The Hardy Boys

The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries Mystery of the Hollywood Phantom (Episode 2) Recap

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

This is part two of The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Hollywood Phantom. If you want to read the first part of my recap of this two-parter, you can find it here:

When we left off from part one, Joe had been snatched from outside a building he was snooping around, looking for his father and the other detectives who had been kidnapped from the conference. Frank was stopped by the security guard he and Nancy had a run-in with right after Weatherly disappeared. Nancy was on her way to the hotel to “get help” (cue the funny scene from Thor Ragnarok in my head.).

The security guards escort Frank to the head of security, and Frank takes them to the set.

Nancy has run back to the hotel and finds Fox talking with a police officer. She tries to tell them what happened, but the police officer rolls his eyes for a bit before agreeing to go with her to look at the photograph.

You know what’s going to happen, right?

The photograph is gone when everyone gets there — Frank with security and Nancy with the police. It’s been switched to a normal photograph. Dun-dun-dun. I don’t know why they didn’t just take the framed picture with them.

So now no one believes Frank and Nancy even though Joe hasn’t come back yet either.

Back at the hotel, Frank is pacing, worried about his dad because there was blood on the ring that was sent to the hotel.

“That means they ripped it off him,” he tells Fox.

Fox assures him that his dad will be fine, saying he’s known him since he was a lieutenant with the NYPD (huh…I haven’t read enough Hardy Boys to know this yet).

We switch to Joe tied up somewhere and trying to get loose and then back to Frank saying he’s going to look for his brother.

Nancy, who by the way has been without a sidekick this whole time, which is weird for her, says she’s going with him, Frank says she needs to stay behind.

Nancy goes to talk to the police and Jason Fox and they tell her to keep her nose out of things.

The manager of the hotel is also upset at her because she suggests that someone from the staff could be involved in the kidnapping and the ransom note.

She goes back to Studio 24 to look for Frank and Joe and this time she sees a photo on the floor and when she stoops to get it a man in a mask begins to chase her. This is the creepy masked man we’ve been seeing throughout the two episodes.

She hides behind a set, and the man runs by, and I thought she was safe but nope, he finds her and she climbs a scaffolding, which was so stressful for me to watch.

She escapes, though and finds an exit on the roof. Girl is running in her heels this whole time too.

Then she manages to balance across a wall and jump to another building (in heels!) and run inside and down a flight of stairs and out into the street, where she runs into Casey Kasem again. Whew.

He asks her if she’s okay and she says the sound stages are just scary at night. Why can’t she just tell people the truth? “A man was chasing me! Holy crud! It was scary!”

They chat a few minutes and he says something about leaving the country for an acting job. Nancy is like, “yeah, that’s nice. Okay…gotta go…” and starts running back to the hotel.

Next, we flip to Frank who is still wandering around looking for Joe. While wandering he stumbes onto the Charlie’s Angels set where Cheryl Ladd is being told she’s going to have to kiss the extra as soon as he comes around the corner. Ladd is up for it, but hasn’t met the extra yet.

Of course, Frank walks around the corner instead of the extra and bam…he’s suddenly making out with Cheryl Ladd.

He’s distracted though so he pulls away when the director yells “cut” and says, “Any other time I would discuss spending my life with you because that was nice but right now, I’m in a hurry. Thanks.”

I can’t help admiring Frank’s bellbottoms as he walks and as someone pulls up behind him in a car and starts chasing him. Frank is running well but hits a dead end. He’s sweating and his hair is all 70s wavy and now I get why the girls back then wanted to watch the show.

Anyhow, it’s the security guard and he tells Frank he’s taking him back to the main gate. Again.

Next, we see Joe waking all the way up and looking around him. He manages to scoot and roll to the door and open it with his feet.

Scene switch again — Nancy is grilled by the police and Fox who say she needs to tell them where she’s going  from now on. (There are so many scene switches in this one and they are like three minutes apart.).

Back to Frank who is climbing walls back into the sound stages to find his brother, who is rolling out of his prison area and trying to find a way to get the ropes off his hands while we see the guy in the mask driving toward him.

Joe manages to get himself untied and hides under a wagon and sees the security guard and the masked man get out of the car and go look for him.

He runs to the car and climbs in the trunk but leaves the license plate number scrawled on the wagon for Frank.

Nancy is with the police officer looking in a microscope at the negative she retrieved from the sound stage and says she sees makeup on it and a fingerprint.

“Your forensics guy should be able to pick that up,” she says (sort of arrogantly).

So the guy is taking orders from a very young woman now? I have no idea how old they are supposed to be in these shows but they don’t go to school so I would guess early 20s.

The police say Frank is back at the hotel now after being picked up so Nancy goes back to the hotel.

After we see Joe sneaking around and finding his dad and the other men, right before he’s knocked out yet again, we switch to Nancy looking out a window and someone sneaking up behind her.

Is it the bad guy? Has he found her?

No. It’s Frank and he scolds her for leaving her hotel room door open.

“It could have been anyone!” he says.

“I can take care of myself,” she says with a whispered tone.

“You’re not doing a very good job of it,” he responds, somewhat breathlessly, standing close to her and I think… Oh my gosh, they’re going to kiss!

But the scene cuts away and suddenly (whiplash!!) Nancy marches into the room where the police officer and Fox are and thrusts a piece of paper in the officer’s hands. She says the kidnapper only wants her to come, no police, with the ransom money.

The officer says he won’t let her do it and she says he will because the kidnapper will know if he switches to someone else.

Not only that, but Frank says he’s going to go too.

The officer says he will not be going and Frank snaps, “I’ll go whether you allow it or not. It’s my brother and dad you’re rescuing.”

