The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: Will The Real Santa….? Recap.

December 23, 2025December 23, 2025 / Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

I have been recapping the old The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries episodes from 1977 to 1979 and this week I am skipping ahead a bit to a Christmas one from season two entitled just “Will The Real Santa…?”

Yes, there are just dots there.

This is the second to last episode Pamela Sue Martin was in as Nancy before leaving the show due to the writers making her role smaller and smaller each episode. Her last episode was one I will write about later and creeped me out a bit —The Lady on Thursday at Ten.

After The Lady on Thursday at Ten, the show featured actress Janet Louis Stevenson as Nancy Drew for four more episodes. Then after Season 2 episode 21, Joe and Frank Hardy dominated all the episodes. In the next season, which was the shows’ last, it would even be rebranded as The Hardy Boys. It was canceled ten episodes into the season and replaced with The Osmond Family Hour.

This episode starts with a man with a white beard running to catch a train. He is pulled up into one of the cars with the help of another person and then we see two men running out of the darkness, guns pulled.

“This train will stop in River Heights,” the one man says. “We’ll get him there.”

The man with the white beard rides away in the train car and then we switch to Nancy decorating a tree with some woman. Her father, Carson Drew, is sitting on the couch.

Carson and Nancy call the woman George, but this is not the actress who played George before. The previous George had dark hair. This George is a blond.

The tree is huge and so 70s too, by the way. I don’t know how else to explain what I mean by it being “70s”. It just has a lot of red bulbs and popcorn strands on it and — it’s just has a 70s/80s look.

So, Nancy is up on a ladder that is perfectly capable of standing on its own because it is freestanding, but she asks George to hold it anyhow. Nancy is trying to place the tree topper on the top of the tree, when Carson asks George a question and she lets go of the ladder to show him an article in the newspaper. This happens about the same moment when the front door slowly opens, and we see a young man wearing a dark suit and with dark hair peering in.

His knock and him calling out “Mr. Drew?” wasn’t loud enough for them to hear him so he just walks in. It’s a good thing he does too, because at the same time he peeks in, Nancy starts flailing around like the ladder has been pulled out from under her (it hasn’t), yells “George!” and starts to fall.

In rushes our hero to catch Nancy before she falls and say the words, “I never had a girl fall that hard for me. Not at our first meeting anyhow.”

Har. Har. Cue my gag reflex.

Carson introduces the young man as Ned Nickerson. Color me confused.

The problem with this is that there was a Ned Nickerson in the first season and this is not him.

Ned was his dad’s legal assistant and close friends with Nancy but clearly in love with her. He was in several episodes in the first season and disappeared by season two.

Now we are supposed to pretend that whole season never happened and this is the real Ned Nickerson — some dude who works for the Boston DA.

This new Ned is played by Rick Springfield (…I kid you not! ) and I guess the first Ned never existed. So, it was like they were trying to reboot Ned’s origin story like Marvel keeps rebooting Spiderman’s origin story and DC keeps rebooting Superman’s origin story. Sadly, poor Rick never got to flush out his role as Ned because Pamela Sue Martin left the show after the next episode and Ned’s character was written out of the show.

Also…. I guess Ned was more interested in Nancy than Jesse’s Girl at this point. *Cymbal shot* Yes that was a bad joke.

[If you, like me, do not know a ton about Rick Springfield — he is a popstar from the 70s and 80s and has also acted. He also has either taken a youth elixir or had a lot of work done because at 76 he looks like he is 56.]

Okay, moving forward . . .

So, George is clearly enamored with Ned and is very excited when Carson introduces them. Then Carson says, “And I guess you’ve already met Nancy.”

Laughter all around and then Ned starts to mansplain to Nancy how to put a tree topper on.

“Beautiful tree but you’re putting the topper on wrong,” he says.

Ummmm…’kay….it’s just a topper. How is there a different way to put it up there?

Dude. Please.

So he puts it up there and says, “There. It’s how it should be.”

And Nancy shoots daggers at him with her eyes. Dashing? Maybe. Total arrogant jerk? Absolutely.

This is setting up the “enemies to lovers” trope that will continue throughout the episode.

