Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mystery of the Hollywood Phantom (Episode 1) Recap

November 11, 2025November 11, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 4 Comments

Here I am with another recap of an episode from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from 1977 to 1979. This month it’s perfect because it fits in with my Nancy Drew November event.

As I’ve mentioned before in previous recaps, in the first season of this series, the episodes switched back and forth from The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew episodes and in the next season, which is the season I am in now, they started to join together. Eventually, they began to phase out the Nancy episodes and focus more on The Hardy Boys. A new actress also stared as Nancy part way through season two when Pamela Sue Martin became disenchanted with the lack of parts that were being written for her character.

According to trivia on IMdb: “Upon Janet Julian replacing Pamela Sue Martin in the second half of season two, Nancy Drew was only seen teaming up with the Hardy Boys, and never any solo stories. ABC however, did continue to air Martin’s episodes over rerun periods. For the third season, Nancy Drew was completely eliminated from the series, which was re-titled simply “Hardy Boys.””

I haven’t decided if I will watch the episodes that are just Hardy Boys, but I probably will.

This time around, I am tackling The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Hollywood Phantom.

This is the second two parter I am writing about, with the first being The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula.

This time around I am going to share my recap in two posts, instead of one.

In this first episode, Nancy and the boys fly, separately, to Hollywood to take part in a detective conference. As Nancy is walking into the terminal, we see someone cutting a pol polaroid picture of her, removing her head. When she pauses at the payphones to call Bess (her sidekick for this season, but who does not show up in these episodes other than that call), we see someone cutting across a photograph of a man wearing a cowboy hat, and removing his head (in the photograph, I mean) as well.

We then see the Hardy brothers walking through the airport and picking on each other.

When Nancy looks across the airport, she sees a man trying to put a polaroid in the bag of the man with the cowboy hat. She runs to stop him, but the other man gets away and the cowboy thinks she’s the one trying to put something in his bag.

Frank and Joe see the interaction and rush to her rescue, telling the cowboy that they are with the airport police, juvenile division. Joe says to Nancy he thought he told her not to show up at that airport anymore.

The cowboy isn’t buying it and tells them he thinks they are all in on it together and were trying to steal from him.

As usual, Nancy is a bit uptight about it all when the cowboy leaves, but laughs a little at the boys. She catches a taxi and leaves them behind, being somewhat rude as usual.

The Hardy boys figure out she’s going to the same conference and will see her at the hotel.

While in the taxi, Nancy pulls out the photo of herself with the head missing. That means someone was able to shove a photo into her bag too. On the back are the words, “No one will shed a tear when you’re gone” written in sharpie.

Back at the hotel famous detectives are arriving but then we also see Fenton Hardy’s head being cut off in a photo too. Someone is using a typewriter to write, “The best shall also go.” The camera pans up, and we see a person wearing a creepy blue rubber mask.

A detective named Jason Fox arrives and the media all rush to talk to him. Fox chats with the media some, then brushes them off and see Fenton and goes to talk to him while the cowboy — Arlo Weatherly — comes in behind Fox and grabs him in a bear hug. They are all old buddies, I guess.

Weatherly sees Nancy, excuses himself, and approaches her. Nancy says she’s an investigator and Weatherly asks her why she put a photo of him with his head missing in his bag.

Nancy says she didn’t put the photo there and shows her own photo.

The Hardy Boys show up and together they all decide that this must be some sort of prank, even though Weatherly’s photo says, “You’re first, Cowboy.”

The boys later find similar photos in their room. “Brothers can disappear too,” is written on the back.

Soon Fenton, Nancy, and the boys are all comparing their photos.

Nancy says she thinks it is something important and dangerous and the boys laugh it off, because, you know, chauvinism.

Jason Fox shows up, and he says the same thing, reminding Fenton of all the pranks they’ve pulled in the past at this, and other, conferences.

The boys and Nancy start to walk back to their rooms later and Nancy says she still feels like something bad is going on. Frank pulls the sexist line, “Is this what you call women’s intuition?”

Then Nancy throat punches him. Oh. No. I mean. She should have.

Instead, she just roasts him by saying, “It’s called detectives intuition. Don’t you have any at all?”

Joe and Frank watch her leave and are like, “Girls. Psht. Whatever.”

Next, we are on a tour with the attendees. They are touring the sets and various sites of the movie and television making industry. Part way through, though, Nancy announces that Arlo Weatherly is missing.

She asks the boys if they remember the threat he got. That he’d be the first to go?

The boys brush her off yet again.

“Please, Nancy, don’t start on all that again,” Frank says with an eye roll.

Nancy shows them there was a polaroid on Weatherly’s seat and it’s the second half of his photo, his head.