Honestly, these kids are hindering an investigation and should be thrown in jail, but the cop just sighs and says, “Fiiiiine.” Or something like that and they start to concoct a plan to set up the exchange.

Everyone heads out soon after that and there is a zoom in on the hotel manager’s face so now we have to wonder if he is involved.

Nancy and Fox get on a tour bus with the briefcase of money and head off to meet up with the person for the exchange.

Scene switch and Joe in the jail cell with his dad and the others.

Suddenly he remembers a nail file in his sock. Yes….Joe has a nail file in his sock and begins to pick the lock. How very convenient.

Another scene switch and Nancy and Fox are going through a tunnel on the tour and then a warehouse. Suddenly the doors close in the warehouse and the woman leading the tour gets nervous. The masked man grabs Nancy and pulls her down and when Fox turns to say something to her, she’s gone.

Nancy is being put in an elevator by the fake security guard and the masked man.  They check the money in the briefcase they stole, and then smuggle her out into a car and make her lay on the floor. Meanwhile, Joe has broke out and comes out the door and sees the men leaving with Nancy.

He finds his way to security to tell them Nancy has been grabbed and suddenly a police chase ensues. I don’t know how Joe got to security so fast so they could tell the police officer, but he did I guess and Frank and the officer take off after the car. The only problem is that the water is drained from the fake lake enough for the bad guys to drive the car over but the masked man pushes a button and the water fills in again so they can get away.

In the end, they won’t get away, though, because they come around down a street where shooting for a show is going on and can’t turn anywhere, which means the police corner the car. The masked man jumps out, pulling Nancy with him, and Frank leaps from the car and then leaps over the hood of another car and tackles the masked man. He flips the guy over and rips his mask off and it’s — oh my gosh! Casey Kasem!!!

He’s the kidnapper?!! Well, there’s some American Top 40 for you.

But Casey isn’t down yet. He flings his arm back and knocks Frank back off him and tries to take off. Sadly, he takes off right into the fist of Robert Wagner, who knocks Casey flat on his back.

Robert cockily says he’s always glad to help, “especially when there’s a beautiful girl in distress” while watching Nancy.

Nancy runs up to him, all mooney-eyed and says, “How can I ever repay you?”

Robert smirks and says, “We’ll think of something.”

Gag. He’s old enough to be her father. He always was a dirty old man. *wink* (I really have no idea…I’m just messing around. I won’t mention *cough* Natalie *cough* Wood *cough* here.)

“I don’t believe it,” Frank cries.  “I did all that and she hugs him.”

“You’re not a movie star kid,” the cops says.

But he does have good news for Frank. His dad and brother have been found and are safe.

Joe Fox is happy with the outcome when the kids go to visit him at his hotel room the next day, but they say it’s not all good news because Casey (Paul Hamilton) wasn’t the only one involved. Yes, the security guard was but so was…yes! Joe Fox!

“You engineered this whole plot,” Frank says. “Hamilton wasn’t smart enough to do it on his own.”

Joe and Nancy lay out their case with Frank, pointing out how Hamilton and the guard were always one step ahead of them. Someone must have been on the inside, they say.

“What motive could I even have?” Fox says with a smirk.

Nancy tells him they’re sure if they look things up they will find out that he is flat broke.

“That’s why you were insisting real (cash) ransom money,” she says.

Frank says they have one piece of evidence. It’s Bronson’s medallion which showed Fox’s fingerprints on the bottom of the medallion, showing he’d ripped it off his neck during the kidnapping.

Fox smirks again, can’t say anything to refute them so tries to leave the room. Unfortunately for him, the police are waiting for him at the doorway. He congratulates the kids on their sleuthing.

“You are three of the most remarkable detectives I’ve ever worked with,” he says.

He’s taken away by the police with another smirk.

At the end, Fenton is discussing what happened with the boys and then Frank decides he is going sightseeing.

Nancy marches up and demands to know where he’s going.

“I’m going sightseeing. There’s more to LA than just this hotel. Is that alright?”

“No, it isn’t,” Nancy says sharply. “You didn’t ask me.”

“I didn’t know I had to clear it with you first,” Frank snaps.

“No, you didn’t ask me to go with you,” Nancy says.

Frank laughs and smiles and asks if she’d like to join him.

“What I’d like to do is thank you,” she says with her tone softening.

“For what?” Frank asks and now we are getting the profile view of them.

“For saving my life,” Nancy says tenderly.

Oh. My. Gosh. Are they going to kiss??!!! Are they????

Yes. Yes, they are because Nancy gives him a very tender kiss on the mouth.

Swoooon.

Joe steps behind them and asks where they are off to, essentially making him the third wheel.

End episode. Sadly, we are never to see Nancy and Frank shipped together because soon the show’s name will changed to Hardy Boys and, alas, there will no longer be a Nancy included.

That’s the end of this recap.

I haven’t decided which episode I will recap next because I watched one where the Hardy Boys went to Egypt and … wince …. It was pretty horrible.

If you want to read my other recaps you can find them here:

Recap of The Hardy Boys and The Secret of The Jade Kwan Yin (With spoilers)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

For the past several months, I have been writing about or recapping episodes from the 1977-1979 TV Show The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. For the first season, the episodes would flip-flop back and forth between featuring The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and eventually the two would join forces before they began to phase Nancy out all together.

This time around, I’m writing about the episode entitled The Secret of the Jade Kwan Yin which features The Hardy Boys.

This one will take the boys into a crime underworld stemming from smuggling originating in Hong Kong. The episode starts with Fenton Hardy watching a news broadcast talking about items being smuggled into “ports all over the world” from the small Asian country.

