they killed Iola, and the boys used guns, and I pretty much threw it across the room in disgust. I finished that book, but I never read another Hardy Boys book.
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I never got into the TV series. Sean (sp?) Cassidy was way too pretty and long-haired, and the Hardy Boys were clearly clean-cut in the books.
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quote:Originally posted by Raia: On a somewhat different note...
Did you know that Carolyn Keene's real name is Mildred Wirt Benson?
Sort of. She wrote a bunch of the earlier books (following and subverting supplied instructions), and is responsible for Nancy's more liberated aspects, but Edward Stratemeyer's daughter Harriet Adams was largely the one in control. Although even that is an oversimplification.
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