The boys still aren’t buying it. Because they are stupid and don’t remember she helped solve the mystery with Dracula the last time they met her. Duh-uh!

So, Frank and Nancy go off to look for Weatherly and run into Columbo or Peter Falk who is shooting his show but wait — that’s not really Peter Falk. It’s an imposter! Something is off.

Oh, because that isn’t really Peter Falk. It’s ….. Casey Kasem?!

No. It legitimately it is. But his name in the show is Paul Hamilton and he eventually tells them that is who he is.

He does impressions and used to have a show in the 1950s called The Raiders, he says.

“Ever heard of it?”

Nancy and Frank have no idea what he’s talking about.

On the other side of the park Joe and Fenton are trying to find the Cowboy too but Jason Fox shrugs it off again and says it’s just a prank.

We see it isn’t a prank in the next scene when we see Weatherly sitting in a chair with his hands tied behind his back in a dark and empty cell.

Back in the park, a security guard questions Frank and Nancy about what they are doing there and escorts them out of the park.

Later that night at the conference, the boys ask Nancy if she’s heard anything on Weatherly.

She hasn’t but she has found a shooting schedule for a movie called The House on Bracken Moor.

The boys are confused and she explains that it is based on a book where eight people are stranded in an old house on an English Moor and they each receive a photograph of themselves and then each one disappears. (This is similar to the plot of And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, by the way).

The boys are still not convinced that it has anything to do with Weatherly’s disappearance but Nancy points out that they were on a studio tour when he disappeared and that studio is shooting The House on Bracken Moor.

To keep the plot going, the boys dismiss her again and she says she’s going to go find the set herself and investigate.

I don’t blame her this time around. I find Pamela’s portrayal of Nancy overly aggressive on a god day, but the boys are being absolute jerks this time around.

To speed things up a bit, Nancy goes to the studio were the movie is being shot and finds a set with a picture propped up that features photos of all of the main detectives at the conference. Someone laughs and she runs after him, chasing the down a dark alley. She eventually finds herself on a set that looks like a dock and soon is tilted off a platform into some water. A fake shark chases her (think Jaws style), but she’s able to get out of the water. Staggering down the sidewalk, much less soaked than she should be if she’d really fallen into water, a truck attempts to back over her, but she is rescued by a man on horseback.

That man turns out to be Dennis Weaver who was acting in a show called McCloud at the time.

He takes her back to the hotel where the boys meet her, and Weaver tells them someone tried to run her over.

She tells the boys about the picture and as she goes in to change her clothes, she is thoroughly annoyed at them. After she leaves, they talk amongst themselves and finally agree that she’s been right all along after all.

They see Bronson, one of the detectives at the conference, get an envelope with a photograph and Frank goes to find Nancy. Nancy opens the door to her hotel room, but says, “Turn around, I’m getting dressed,” after he comes inside. Ummm…so what was she wearing when she opened the door?

Let us not think about that.

Anyhow, they confront Bronson and he says it’s a photograph of his son, not of him. They’re barking up the wrong tree, he adds.

He says Jason Fox is trying to play pranks on people and not to worry about it.

Nancy feels like the boys still won’t believe her now and they all go downstairs and see Jason Fox who is looking for Fenton because it appears that he is now also missing.

Joe, Nancy, and Jason start to go to look for Fenton, but Franks sees a photo in Bronson’s mailbox. He says Bronson sent him to get it. It’s a photo with Bronson’s head cut off.

They can’t find their dad and meanwhile we’re shown that Weatherly and Fenton are tied to chairs. Fenton says, “We should have believed Nancy. This guy’s crazy.”

Fenton’s ring, Arlo Weatherly’s watch, and some pendant belonging to Bronson are in a box given to Jason Fox. They all decide it is time to call the police, even though a ransom note in the box with the items says not to — just to bring money.

“Three of your detectives already gone,” the note reads. “$500,000 will free them. Don’t call the police.”

Jason says he will call the police and the boys apologize to Nancy for not believing her and they all agree to combine their forces and find out what is going on.

There is an argument between Frank and Nancy because Nancy was pushed into water earlier and could be in danger, but she points out she came there alone without them before because they didn’t want to believe her so she will be fine.

After Joe urges them to put their argument aside, they go onto the set and find the same photograph that Nancy told them about.

As they are talking someone begins to laugh again and they see the person’s silhouette outside the set window.

They all take chase. Joe gets onto a golf car type thing, while Nancy runs for help, and Frank gets stopped by studio security. Joe is busy searching an abandoned set when he is also snatched.

That ends episode one. I’ll share about episode two in a separate blog post tomorrow.