I don’t know if I remember the Hard Boys hometown being on the ocean before this episode, but maybe it was, because they find themselves scuba diving in the ocean when a package drops under the water in front of them. They’re confused but haul it out. They don’t know that two “Asian” men (I think the one man may actually be Hispanic but they are supposed to be of Chinese decent) are watching from the shore in scuba gear. They are  upset that the two boys  have picked up the package.

“If I had known anyone was going to be here, I wouldn’t have chosen this cove,” the one man says.

This man, by the way, is Richard Lee-Syeung who I recognize as the con-man trinket seller on M.A.S.H.

According to IMdb, Lee -Syeung, “has been seen and heard on numerous commercials and voice-overs. His roles include some of the most popular characters on TV shows such as M*A*S*H, Happy Days, What’s Happening, Hardy Boys, The Incredible Hulk and played an Asian version of Ed McMahon on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”

And, no, he is not Chinese. He’s an American with Chinese and Mexican heritage. There is your bit of trivia and now back to the show.

The other man tells Lee-Syeung that they will get the package back. No big deal. It’s just two teenage kids.

Well, these two teenagers have taken the package home with Frank’s girlfriend (and Fenton’s secretary) Callie.

The boys open the package and find what looks like an ancient statue inside an adorned green box. They find some Chinese writing on the bottom and Callie says she’s seen a statue like in Chinatown.

So, the three go to Chinatown to find the shop. They find the shop and a couple of statues that look just like the one they found. The Chinese-American shop worker says that the statues in her shop are $14 but there is an original statue that his priceless because of what it means to her people.

It is a depiction of Kwan Yin who was a Chinese Buddhist deity, a goddess of mercy, she says.

In the old days she was thought to be the guardian of fishermen and there was a little Kwan Yin temple in every fishing village.

Now the boys are worried. Could they have found the real statue after it was smuggled out of Hong Kong?   

They show the young woman the inscription on the bottom of the statue, which they had gotten a rub of earlier, and she says the inscription is a Chinese poem that reads: “A branch without leaves, a raven perched on it, this autumn eve.”

She suggests they go see her uncle across the street. He’s at the Kung Fu studio, where he teaches.

She walks them over and tells them what Kung Fu is actually called, which I thought was very interesting. I won’t write what she said here because I don’t know the spelling and don’t want to share any misinformation.

After watching a Kung Fu match and finding out that the uncle is an expert in it, the boys are a little nervous when he says he wants to talk to them alone over tea.

(I will say one annoying thing about this episode is every time they are in a Chinese house or shop there is Chinese-styled music playing in the background and it almost drowns out the dialogue.)

The uncle says he paid for the Kwan Yin statue to be sent to his shop, but it was stolen by a Chinese-American criminal who demanded a ransom for the statue.

The uncle, Mr. Chen, asks the boys to bring the statue back to him so he can see if it is the same one and if it is then he can tell the police the statue has come back to the rightful owner. The statue will be shown at the parade the following night.

Unfortunately, when the boys get home, they find out the statue has been stolen. Of course, we know it is the two men who were supposed to retrieve it from the boat in the first place. We watch them do it. The boys catch the men in the act and then have to chase them on their motorcycles.

When they lose the men, they have to tell both their dad and Mr. Chen that the statue was stolen from them. Oh, and the police because, as usual, calling the police is an afterthought for the Hardy Boys

The police chief is not happy at all because he was working with the FBI to get the statue back to its rightful owner.

“If you had called us when you had fished it out, then Chin Lee would have had his precious kwan yin and I’d have no problem,” the chief snaps. He tells the boys he called them in to tell them he wants them to stay out of it.

“This is our job, not yours!”

The boys say they understand and hang their heads like scolded puppies. They’re not going to stay out of it. We all know that.

They go back to the shop to talk to the girl at the shop — Lily. They want to apologize to her. She tells them a legend about the statue when they arrive. She says the statue is over 200 years old and was put in a temple in a fishing village after a tidal wave destroyed the village but everyone survived. The people credited Kwan Yin for saving them and had the statue installed in the temple.

She says her uncle promised people in the community to have the statue brought there to bring back prosperity. If it doesn’t show up her uncle will look like a fool.

Soon we learn that one of Uncle Chin’s students from the Kung Fu studio is actually behind the theft and has left a boat at a marina with his fingerprints on it that will prove he is the one who stole the statue in the first place.

He wants the men who stole the statue from the boys to destroy the boat. They set a bomb on the boat.

Of course, you know what will happen later — that’s right, when the boys find the boat through various ways and while they are exploring it, it explodes, which leaves Callie shocked and screaming because she thinks they’ve been killed in the explosion.

They haven’t been killed, obviously, and we switch back to the men who set the bomb. They are calling Mr. Chen and telling him that they want $100,000 for the statue now. Mr. Chen is upset and says he can’t pay that, and asks who is on the phone.  The student says, “You should have memorized my voice more, old man.”

Meanwhile, Joe has been able to pull fingerprints off some items on the boat and somehow the tape he used to lift the fingerprint survived despite all that swimming they had to do in the water to get back to the pier.

Their aunt bursts in as they start to try to study the fingerprint and tells them that eight hours of sleep is important. I had to laugh a little when Joe tells her that “actually recent research shows that not everyone needs eight —”

She interrupts him and tells him to go to bed. I didn’t realize that research about sleep was out back then too.

The boys go to Mr. Chen’s store to talk to him, but he tells them he has given up and is going to pay the ransom to get his statue back. He leaves and the boys stay back to lament with Lily that her uncle is doing the wrong thing.

The boys then try to find Mr. Chen at his Kung Fu studio to try to talk him out of it, but when they get there, he’s already left to get the money to pay for the statue.