Scene shift. Now there is a man dressed as Santa breaking into a house and stealing things while in the other room a white-haired man is on the phone asking Carson Drew, “Hey, cousin, where are you? The party is getting lit over here.”

He doesn’t actually say lit – I summarized for you. What he does say, in a sort of creepy old man way (and also sounding fairly drunk) is, “Ah, cousin, where are you all? The party’s flagging, especially without your beautiful daughter here to liven things up.”

Carson laughs and says they’re just getting ready to leave but wants to know if he can bring Ned along.

“Sure,” the unnamed cousin says. “The more people are here the more Christmassy I’m going to feel.”

Huh? Was that sarcasm or ….? I don’t know but it was weird.

So next scene we see the two men we saw at the train in a car. “I thought you said he’d get off in this town,” the one man says.

“We’ll find him and he’ll never see Christmas,” the other man says.

The man in question, white beard and all, shows up in the next scene but not near where the men are. He’s found a barn and he’s excited because he’s about to crash in the straw for a snooze.

Before he gets there, though, he looks over his shoulder and sees the burglar Santa climbing down some vines (that would not have supported his weight actually) from a second story window of the house. We aren’t sure whose house this is yet, but earlier scenes hinted to us that it is Carson Drew’s cousin’s house.

The white-bearded man shrugs and says, “Dejevu. Christmas Santas.”

He staggers to the barn, unspotted by the Santa who is still busy climbing down, goes inside and lays down in the straw to take a nap. He isn’t there long, though, before two rich kids are looking down at him and saying “Daddy doesn’t allow anyone in the barn.”

The man tells them they wouldn’t want to chase Santa away right before Christmas, would they?

Nooo. They wouldn’t want to do that.

But we scene switch again and the police are at Carson’s cousin’s house, and I don’t know how far away this guy lived but in the time that Carson was in the car to when he got there, the burglary has already been discovered and the police are investigating.

The cousin hands Nancy a card that thanks the man for his generosity and signs it as Santa.

“Not again,” Nancy says.

Ned asks if this has happened before and Carson explains it has happened four times in a week and a cheery card is left at the scene of every crime.

Ned has to get in on the action and says Nancy shouldn’t have been handed the note and Nancy shouldn’t have taken it because fingerprints could have been lifted.

Nancy, of course, has to tell the detective on scene that he’s making mistakes and didn’t notice a footprint covered in glass by the window, showing someone kicked their way into the room.

Ned says something like, “Oh yeah? How do you know?” and Nancy rattles off some nonsense about wet footprints still being there and glass being embedded in his shoes and blah, blah, blah. It actually didn’t make sense but it’s okay…it’s a fun show so will just go with it.

They all end up back at the Drew’s house where Ned acts like hot stuff and says he can call the DAs office and ask if anyone who is a known burglar has been let out recently or lives in the area. He doubts that it would be anyone local, which offends Nancy who says, “You don’t think this town is big enough to have thieves of their own? Some of the biggest thieves are in this town. I know. I’ve caught some of them.”

I don’t know that I’d want to brag about that, Nancy. It’s kind of like when my area became the Meth capital of the nation. It wasn’t a designation we really liked to tell people about.

Nancy says she’s going to go back to talk to the cousin’s wife and make sure she’s okay. It gives her a chance to get away from Ned who is just driving her bonkers.

Honestly, Ned is a huge jerk in the beginning of this episode, bossy and pushy and essentially acting like they have Nancy act in other episodes.

On the way over to the cousin’s, Nancy notices some lights are on at a house where the owners are supposed to be out of town. She wonders what is going on so she pulls over and, of course, finds the back door broken. We’ve been seeing scenes of someone dressed in a Santa costume stealing valuables and putting them in a big bag, so we know someone is in there.

She goes in and calls the police station, telling them to send the detective over because she’s Nancy Drew and she thinks a house is being broken into.

She makes her way around the house to see if someone is in the house, and is on her way back down the stairs when a man dressed in a Santa costume and wearing a scary mask (it creeped me out!) starts down behind her. A crazy chase scene ensues where the man throws is bag at her (by the way, when it hits the wall, it does not sound like it is full of valuables. Instead, it makes no noise and seems to be full of a pillow.)