Before, I close, I will share what I liked about episode one: I liked the intrigue and how everyone was blowing off the idea that something dangerous was really going on util Fenton and Bronson disappeared along with Weatherly.

What I didn’t like was how all the men treated Nancy like she was a hysterical girl. I think that they could have moved the plot of the show along even if they had believed her. They really didn’t have to be so rude to her all of the time.

Even though, again, I feel Nancy is often rude in these shows. I think the writers, and Pamela herself, were trying to make Nancy appear confident, but instead I feel like it makes her look curt, abrupt and dismissive.

If you want to read other recaps from this show you can find them here:https://lisahoweler.com/old-tv-show-recaps/

A recap of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise (with spoilers)

August 4, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 3 Comments

Here I am with another recap of an episode from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from 1977.

As I’ve mentioned before, in the first season of this series, the episodes switched back and forth from Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew episodes and in the next season, they started to join together. Eventually, they began to phase out the Nancy episodes and focus more on The Hardy Boys. A new actress also started as Nancy when Pamela Sue Martin became disenchanted with the parts that were being written for her character.

*Disclaimer: These posts do spoil the entire episode. Also, I do joke around a lot about the cheesiness or plot holes or the “weird” 70s hairstyles, clothes or music, but please know it is all in good fun. I have fun watching these and the mysteries are often very interesting. Please don’t leave me comments enraged that I am making fun of your favorite show. *wink* I make fun of my favorite shows too!

In this episode, focused on Nancy Drew and titled, The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise, we start out with people loading on to a cruise ship.

First, we see the ship with people waving from the decks and then we see a scrapbook with photos featuring an elderly man and the headline under the one photo reads: “Famous Mystery Writer John Addam to Set Sail.”

Underneath the photo there is a handwritten note which reads: “Castling to protect king — two moves to checkmate — this will be your last cruise, Mr. Addams. Your going to . . .” A hand begins writing and finishes the sentence by adding the word “die.”

I should note here that I copied that sentence verbatim from the threatening note in the journal (as you can see by the photo) and really wanted to go back and change “your” to “you’re.”

Imagine the editors not noticing that error before this episode aired. Or maybe they never noticed. Ha!

Immediately after this scene we see an elderly man and a young woman standing next to him and they are being interviewed by a TV reporter. The reporter asks the man, who we can see is Mr. Addams, the mystery writer we saw in the photos in the first scene, what made him decide to retire.

What she actually says is, “What finally decided you to do it?”

Um…huh? I don’t know about the writers of this show sometimes, but anyhow….

Mr. Addams answers that writing is getting boring now. “There isn’t a new twist anywhere.”

She asks him if this means there will never be another book featuring the main characters from his mystery books and he tells her she clearly hasn’t read his books because he killed off one character, retired the other one, and the third has simply gotten too old to do anything.

The camera pans to Nancy and her father, Carson, and friends George Fayne and Ned Nickerson. Ned is carrying all the luggage asking why the girls have so much if they are only going on the cruise for a week.

We switch quickly back to the interview and the author is mellowing a bit as he answers questions. He also refers to his niece Cathy as being his main helper with his books these days.

Nancy and the crew are now listening in the background and soon Mr. Addams ends the interview so he can meet up with them.

It isn’t clear why, but Nancy and George seem to be going on this cruise with Mr. Addams. At first, I thought maybe he is an uncle to one of them but that’s never really made clear, so I believe he is simply a friend of Carson’s.

This is one of the first times I’ve seen Nancy act like she and Ned might be more than friends. As they are saying goodbye Ned expresses concern that she will get herself in trouble and she says she doesn’t plan to and then assures him she will be safe on the cruise, leans up, and gives him a quick peck on the mouth.

Oh. Um. Well then.

Carson tells Mr. Addams to take care of the girls and Mr. Addams answers, “I’ll certainly do that.”

This whole time there is a man with either an amused or creepy smile on his face, we aren’t sure which, watching both the interview and the gathering of Mr. Addams and Nancy and her friends and Dad.

This will start an interesting episode-long tactic of making the viewers question who is suspicious and who isn’t, by the camera focusing on a person frowning, smiling, glaring, or simply looking, well, suspicious while watching Mr. Addams and the girls. This is done a number of times making us guess who was behind the eventual threats against Mr. Addams.

Let’s get back to the story, though.

On their way to find their rooms, the party is stopped by the captain. He tells Mr. Addams what a pleasure it is to have him on board and invites them all to dine with him at his table that night.

After that praise fest it’s on to their rooms but not before we have the suspenseful music and a pause by the captain with him watching the group walk away. Huh…is he also suspicious? And then there is a young woman watching them too. Is she suspicious or just a fan?

They were really dropping the red herrings left and right from the start in this one.