They then try to lift fingerprints from the sparring sticks to see if any of the men there could be involved with the theft of the statue. Once they confirm the fingerprints match, they are attacked by two men. They are able to escape into the street where the parade is going on. They run to find Mr. Chen and stop him from paying the ransom and hide on the edge of the alley while the student reveals himself to Mr. Chen and says he stole the statue. Mr. Chen is sad but says they can keep the money, he just wants the statue. The boys jump in and tackle the men and take the statue and tell Mr. Chen to run.

He does and then everyone is running as the men try to catch up to the boys to get the statue. What follows is a game of keep away while the boys toss it back and forth to each other across the street as the men get closer to one or the other.

Then — PLOT TWIST!!! — during a pretty cool slow motion scene, Joe’s foot catches on the curb and he trips and falls, shattering the statue into a million pieces. What the boys see, though, isn’t ancient glass, but a sidewalk full of tiny, gems of all colors. About this time Mr. Chen and the other men who betrayed him catch up to them.

“This wasn’t the real Kwan Yin, it was a fake to transport jewels,” Frank cries.

“Yes,” Mr. Chen confirms, and then tells them he was the one who ordered the statue with the jewels in it, but his men went rogue and tried to steal it for themselves.

Fenton Hardy and some undercover members of the FBI, as well as the police, show up next and arrest Mr. Chen and his men. The real statue is in Hong Kong, according to Fenton. This was just a way to smuggle in jewels. The chief is now happy because they were able to break up a smuggling ring that has been operation for five years. He says the Hong Kong police will be thrilled with what they’ve done.

Lily says she had no idea what her uncle was doing (ha, yeah right!) and the police say they believe her because Interpol had been watching her uncle for “quite some time.” I guess we are supposed to gather from that the authorities knew she wasn’t involved? I have no idea but the boys say they were help her stay out of trouble however they can.

There is some cheesy joke at the end of the show about Chinese breakfast cereal and everyone laughs like they always do in the last scene of an episode.

This was an educational and interesting episode with a lot of tidbits dropped in about Chinese culture. Unlike some shows made around the same era (1979) the depictions of the Chinese and Chinese-Americans was fairly espectful. There were some stereotypes presented but it didn’t go over the top to me.

This one had a lot of suspense and the reveal of Mr. Chen being the guilty in the end was a good surprise.

The next episode I will be watching will be a Nancy Drew centered one called The Mystery of the Solid Gold Kicker. It will feature a surprise guest star who became a big star in the 1990s and 2000s. Most of my readers will definitely know the actor when I talk about this episode next time around.

If you want to read the blog posts about other episodes I watched, you can find a list here: https://lisahoweler.com/old-tv-show-recaps/

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.

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

/ 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.

*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!

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:

And if you would like to know more about how I feel about the song Da Do Ron Ron, you can read this post about the first episode of the series:

Okay, up next in our episode recap will be an episode featuring Nancy Drew called The Mystery of The Fallen Angels.

Additional resources:

Shaun Cassidy Gets Ready for the Longest Tour of His 45-Year Career: ‘I Felt the Need to Connect with People’

https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/shaun-cassidy-road-to-us-tour-1235982175/

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.

The Hardy Boys and The Flickering Torch Mystery (with spoilers)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 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.

Up this week is a look at the episode called The Flickering Torch Mystery. I have absolutely no idea where the title for this one comes from by the way. There is no flickering torch.

But whatever…let us not focus on semantics.

 This episode is certainly full of some weirdness, but not as weird as our next Hardy Boys — The Disappearing Floor, which actually came before this episode. Somehow I mixed up the order, so I am writing about this one first.

Now, when I say weirdness when talking about this show, I don’t mean to be slamming it at all. It’s just, well, a little weird sometimes. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good show or doesn’t have some good episodes/storylines.

This episode does actually feature a fairly engaging storyline and if that doesn’t grab you then maybe looking at former teen heartthrob Rick Nelson all grown up will.

We enter this installment with Rick Nelson (Tony Eagle) on stage “singing”. My husband walked in at that moment and said that the musicians and Nelson were not really playing at first. Later, he says Nelson was, but the other guys still weren’t. Hey, that’s TV for ‘ya. No reason to really do what you can fake doing.
Also, if you really want a sad story, look up how Rick Nelson died. It was not a simple plane crash, like I always thought. What a horrible situation for him and the others who died.

Fenton Hardy is off stage, clapping for Rick’s character, and we wonder why Fenton is there but we soon find out that he is helping security for Tony’s next performance, which will be where the Hardys live – The Tri-City area. Wherever that is.

Fenton says he will be ready with the help of his sons, even though they are “just your normal, average teenage boys.”

We flip right to Joe and Frank Hardy in a small airplane, doing flips. Or at least Frank is. When another plane runs into severe fog and starts to struggle because of an instrument failure, the boys are there to rescue the guy and help him land safely.

That’s when they realize the man, a Mr. Lou Haskel, is exactly who they are looking for because they are investigating a case of a missing man — Richard Johnston — for their dad, who is a private investigator in case you forgot.

The missing man, a sound engineer, left for work one morning and never came home. He was supposed to show up to an appointment with Mr. Haskel, but he never showed. The boys want to know if Mr. Haskel has seen him. He says he hasn’t but gives them a warning that his wife, who hired their dad, is known to “overreact” at times.

Thank you, Mr. Misogyny, the boys will keep that in mind.

Mr. Misogyny works for All Points Airway and the boys want to know why a sound engineer would be working for him. Mr. M says it is because he developed the sound system for the jet in front of them.

Ooh. Ah. Fascinating.