Nancy runs into the living room with the man behind her and throws a chair through the patio doors to escape. The Santa is like, “Dude…no way…not dealing with her…She’s nuts” and books it out the back door with a flashlight and his bag.

He runs and finds the barn our “Santa” homeless man is in (so this must be in the same neighborhood as the cousin, which makes this burglar very bold and risky) and runs inside to hide the stolen goods behind some hay bails. He then leaves the barn, with the old white-bearded guy still sleeping in the straw.

When Nancy’s neighbor comes home (I don’t know who called him or how he knew to come home from being “out of town”) they talk to the police detective who says he’s going to get two dozen officers in the neighborhood to track the burglar down. It makes me wonder how much of a budget this little town has that they can afford that many police officers.

The neighbor invites Nancy in for tea (umm…what? Your house was just robbed and you’re inviting this young girl in for tea??) and then says he’s going to check around the house to make sure the guy didn’t try to hide there. Nancy makes her way to the kitchen and starts filling the kettle with water so I guess she’s been here before.

Suddenly, though, the two kids we saw in the barn earlier are in the kitchen with a huge jar of cookies and a loaf of bread.

Okay, so pause here. Nancy tells us viewers, that the family was out of town when she said, “I thought the Garbers were out of town,” when she drove by their house, but the kids were in the house? Alone?? Are these kids siblings of Kevin McAllister? Why didn’t they wake up when the burglar broke in and tried to kill Nancy?

So, I don’t get that part at all, but the kids let it slip that they are taking food to Santa in the barn.

Nancy wants to know if this Santa is the burglar Santa, so she follows them to the barn and meets the man who has been hiding there.

He’s just wearing a gray pair of pants and a gray jacket and looks tired but otherwise fine. The kids give him his food and then leave, which leaves Nancy to grill him about the burglaries. He has no idea what she’s talking about.

“You didn’t catch me the first time,” she says. “Now you have another chance.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ve ever met,” he says.

After some more conversation, he says he did see someone dressed as Santa climbing from a window of a house, but he thought it was a father having fun with his children.

He tells her his name is Griffin.

The police rush in though and start questioning the man, asking him where he’s come from. An officer finds the stashed jewels and other valuables and the man is arrested but says he can’t be arrested because the next night is Christmas Eve and he will be busy.

“You can’t do this to the children!” he says as he is dragged away.

Nancy watches them take the man away and sees a car pull out to follow the police car, as if they were waiting for Griffin to leave.

Back at home later, Carson is woken up by a phone call but no one is there. He tries to go back to sleep but Nancy runs in and says she can’t leave Santa Claus in jail over night, which puzzles Carson who says he actually just had a dream about the man she met. When he tells her the phone call woke him, but no one was there, there is a quick clip slid in of Griffin in jail, so I guess we are supposed to get the idea that this man really is Santa and he has powers to make phone calls or hear conversations or…is omniscient like God? I’m really not sure what we are supposed to be getting here.

All I know is that Carson and Nancy rush down to the jail and post bail for the man which I think is amazing since it is 3 a.m. and most jails wouldn’t let anyone in at that time of the day. When the scene first starts we see the outside of the jail and hear a voice say, “Alright, I’ll release the old man into his custody when he gets down here.”

The officer unlocks the cell door and Griffin says, “Ah, I’ve been expecting you.”

Carson is confused by this, but they move on and offer Griffin a place to stay at their house after asking him some questions.

He tells them that he arrived in their town the night before but will only say that the train brought him — also every time he answers a question music with a little bell plays to suggest he is magical or …whatever.

As they are all leaving, Griffin sees those men waiting in a car outside and while Nancy and Carson are talking, he disappears.

They can’t find him but in the morning, there is a newspaper article saying that Carson Drew is defending Santa Claus. Griffin had told the press that he was Santa, but Carson had no idea when he gave them that information.

Nancy and Ned get into an argument when Ned says this guy is clearly running from something, maybe a crime. Nancy says she has feeling and instinct that he’s a good guy. Ned just laughs at her “hunches.”