After the captain, the group run into George the activities director. He’s excited to meet George since his name is also George. George and George. Ha. Ha. He clearly thinks George is cute and lets her know he can’t wait to see her later during the cruise. He creepily touches her face, trailing his finger down her cheek, and says “There’s a hidden depth to you….”

Her expression cracks me up. It is a mix of flattered and horrified — pretty much how most viewers probably feel watching that moment. *snort laugh*

Once they finally get to the room there is a man waiting for them and he is not welcoming. He is the man who we saw at the beginning of the episode watching the interview and he says his name is Peter Howard. He has a tape recorder and starts smooth talking Mr. Addams, telling him he wants an interview with him about the memoir he’s planning to write. Mr. Addams says he isn’t going to be writing a memoir and tells the man to get out.

George and Cathy go to explore the ship, leaving Nancy and Mr. Addams in his cabin. Mr. Addams says he’s going to take a nap and settles back in a chair. Before he can fall asleep, though, Nancy finds the scrapbook with the threat written in it. She reads it to him and he sort of shrugs and says, “You don’t go through life like a battering ram without making some enemies.” He doesn’t like the idea someone may be after him but he also thinks it might be a prank so he decides to nap and Nancy decides to go meet up with George and Cathy.

Mr. Addams asks her to leave one light on in the cabin because he doesn’t like to wake up in pure darkness and when she goes to turn a lamp on, a huge spark flies out, knocking her down.

There is a fade out as the show goes to commercial break and when we “return” (there are no commercials where I watched this on a YouTube channel where someone uploaded all the episodes), George and Cathy are back and Nancy is sitting on the couch with a glass of water.

Everyone is concerned about Nancy and the captain steps in because he’s probably concerned about his ship’s reputation with the light in a celebrity’s cabin almost zapping the life out of someone. A ship electrician has arrived and says the lamp was definitely rewired to it would zap someone on purpose.

Mr. Addams points out how bad the situation is but how it could have been even worse if he had touched the lamp since he is an old man with a heart condition.

The electrician is a fan of Mr. Addam’s and lets him know how the fact someone targeted him is like a scene from one of his books. Wow. I bet Mr. Addams had no idea the attack was similar to one of his books. Good thing that electrician was there to tell him.

Viewers are left feeling that there is something not quite right about this electrician but can’t put their finger on it. He goes on the list of suspects too at this point.

As if we don’t have enough suspense, we will soon find out that the captain is worried about what could be deadly fog settling around the ship. He tells the crew to keep him abreast of the situation and then heads to dinner.

Throughout the episode we keep being shown a person in a long trench coat moving around the ship. We see them again as Nancy is on her way to dinner. They are cutting some wires and putting what looks like a bomb somewhere in the bottom of the ship. Eek. This episode is intense and I’m not kidding.

As in any Nancy Drew episode of the series, we have another moment where an older man seems to be flirting with her. This time she’s dancing with Mr. Howard who wants to know how well she knows Mr. Addams. What’s a little icky about this scene is that it’s like Nancy is flirting back with the man. He’s old enough to be her father! *gag sound*

“I’m not a stepping stone to him, you know, Mr. Howard,” she says coyly.

I’m sure that’s not how the writers meant it, though, really, so I’m just teasing.

Anyhow, they chat a bit about how she knows him and she says she knows his niece Cathy more, which is something I’m just learning about because for this whole episode I’m assuming Mr. Addams is friends with Carson.

Anyhow, Mr. Howard says he’ll get what he wants from Mr. Addams, mainly by intimidation. He’s smiling but…hmmm….is he the mystery note writer?

Nancy escapes Mr. Howard by bumping into the electrician or crew member, whose name is Tony by the way, and asking him for a dance before questioning him if there could be a stowaway on the ship. The man says there couldn’t be and the two continue to dance while Cathy looks on sadly. Her uncle encourages her to go out and dance but she simply looks sad and declines.

A girl named Adrienne approaches Cathy and Mr. Addams at their table and tells Cathy she went to school with her brother.

Cathy invites Adrienne to sit with them, and a chat ensues.

On the dance floor, the Georges are dancing together and the male George says the female George (yes, this does sound like the start of a joke…), “You know George, you’re very attractive.” And the female George responds, “You are too, George. In your own way.”

Ouch.

We flip to a scene with Mr. Addams out on the deck of the ship for a smoke. Suddenly a voice starts speaking over the loudspeaker, telling him that this is his last cruise, etc. The voice is echoing and s female voice. The voice taunts him in reminding him of what happened to his victims in his books. He is looking freaked out as the voice tells him he is going to die.

He runs into Nancy and asks her if she can hear the voice. She can and they start to look for the source of it and find a cassette recorder broadcasting through the loudspeaker.