The boys want to see the inside, but Sexist Man says, “Nope..not right now. Have to get on with my day.”

They take that answer pretty easily and head off home to mull over what they’ve learned so far, which is very little.

Their Dad returns home with Tony in tow and they are starstruck because they have all his albums. Breaking all kinds of confidentiality they tell their dad what they’ve found out about Richard Johnston in front of Tony and his manager.

Tony’s shocked. “Richard’s missing? He’s the best sound engineer in the country. He’s supposed to be doing our sound at the stadium. What happened to him?”

The local fire chief, always a source of absolutely the worst take on things offers up this gem: “He probably turned Mom’s photo to the wall and took a plane to a place he’d never been before….” Implying that he simply walked out because he didn’t want to deal with his family.

Everyone promptly ignores that idiot and heads out to the venue to discuss security. Tony says he wants to stay back and “discuss some things” with the boys. Huh…whatever that means. At that moment, though, Fenton’s secretary, Callie, is trying to reach the boys on a CB radio.

She’s found a car over an embankment and wants them to come quick. Tony overhears it and says he’ll join them for more screen time and a bigger check — I mean because he wants to find out what happened to Richard.

They find the car over the embankment and if anyone was in it, they’re dead, Joe declares. For some reason the boys don’t call the cops at this point. Joe just ties a rope to a tree and lowers himself down to the scene. Luckily, Richard isn’t in the car, and they won’t have to tell his wife he’s dead. At least not yet.

Tony suggests they go back to the plane that Haskel didn’t want them to go in and start investigating there to see if there are any clues to where Richard went.

Inside the plane they find Richard’s equipment but only after they are chased by an angry pair of Doberman Pinchers.

Dipsy-Do police chief catches them snooping, by the way. Seems he shows up at just the right, or wrong, times. He scolds them a bit and they decide not to share anything about what they’ve found, probably because they know he will bungle the case.

Fingerprints that Joe pulled from a Tony Eagle tape inside the equipment box prove to the boys that Richard was in the plane, even though Haskel said he wasn’t.

Dun-dun-dun.

Later we are at the stadium, getting ready for the concert with Fenton talking to his staff about security and the boys heading to see Tony, who is in his dressing room arguing with his manager, Carl, about how he hasn’t been shown his finances lately. Tony says he doesn’t know how much money he has. The manager tells him not to worry about it, his finances are fine, so we clearly know something is up there.

Tony starts sleuthing when he asks his manager if he’s seen Richard Johnston. The manager says he hasn’t in a couple of weeks, but Richard said he’d be there that night for the concert.

“Come on, don’t worry…I’m going to go do something totally not suspicious now,” good ole’ Carl says as he leaves the room.

Okay, he doesn’t really say that, but that’s what it sounds like if you listen between the lines.

Meanwhile, Richard’s wife found a piece of paper in the floor of his car after the car was taken to the junkyard. It’s ripped up but the boys can see enough that they know there was something dangerous Richard was trying to warn someone about. The letter is a carbon copy so the boys ask if they can go to Richard’s office and find the original so they can learn what Richard wanted to warn everyone about.

When they get there they can’t find the letter, but they overhear someone talking outside the office and discover that Richard wanted to warn someone that something has been rigged to the sound system to —

Well, I think I’ll leave it right there because you might want to watch the episode yourself and learn what someone was supposed to be warned about.

Ah, who are we kidding? You probably won’t want to watch it or already have so if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read past these dots. . . .

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And

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Okay, so while Frank and Joe are snooping for the letter that will tell them what Richard was trying to warn someone about, they overhear someone on the phone saying that the Hardy boys won’t find out that once the sound machine hits a certain frequency Tony will be killed.

Then the person sets the office on fire to cover up the evidence, not knowing that the boys are inside. Eventually the boys are able to break out, just as the fire company shows up (rather quickly I might add, without it being clear who called them), and rush out to try to warn Tony.

The way the boys try to call the police station with their CB totally bewilders me, especially since it works. Can you really call a landline with a CB radio? I should Google this, but I’m ot going to….

What bewilders me more is how they don’t say to the officer, who answers, “Tell my dad or the chief Tony is going to be killed!” Instead, they ask to talk to the chief and the officer puts the phone down to go to look for the chief.

This wastes a ton of time, so Joe tries to call the operator again to patch it through to the police station. Sadly, this is before there were multiple phone lines so the operator can’t get through.

Joe and Frank drive as fast as they can to the stadium, race in and onto the stage and demand that the concert be stopped before Tony is killed. They are certain there is a bomb inside the sound system.

There isn’t, however, and now the chief and everyone who was evacuated from the building and missed out on the concert are extremely angry. The boys look like the boy who cried wolf.

Carl, Tony’s manager, is incredulous. How dare these teenagers ruin the concert and say something was going to happen when it wasn’t! There’s no death threats against Tony, he says and then reminds them that Tony is on his way to London the next day.

The boys are gently scolded by their father for putting themselves in danger and not having all the facts, which makes Frank even more determined to figure out what the letter actually said. The evidence is gone, but surely if he jots some letters down on a blank piece of paper next to the piece of the letter, he will completely figure out what is going on. Somehow, he decides the name that is cut off is actually Haskel.

Richard was trying to warn Haskel that there is a bomb wired into the sound system of the plane that is flying Tony to London Joe summarizes, from very little information provided by Frank.

When the scene shifts to Carl and Haskel bidding Tony farewell and telling him to enjoy his trip to London, but declining to go with him, the viewer can see guilt written all over them.

The boys make it to the airport just as Tony’s private jet is starting down the runway.

Once again, they beg the police chief to listen to them, but they’ve already been wrong once, so they’re told to go cause trouble somewhere else.