Nancy declares she’s going to prove Griffin innocent even if she has to prove he is Santa Claus. Ned scoffs at this as she stomps out of the office.

Next, we have Nancy looking at some fabric she found at the scene of the first crime under a magnifying glass.

She doesn’t see anything that will help her, so she and George start to list what the burglaries have in common. Nancy then tells George to get her a list of all the people who have worked in the homes of the people who were robbed.

Pause here.

First, what is she doing bossing George around? Second, how in the world is George supposed to get that info when she is not a police officer?

George, however, has no doubts. She isn’t the George from season one who was timid and worried all the time. (I mean she’s entirely a different actress even). She’s bold and says she will do it.

In the following scene one of the two men who are after Griffin is talking to another man on a phone.

The man is in a nice office, wearing a suit and tie and says he wants the old man caught and killed because he witnessed “the exchange.” I don’t know what that exchange was but he witnessed it so he orders the man to find him and take him out.

Then he says, “I don’t want a witness to an exchange of $5 million for drugs to be alive.”

Scene switch again and we are in a department store where kids are waiting in line to talk to a Santa who is clearly drunk.

The two children Griffin met in the barn see him and tell the store owners he’s the real Santa. All the kids run to Griffin, and the store owners ask him if he will be their Santa at that night’s Christmas Eve party. He says he can’t because he has a big job to do that night. The store owner thinks it is a joke and hires him.

Meanwhile, Nancy has her list of employees and sees a man named Pierre Cortez, who is the gardener for everyone that was burglarized on the list.

She wants to get his prints so she can prove it was him, but George suggests she call the police first. She refuses because she doesn’t want Ned to think she’s an amateur.

She instead heads back to the barn where Griffin had been staying to find more clues and catches this Pierre man looking for his bag of stuff. There is a standoff, and he threatens to kill her, but luckily, Ned bursts in and tackles the man because George told him what Nancy was going to do.

Somehow, he was also able to call the police in that short amount of time, and they burst in and take the man into custody.

Nancy then rewards Ned with a big kiss, which startles him (and me too, quite frankly) but he thoroughly enjoys. Apparently, they are no longer enemies. He asks what the kiss was for, and she says it was because he saved her life and he quips he will have to do that again sometime.

Now Griffin is off the hook, but Nancy still has to figure out who is following him and why.

Griffin is going to be in a Christmas parade that night so the men who are after him decide they’ll shoot him, Nancy, and Carson to get them all out of the way in case Griffin told Nancy and Carson what they saw.

Before the parade, Griffin overhears Nancy tell Carson that there was a doll she saw in a store in Amsterdam that she wishes she could have purchased as a child. This will come into play later.

Flashing forward a bit, because this recap is getting way too long, we get to the parade and the snipers are ready to shoot Griffin, but he does some voodoo magic where he can see them through his mind and as Carson and Nancy are talking, Griffin disappears.

The men don’t know where he’s gone, but they shoot at Carson and Nancy anyhow and somehow completely miss them.

The police look for where the shots came from and run to the roof and find the two men unconscious, with their guns beside them, and handcuffed together.

Everyone is bewildered until Nancy sees hoofprints and sleigh marks in the snow. It’s at this point that Pamela Sue Martin lets out the weirdest giggle and smile, which makes me wonder if she was on something at the time of filming. I guess it was supposed to show how excited she was at the idea of Griffin being the real Santa, but it flat out scared me.

At the end of the episode, everyone is opening gifts, even Ned who should have gone home by now. There is one gift that no one saw before. It’s addressed to Nancy, from Griffin and inside is the doll she’d always wanted from Amsterdam. The doll, by the way, is some really small, weird looking doll in underwear. It is not what I expected at all.

Pamela does the weird smile again — and again I am frightened. She looks somewhat deranged. I’m sorry! But she does!

Also, she was sporting some really long, crazy nails for this one. I couldn’t figure out how she could get anything done with them!

Up next I’ll be recapping Pamela’s last episode where she has some more weird expressions but not as creepy as her smiles in the Christmas episode.

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:

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.

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

April 8, 2025April 8, 2025 / 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