Nancy points out that the recorder looks like the one Peter Howard had and suggests that he was hoping to sneak up behind Mr. Addams when Mr. Addams was looking for the source of the voice.

Cathy is out on deck next and says she heard the voice too.

“Whoever did it made a very big mistake,” Nancy says and stares at Cathy pointedly. Cathy stares back. Also pointedly. Dun-dun-duuuuuuuun.

Nancy and Mr. Addams rush to the captain’s office to play him the tape but when they hit play, the recording is gone.

Now they both feel stupid and leave with their heads hanging down. The captain watches them leave with a little smirk.

There are a lot of smirking people in this episode.

To speed this recap up a bit I’ll skip ahead a bit. After discussing that this all sounds a lot like a book Mr. Addams wrote called The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise (gasp! The episode title!), Nancy goes to look for the book in the ship library because, yeah, sure, a ship is going to have an extensive library with just the book she needs. She can’t find it and we see the person with the gloves and the trench coat throw the book overboard.

Moving ahead again, Nancy bumps into Tony, literally, and he looks at her with “come hither eyes” and says, “I heard the captain say you think someone wired that lamp on purpose.” She says she does and he … yes, you guessed it…smirks.

“Who would do a thing like that?” he asks, suggesting she’s just some silly girl.

He tells her he will help all he can but to please be careful “in case there is some nut running around the ship.”

Are you the nut, Tony? Be honest now…you did think it was important to tell Mr. Addams you read all his books

Adrienne has somehow wiggled her way into the show and is now playing chess with Mr. Addams. She seems a bit miffed when the old man wins.

Nancy looks at the scrapbook with the threat in it again to see if she can figure out who might be making the threats and finds an article about a Martin Carroll who sued Mr. Addams for stealing his idea for a book.

When Nancy asks, Mr. Addams says Martin Carroll would be about 50 now. He also says he didn’t steal the man’s idea. They were working on the book together and Martin Carroll simply flaked out and walked away. There was also never enough evidence for the lawsuit to go forward.

Nancy begins to suspect that Martin Carroll is actually Peter Howard.

She somehow uses a CB radio to contact her dad and ask for more information about Martin Carroll. The captain is listening in and looks very concerned about her conversation.

Nancy soon gets a telegram for her dad telling her that Martin Carroll died six months earlier. He also tells her he will be meeting her on the first island the cruise ship is stopping at.

Nancy then finds someone leaving Mr. Addams room. She chases the person into the belly of the ship and is knocked off a metal ladder and is about to fall to her death when Tony shows up to rescue her.

Tony tells her she needs to be careful (he’s the new Ned, I guess) and then we are in the bridge and the captain sees on the monitors that they are about to hit a tidal wave. He wants the crew to tell the passengers what is going on without alarming them.

In between all this, George (the female one) is asked to sing by George (the male one). We listen to a subdued 70’s style song but they are interrupted by crew members telling everyone to get their lifejackets on.

Nancy smells a hoax though. She runs to tell the captain that she thinks the tidal wave is a hoax and that it isn’t going to hit. While she tries to convince him, we get cut away shots of Mr. Howard smirking while he drinks some kind of alcohol and Cathy looking creepy.

Turns out Nancy is right and someone has hacked the radar. But why?

Nancy has to find out.

She asks Tony if he knows anything about the Carroll case since he was such a huge fan of Mr. Addams. He says yes and that Martin Carroll did write one book and it was called The Mystery of the Haunted Cruise.

Nancy rushes to the ship library again and — it’s a miracle — the book is there! She reads the ending of the book and finds out that the character in the book is backed against a railing before being killed. She flips to the front of the book and sees a dedication that reads, “To my wife Celeste and my daughter …. ADRIENNE??!!!”

Nancy rushes out of the library and then we are sent to the deck where George and George are talking but that isn’t important — what is important is that Nancy runs out looking for Mr. Addams.

George tells her that he’s walking on deck with Adrienne.

“She’s the one who has been doing all this!” Nancy cries. “Get the captain right away.”

Suddenly we are on the deck where Adrienne shoves Mr. Addams toward the ship railing and declares he killed her father.

“He was a broken man, Mr. Addams in health and spirit,” Adrienne tells him. “I’ve lived under your shadow for years. Your name was all I ever heard in our house. My father was obsessed with you. You ruined his life. You robbed him of the success that might have changed his life.”

“And you wanted me to relive the events of that book?” Mr. Addams asks.

Adrienne says, “That’s right. Everything the way it was.”

Mr. Addams suggests that she couldn’t kill him, though, not really. Adrienne disagrees and is about to shove him over the railing when Nancy stops her at the same time the captain and his first mate are walking up to the scene.