The boys won’t be silenced, though, so they take off with their van to follow the jet and force it to stop before they take off. Richard is found inside the airplane, where the extra gas would be stored and the plot by Haskel and Carl unravels.

Carl was taking Tony’s money and investing it in the airplanes owned by Heskel and also charging Tony extra every time he chartered the plane. Their plan was to kill Tony before he found out what they had been doing, especially since Tony kept asking to see his financial records. Richard found out about the plot when he checked out the system for the jet star (the name of the charter plane Tony used) and discovered that a high frequency feature had been added. He knew that was dangerous, so he tried to warn Haskel. Haskel, though, knew since he’d planned the plane to explode with Tony inside so he kidnapped Richard and stowed him in the bottom of the plane.

By the time he was found, it had been almost a week and as far as I know he was in there without food or water. Somehow, though, he was standing and chatting with everyone else like he was totally fine, instead of being in a hospital to be treated.

That’s how television is, of course.

If you want to watch the episode for yourself you can find it here: https://youtu.be/n8S8Ke6e7iU?si=fXxJBXBF0pFDmIoc

I am going to say that the story in this episode is not related to the book with the same title since this is the description of the book: Two unexplainable plane crashes near an airport on the East Coast plunge Frank and Joe Hardy into a bizarre case. From the moment Frank and Joe find a radioactive engine in an airplane junkyard, unexpected dangers strike like lightning. Despite the repeated attempts on their lives, the teenage detectives pursue their investigation, discovering two vital clues and others that provide the solution to one of the most baffling mysteries the boys and Mr. Hardy have ever encountered.

Have you ever seen this one?

A recap and thoughts on The Hardy Boys 1977 episode “The Mystery of Witches Hollow”

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

I’ve been watching and writing about episodes from the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mystery Show from the 1970s. For the first season the show would switch back and forth between The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.

Last time around, I wrote about a Nancy Drew episode.

Now here we are back to a Hardy Boys episode called The Mystery of Witches Hollow. The Hardy Boys stars 70s teen heartthrobs Parker Stevenson and singer Shaun Cassidy.

We start out with the boys and Frank’s girlfriend, or their dad’s secretary, or whoever she is, Callie, and their friend Chet.

They are all driving in the dark somewhere and Joe says he sees a barn with a hex sign.

It seems like each sleuthing team — Nancy or the boys – have that one friend who is afraid of everything. In the Nancy Drew books it is Bess but in the show they eliminated Bess and gave the fear to George. As someone commented on my Instagram post about the Nancy Drew portion of the show, “They did George wrong in this show.”

I don’t know enough about Chet to know if he was done wrong but in this show the poor guy is afraid of everything and always hungry (yes, like Bess too).

So, we open with the boys driving through Witches Hollow near Salem, Mass and when Joe says he sees a hex sign on a barn roof, Chet fearfully asks what that means.

Callie explains that people in this area of the country are afraid of things that go boo in the night so they place hex signs as a way to ward off evil spirits.

Now Chet is whining that he should have gone on vacation somewhere else and wants to know why they are even going this way when they were supposed to be going camping.

In an info dump, Joe tells Chet that Callie’s Uncle Captain McGuire said there were some strange things going on up here and asked their dad to come up an investigate. As so often happens, Fenton Hardy, Frank and Joe’s dad, seems to be pushing his responsibility off onto his young sons who don’t appear to go to school or have a real job since they have so much investigation time.

When they go to look for Captain McGuire at his house (while it is thundering and lightening, of course), a rather creepy woman answers and says she doesn’t know when the Captain will be back. She’s just there to clean the house, she says.

Frank, always perceptive, sees mail piled up behind her and asks her about it, suggesting it means the captain has been gone for a while.

She says she doesn’t know how long he’s been gone.

Umm….okay. Has she not been cleaning his house everyday?

She does let them in to wait for the Captain, though, and then warns them that there are scary “goings on in these here parts” but says the Captain will never listen to her about them. She suggests the kids “get on out of here before things get worse,” but they decide to stay and wait for the captain. She leaves with a warning shake of her head, and once she leaves they immediately start snooping around. Chet is looking for food and the boys for clues. They notice the mail on the counter is dated about a week back and Callie notices her uncle’s favorite shotgun is missing.

They decide they better call their dad, who, in true Fenton (and Carson Drew for that matter) fashion, blows off their concerns.

Fenton tells them they are simply getting wrapped up in all the haunted and creepy stories of the area. None of it is real, he says, and the captain is known to wander off for days on hunting trips.

While all this is going the camera keeps taking us outside to some man staggering toward the house and no offense to this guy but it certainly has taken him a long time to get to the house. He’s been staggering around out there since the housekeeper was giving her creepy speech and left, and all while the kids were digging through the captain’s mail.

Now, though, he seems to be being stalked by a black panther. I kept help wondering what state these guys are in and if black panthers are actually native to that area.

Eventually the guy finally gets to the house after everyone is asleep and slowly lets himself in to steal some food. The scream of a panther wakes everyone up and the man takes off into the storm, quickly followed by Joe who is then followed by Frank. When Frank finds Joe, he’s fallen over the edge of a ravine and Frank has to help him up. After a heart-to-heart about Frank saving Joe and how much Joe appreciates it, the pair find a empty shotgun shell and decide it’s time to go to the town sheriff and tell him they think something happened to the captain.

The sheriff is none too happy they’ve woken him up in the middle of the night and says Captain McGuire is probably off hunting, which is why he bought the cabin in the first place.