“I don’t think she would have gone through with it,” Mr. Addams says, an optimist, despite being a grump through much of the episode.

All is well now, but Nancy and George decide they’re going to get off the ship on the island where Ned and Mr. Drew are meeting them.

Mr. Addams is going to finish his cruise, and he decides not to press charges against Adrienne, instead asking that she get mental help.

He even grants an interview with Mr. Howard.

And with that the episode is over.

As I said, this was one of the more intense and exciting ones.

Up next for a recap is Episode 13 of the series with The Hardy Boys and entitled The Secret of the Jade Kwan Yin.

If you want to read some of my recaps of other episodes of this show, you can find them by doing a search for Hardy Boys Nancy Drew in the search bar on the right sidebar.

Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.

You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find her on Instagram and YouTube.

Episode recap: The Hardy Boys The Mystery of the Flying Courier

June 12, 2025June 12, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 2 Comments

I have been sharing my takes on the episodes from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from the late 70s off and on for the last few months.

The show was, of course, based on the separate series of books from the 1930s and switched off between featuring The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew each week for most of the first season. Eventually the “teen” sleuths would combine their efforts in joint episodes.

This week’s episode was with The Hardy Boys and was called The Mystery of the Flying Courier.

We start out with Frank (Parker Stevenson) Callie (their dad’s secretary and maybe Frank’s girlfriend), and Chet (the boy’s friend), heading into a bar or restaurant where Joe’s band is playing. Of course Joe (Shaun Cassidy) is singing because that’s what Shaun Cassidy did back then as a teen heartthrob.

And he’s singing “Da Doo Ron Ron,” which is pretty much one of the most annoying songs I have ever heard — apologies to the original performers, The Crystals, who recorded it in 1961.

The song was Cassidy’s biggest hit other than That’s Rock N’ Roll. *spoiler alert* That song is not rock n’ roll.

When it was recorded by The Crystals the person in the song was “Bill” and not “Jill” by the way. I am sure you wanted to know that.

Okay, back to the show. The camera pans away from Frank and the rest walking inside to two official looking men in suites. One says, “She’s in there now,” and the other says, “We’ll wait for her to come out.”

While sitting and listening to Joe “rock out” (eye roll…it was NOT rock, but pop) Frank spots a girl across the bar and says she looks exactly like Susie Wilkins.

Susie dropped out of sight three years ago, he tells Callie. His father was trying to track her down because her parents were worried about her.

All Fenton Hardy’s leads dried out but now she’s sitting in the bar with them. He’s sure of it.

Frank tries his best to focus on his brother’s performance, but he can’t help stealing looks at the girl and at one point when he looks, she’s gone.

She’s followed the DJ back into his office, but Frank doesn’t know this yet. We, the viewers, do.

She’s telling the DJ that she needs the money he promised her and he better get it to her, but the DJ is saying he doesn’t have it. Not only that, he doesn’t even want to do the project with her anymore because two other men were there asking about her.

She tells him to get it done and get her the money or he’s going to “be the one shot down.”

Whatever that means.

When she leaves, Frank confronts her and calls her Susie. She says he’s mistaken and that’s not her name. She rushes out with him and Callie behind her and all three are met in the parking lot by the men in suits.

They tell Frank that her name is Sandy, not Susie, and they are there to arrest her. Frank runs back into the bar and calls Fenton and says he saw Susie. Fenton tells Frank to get to the police station and see if it is her and why she was arrested.

At the police station, the chief tells him they haven’t arrested a woman but asks for the girl’s information.

Frank goes back to retrieve Joe, and they set out to see if they can find Susie and who has taken her.

The next thing we know the kids are at a junkyard where they find Susie’s car, a little red bug, being destroyed while some men look through the car. I am super confused how they found the car or the junkyard, but let’s just go with it.

Frank sneaks off and climbs in the car to find out more infobot while he’s in there a large magnet comes and picks up the car and carries it off to be crushed.

Callie and Joe follow the car and scream for Frank to get out but then watch in horror as the car is crushed under the machine.

Now they are both crushed in a different way, crying in each other’s arms as they think Frank has become a human pancake.

That’s when Frank pops up from behind some cars behind them after he hears Callie comforting Joe.

“Joe?! What about me?” he asks and suddenly he’s been hugged and they’re crying over him, relieved he is still alive.

Fenton is upset that the boys and Callie took the risk, but Frank says he thinks it was worth it because he found a pay stub in Susie Wilkin’s glove compartment that proves she exists and had a job somewhere not long ago.

The next morning, we find Susie looking for her car, but with no explanation on where she’s been. She’s simply wearing the clothes she had on the day before.

A man pulls up and says hello and she asks him if he knows where her car is.

“You’ve brought this on yourself,” he tells her but then invites her to climb in the car.

She totally does. Like a moron.

They drive off and then we are back to Frank and Joe who are going to “go find us a girl.”

In the meantime we are suddenly at a record making factory where the man has brought “Sandy” and is telling her that he’s short on product because she hasn’t delivered the tapes she promised him

“I told you my terms,” she says. “If you don’t like it, you’ll have to get them yourself.”

What tapes are these? It’s driving me crazy, but not as much as the plot hole where we weren’t told how Frank and Joe knew to go to the junkyard.

So, the man takes Sandy to her crushed car and when she asks why he would do that he says it’s because he gets angry when a friend lies to him.

We find out a few minutes later, these two have been more than friends in the past. Susie, er Sandy, says so.

That’s why she didn’t go to the cops to the tell them about the tapes, she says with a flirtatious smile.

He tells her that she better have the tapes soon because she’ll be in the next car that is crushed. Oooh…

She says she doesn’t have the tapes on her and she just needs a little more time.

Next thing we see is the DJ ripping a house apart, looking for something. He’s interrupted when Frank and Joe pull up. I still don’t know how they’ve gotten here, other than they had her paystub so it must have had her address on it.

They call for her, but she doesn’t answer so they simply walk right in and find the place trashed.

Then they find a 8 track cassette of a song they say would have been pre-released to DJs and they wonder why she had it. A photo of her and the DJ together let the boys know that the two know each other somehow and are pretty cozy. (Just an aside but Susie seems a bit loose to me…if ya’ know what I mean.)

The DJ and the two men posing as cops are meeting in the next scene, and the men tell the DJ that they tried to get Sandy to tell them where the tapes were but she insisted they were in a safe deposit box and she didn’t have the key. They believed her and let her go. They said pretending to be cops to question her was one thing but kidnapping her was a line they wouldn’t cross.

The men suggest that the DJ just give her the money and get the tapes back and it will all be over.

The men leave the DJ at the same time Frank and Joe pull up. They enter the bar and ask the DJ if he knows Sandy.

“Why me?” he asks.

“She said she was a close friend of yours,” Frank answers.

The DJ, at his swarmy best, grins and says, “Well, all the little girls do.”

Ick. Ick. Ick. Shudder. Shudder. Shudder.

The DJ thinks the boys have left, but actually they’re hiding behind the bar when the DJ leaves so they can snoop around.

When Joe accidentally triggers the sound system, which sounds like a bunch of guns going off, Frank dives behind the booth where Sandy had been sitting. Once the sound has been shut off, Frank stands to reveal a small envelope with a key inside it.

Joe scoffs at it. “You mean we found what those guys were looking for?”

Apparently.

Also apparently, Frank has called the cops before they arrived at the bar, hoping they’d have a reason to arrest the DJ. Now the cops are going to find them inside the locked bar. Uh-oh. The boys are in trouble for causing problems…again.

Next scene brings us to the police station where the DJ is being asked if he knows a Sandy Wolford.

He denies it and the chief asks the boys if they were looking for this Sandy in the bar. They admit it and then tell the chief about Sandy’s car being crushed and her house being ransacked.

The DJ is listening in to all of this and when they produce the key, he appears to be very anxious and interested.

We, of course, know why.

The chief recognizes the key from a safe deposit box at a place where he also has a box. He says they have every right to go find that box and open it now that they have the key with a number on it.

But when they open the box, whatever was in there is gone.

The lady at the safe deposit company says the owner came back and removed what was in the box earlier in the day. Hmmm…why didn’t she tell them that when they asked to see the box to open it? I have no idea.

The chief gets a call while he’s there and it’s his office telling him they picked Susie/Sandy up at a movie theater and have brought her into the station.

Susie is all smiles in the station in the next scene, saying she is Susie Wilkins and she’s just fine. She wasn’t arrested by the police but a couple federal “hot dogs” who made a mistake of her identity.

Frank and Joe try to get Susie to tell them what’s really going on but yet again she denies there is anything bad going on.

Frank tells her that they’re just worried about her.

“Yeah, just like your father three years ago,” Susie snaps. “He had me on the run every minute until I established a new identity.”

I still don’t get why, if she established a new identity, she’s still in the same town she grew up in but maybe it’s supposed to be a bigger town than I think it is.

Anyhow, she leaves the station but tells Joe to have his bandmates pick him up there for practice and follows her outside. Wow. Nice brother. Especially since Susie turns him down for a ride and he decides to just start the van and begins to leave without Joe anyhow.

He doesn’t actually leave alone, though, because Susie sees the guy who threatened her in a car and jumps in the van with Frank.