They leave the sheriff without much information. The next day, though, they do find out from the owner of the gas station that there is a man who is also a city slicker who has bought some property near the captain.  They find the man man — Donner (yes, I know – foreshadowing much?) — tells the boys he hopes to build a large condominium if a road project goes through. There are some in the area who don’t want the project to go through and many of those people are superstitious, Donner says.

They believe that area is haunted by the ghost of a woman back around the time of the Sale Witch Trials who raised cats, including one very large, black one.

The woman probably raised the large cat, probably a panther, from the time it was a baby, Donner says, but because people in the town believed she just acquired it after it was grown, they labeled her a witch. That would have meant a trial but when the towns people came to get her, she barricaded herself in her house with the cat.

“It’s not a very pretty story,” Donner says.

“It’s not a story at all, without a finish,” Frank counters.

“Well, when she wouldn’t come out, they set fire to the place,” Donner finishes.

And now locals say they hear the woman screaming in the night.

There is something a bit shifty about this Donner guy that we the viewers know already because we’ve seen him in a basement jail holding the captain hostage while a large panther guards him. Apparently, the dude built a cage into his wall for the specific purpose of kidnapping the captain. Why has he kidnapped him? It isn’t yet clear.

Flash forward and the boys finally get their man — the man who broke into the house that is. Only he isn’t a man. He’s a young, mute boy. Not deaf, it appears, but mute.

The boy tries to sign to them that he only broke into the house for food. I’m guessing he has no family who feeds him, but I don’t know.

The boys have no idea what else he is trying to say to them after they take him back to the house. Callie is no help either but in the less than 20 seconds they all discuss how they don’t know what he’s saying the kid somehow sketches a fully detailed and colored in picture of the panther. The guy can’t speak but he is apparently an art savant of some kind.

No one is sure what this drawing means but they know the kid knows something.

That night they all fall asleep and “someone” (cough..Donner…cough) jams a block into the front door of the house so it can’t be open and then lays something over the chimney so that the smoke from the fireplace comes back into the house. The smell of smoke wakes Joe who breaks a window to get fresh air. I’m really not sure what Donner thought was going to happen since even with the door locked the boys could break a window and save themselves. Joe and Frank decide whomever did it simply wanted to scare them.

By the way, most of this episode Chet is just eating and being useless. He even whines when the boys tell him to remove whatever is blocking the chimney while they go get the sheriff. The boy, Simon, is able to communicate to them that the captain was taken away, which is yet another reason they need to find the sheriff. Apparently Simon can’t write all this out because he can’t write. I can’t remember how they figured out his name was Simon.

Before they get to the sheriff, though, the boy points to the side of the road, to indicate he wants them to pull over. They do and see tracks in the dirt. That’s when the boy begins frantically pointing and they look down over the embankment and see two trucks with large speakers affixed to the top, broadcasting a screaming woman over the area.  

Ah, so this is why locals think they hear a screaming woman in the woods at night.

The boys jump onto the back of one of these trucks and find cement that belongs to the contractors who were working to build the freeway. It appears someone is stealing their supplies so they can’t complete the project.

When the boys get back to the house, their dad is waiting for them and was just about to send out a “posse”. I think Fenton thinks it’s 1833 or something.

Anyhow, the boys fill their dad in by saying they think someone is trying to stop the project and that the captain found out about that and that’s why he’s missing.

Fenton says e’s going to get that sheriff to round up a posse and find the captain, but the boys will have to stay at the house, and out of trouble.

“You’re certainly good at poking holes in our balloons,” whines Joe.

“Only when there isn’t enough air in them,” Fenton scolds with a little shake of his head.

During this scene, Joe goes into the next room to “change his shirt” and starts to unbutton it. I’m sure all the teenage girls were hoping for a shirtless scene with this teenage heartthrob, but, alas, it did not help. A few seconds later it appears Joe either has another version of the same shirt or he just changed his mind about changing because he comes out tucking in the exact same shirt. On closer inspection, though, it appears the shirt is the same color but the last one was plaid and this one has stars of some kind on it.

Fenton tells Callie to come with him to get the sheriff because he’s going to need some feminine charm to convince the sheriff to send a posse out to look for her uncle.

When he leaves Simon becomes very animated and draws the boys a picture of a foot, which leads them to the nickname “flatfoot” which is what Donner called the captain when they visited with him.

“What’s that, Simon? Donner is holding the captain hostage?”

Okay, they don’t really say that, but close and Simon nods emphatically, which sends them all rushing out the door, leaving Chet to finish yet another meal while saying, “Here we go again.”

Well, here you go again what, Chet? You’re just shoveling more food in and not going anywhere.

Back we flip to Donner talking to the captain and telling him there is a bill about to pass in the state legislature to stop construction on the freeway pending a study.

First, Donner is clearly an idiot, nothing actually passes in a state legislature and if it does, it is many years after it needs to and by then the bill is completely pointless.

Second, I completely lose Donner’s reasoning at this point. Something about killing the captain and throwing his body at the construction site will delay the project even further.  Why does the guy want the project delayed? He stands to get a lot of money from the construction of condominiums and other structures.

Finally it clicks when he says that other business owners will panic when it looks like the freeway is going to be scraped and will sell to him for a dirt cheap price to get out of what looks like an area that isn’t going to bring their businesses any money. Then, when the project is back on again, he’ll own all that land to mow over the little mom and pop stores and build his more expensive tourist traps.

Donner gives the captain his “final meal” before leaving the basement cage. That meal which includes a steak, but that doesn’t seem very smart of Donner because before long the boys arrive to save the captain and are able to use that steak to distract the wildcat from attacking them.

They then break into the cage and free the captain who bolts from the basement and chases after Donner. The previously useless sheriff shows up at just the right moment, though, and arrests Donner, without even hearing the entire story that the boys only learned after their dad left, I might add.

Maybe Chet told them what was said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs. I have no idea.

I will say that this episode, though a bit cheesy, was much better than The Mystery Of the Diamond Triangle with Nancy Drew.

I bet you didn’t know that there is a Hardy Boys Fandom site, but there is, and here is a bit of trivia from it:

“This is the only episode in the entire run of the 1977 show to be adapted from an actual Hardy Boys book, in this case #41 The Clue of the Screeching Owl, with the opening scene at the circus and the sub-plot dealing with Bobby Thompson and Mystery the beagle & the dog-napping ring being deleted, and a few relationships being changed. An example of a changed relationship, in the book, Captain Maguire is a friend of Fenton Hardy, the boys father; in the TV episode Captain Maguire is the Uncle of Callie Shaw (Callie, while mentioned in the book, never made an actual appearance).”

If you would like to watch the episode for yourself, you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RQs2wdw1uw&list=PLwN7GQjoEtl-rP_m3yPtZym6qGzVEP7qx&index=6

Discussing The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries Show episode, The Mystery of the Haunted House.

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 9 Comments

A few months ago, I wrote about the first Nancy Drew-centered episode of the Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries show from the 1970s — The Mystery of Pirate’s Cove.

The show featured 46 episodes from 1977 to 1979 on ABC.

For those who aren’t familiar with the source material for this show, it was based on The Hardy Boys books by Franklin W.  Dixon and the Nancy Drew Mystery series by Carolyn Keene. Both series were ghostwritten by a number of different authors and created by Edward Stratemeyer in the 1930s.

For the first season of the show, the episodes switched back and forth each week with one week featuring The Hardy Boys and the next week featuring Nancy Drew. During the next season they began combining the two so that The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were in the same episode. This had to do with falling ratings – especially when it came to the Nancy Drew episodes. Somewhere in there the original actress —  Pamela Sue Martin — also left and was replaced by Janet Louise Johnson.

Overall, this series is a bit cheesy and cringy, but I do have to say I don’t think they did too bad for the first episode. I mean – it isn’t award winning and the special effects are bizarre, but it is an interesting plot and the acting isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen.

The show starts with the brothers — Jo and Frank Hardy — in town and spotting their father walking out of a hotel. We aren’t told if the brothers were just driving by or why they are outside the hotel when their dad walks out but through conversation between them, we learn that their dad said he was going fishing. They can’t figure out why he would lie to them.

They plan to ask him but then a car pulls out behind their dad’s car. This makes them realize that their dad is being followed so they rev up their trusty little motorcycles (helmets firmly in place first, of course) and decide they are going to follow whoever is following their dad and find out what is going on.

We are then at a cemetery and the boys’ dad is shining a flashlight on a tombstone with the name Will Bronson engraved on it. Bronson has a death date of the year 1974.

The boys don’t see this part with the tombstone, but we the viewers do. What the boys see is that their dad Fenton Hardy, is being followed.

They go back to their dad’s office the next morning and ask their dad’s secretary what she knows. She says she booked a hotel for their dad for  his fishing trip. They, however, find out their dad checked out that day. The secretary shrugs and assures them their dad will be home later in the day then and he will fill them in.

The problem is that Fenton has been cornered and essentially kidnapped by two men. These same men want to know who hired him on his latest case but won’t tell him who they are. We still don’t know who they are when they break into Fenton’s home late that night looking for his client’s name.

They are also very loud for two men who are trying to secretly break into a home, but let’s not quibble with such minor ridiculousness. It’s just TV and there are many more ridiculous moments to come.

Eventually we learn that Fenton’s client was a government agent suspected of stealing government secrets and selling them to a foreign entity. It’s not as cut and dry as it seems because he may have also suffered some sort of amnesia and he’s wandering around the countryside, trying to get away or hide or something or other.

This mystery will have the boys looking for clues in some pretty strange places, including a “haunted” mansion that isn’t what it seems.

As always when I watch an episode with the actors who play The Hardy Boys — Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy – I am fascinated by their fluffy hair. It’s so luscious and soft looking. Ah, the ‘70s, a time when both men and women had impeccable hair.

Anyhow, I digress… during this episode poor Aunt Gertrude, Fenton’s sister (I believe), is beside herself with worry. No one will tell her what is going on and she must be the go between the boys and their dad as they both chase each other all over the place. She keeps asking all three “boys” to be careful and they just scoff and say things like, “Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Aunt Gert,” like she’s the most annoying thing ever. They might as well say, “Whatever you crazy old bat.”

I just think these “boys” should be grateful they have someone to look after them and who cares enough to be worried.

What was with all these books killing off the mothers and having live in housekeepers or aunts anyhow? Nancy Drew’s mom was also dead, and she and her dad had a live in housekeeper named Hannah. Yes, I know I mentioned this in my last post about the show. Yes, I will probably mention it again because I am becoming an lady who forgets what I already wrote about and tells the same stories over and over again.

Also, Fenton’s secretary is about the boy’s age and seems to be a minor character but at the end of the episode, we get the idea she and Frank are dating when she gives Frank a kiss on the cheek. For whatever that tidbit is worth.

I won’t go into too much detail about the episode’s plot because I know so many of you are just dying to go look this series up and binge watch it, *wink* but I will say that you should brace yourself for the creepy scenes in the haunted house and the scary “monsters.”

Someone put the whole series up for free on YouTube and you can find the playlist here:

In my next post on this topic (not necessarily my next post on the blog), I will be writing about The Mystery of The Diamond Triangle, which was an episode that featured Nancy Drew.

Do you remember this old series or have you heard of it at least? It was not something I ever heard of before last year and now I’m a bit hooked.