She doesn’t tell him they are being followed right away but Frank figures it out and asks her to be straight with him and tell him what is going on.

So, Susie finally lets some of her guard down and says the man following them deals in records and any other illegal businesses.

A chase ensues.

“I’m the go-between, Frank,” she confesses. “I get the demos for him from the companies.”

She told Miles, the bad guy, that she’s holding back his early copies of the demos unless he gives her more money.

She says something about “splitting for good” after she sells the tapes back to so-and-so (I honestly never caught what she was saying, even with a replay) and makes more money than she did buying them.

She’s selling them back because the tapes were sequenced with different songs and coded in a way that would help the original record company find out which DJ was bootlegging them and releasing them ahead of their release dates.

“Oh, Frank I don’t want to go to jail. I ran away from one at home. Always being told what to do, how to dress, where to be, who to be.”

Frank makes Susie promise she will tell his dad what she told him.

She “agrees,” but when they get stopped in traffic, Susie thanks Frank before telling him, “This isn’t going to work.”

She jumps out of the van and takes off running.

Susie finds a pay phone and calls the DJ and tells him she has the tapes ,and she will sell them back to him that night. He wants the tapes so no one finds out that he was the one releasing them to radio stations ahead of time.

So they are back at the bar where the DJ works but what’s weird is that he knows who the Hardy Boys are and that they are getting to close to finding out who he is, yet still lets Joe and his band play. I guess to keep the cover that he doesn’t know that they are involved in trying to find the tapes before him? I don’t know, but it’s another plot hole for me.

Susie shows up but now the other guy she was going to sell the tapes is there too. How did he find her? I don’t know! How did Frank, Joe and Callie even know to go to that junkyard?! Frank breaks into the DJs office and tells Susie she doesn’t have to do this and that his dad will help her.

“Cops?!” The DJ is freaking out now so Frank grabs Susie’s hand and they start running. That running leads them right to Miles, the other bad guy. How did he find her? Um…I have no idea really. Someone must have tipped him off.

Frank starts grabbing sandbags and throwing them at Miles and before long all craziness breaks loose between the DJ and his men, Miles and his men, and the boys.

Sand is flying everywhere, and Susie is being absolutely useless and just gasping a lot.

Someone in the crowd yells that they are going to call the cops and the cops show up in less than two minutes, which I found to be a very unbelievable response time.

The bad guys are arrested, and Susie is suddenly nice instead of dramatic and rude and thanks Frank for helping her.

So, I thought the DJ owned the bar and that it would be closed after he was arrested, though I’m not sure that he would have spent very much time in jail for bootlegging early copies of songs. During the closing scene, though, everyone, including Fenton, is back at the bar for a wrap up and to see Joe sing yet again. Fenton tells everyone that Susie is going to reunite with her parents, and they are going to improve their relationship.

They all say how wonderful that is and then turn to watch Joe shake it and flip his feathered hair around. Callie invites Fenton to dance and then the dance scene is extended so we can have a mini-Shaun Cassidy concert.

Yay? I guess….

Did you know that Shaun Cassidy is still performing and will start a 50-city tour in the fall?

According to an interview he did with Billboard Magazine in May, he never had time to tour when he was younger because of The Hardy Boys filming schedule and then he went on to have a second career in writing or producing shows such as American Gothic, Cold Case, Cover Me, The Agency, and, most recently, New Amsterdam.

He also hasn’t had a new album since 1980 but says there will be new songs on the tour.

Cassidy, followed in the footsteps of his half-brother David Cassidy, Oscar-winning actress Shirley Jones Tony-winning actor Jack Cassidy. He broke into the pop world in 1976 with the song “That’s Rock ‘n Roll” which you can hear on this episode in all its glory.

He released five studio albums between 1977 and 1980 on Curb/Warner Bros. including the Todd Rundgren-produced Wasp. After Nancy Drew, Cassidy then focused on the stage, appearing in plays on Broadway and London’s West End during the ‘80s and early ’90, before segueing into behind-the-scenes TV work in the mid-‘90s.

“Honestly, the reason I’m really motivated to do this (tour) is I have such a feeling that if you are in a position in any way to be a catalyst for bringing people together in a room or a concert hall or a church or your kitchen table, in any context, gathering people, getting them to put down their phone for a minute and actually look at each other and connect and have a shared experience is just so important at this at this stage in our world, I think,” he told Billboard.

He isn’t banning cellphones from his concerts, but he is asking audience members to put them down so he can see their faces.

Here is a clip from him singing Da Do Ron Ron from this episode:

I found a clip of him in later years singing with his half-brother, and his voice definitely got better and stronger as he aged. The reproduction is awful, but here it is: