Pajiba

Olsen.
Not that it matters. When flamjillionaires dress themselves like hobos to be ironic, they officially stop mattering.

Agreed. Misspelling corrected nonetheless. -- Ed.

Hasn't Veronica Mars updated the Nancy Drew role pretty much to perfection?

Will see Factory Girl only for Guy Pierce.

I had a bunch of Nancy Drew books but never read them. I would steal my mom's Jackie Collins books and scan for all the sex bits.

I will be having nightmares about nancy drew and hardy men attacking me in my sleep, aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Carolyn Keene officially rolls over in grave.
booooo.

Right on, Dustin. I was a Encyclopedia Brown kid as well. You got like 15 mysteries in his books to one one or two in a Hardy Boys book. Plus, Sally sounded hot, even thought it was mostly in text.

Oh, I am disgusted. I loved Nancy, and my daughter does too. No way will I let her see this crap!!! Of course, we can't have a smart, popular, confident and *nice* female character in a mainstream Hollywood film. BLAAAHH!!!! I feel damn near incoherent...I can hardly type I'm so upset!!!!

Was a huge Encyclopedia Brown man myself. I think I read 1 Hardy Boys book.

Two other boy genius books I liked, can't remeber the names though:
1. Detective type stories, where you would be given options as to what happened next - turn to this page if you thought A, that page if you thoughht B (although my memomry might be combining Encyclopedia Brown and some other books - tired, been a long week).
2. The other was aseries about a too smart for his own good - always having get rich-quick schemes, not bad, just a trouble maker. Took place in the 1st half the 20th century, in Utah I think. Had one where his father was the 1st to put a septic tank in - charged all the neighborhood kids to see a indoor toilet.

The Nancy Drew movie makes me sad. It looks like they couldn't decide whether they wanted to make a satire a la The Brady Bunch Movie, or stay true to the books and create a teen action/mystery flick. Instead they decided to do both and got a steaming pile of crap that not even Gary Cole would have been able to save. I guess I'll just have to go back to creating my own Nancy Drew adventures like when I was little, and now that I'm older, they can be even more realistic. I'll call it the Mystery of the Disappearing Roommate, in which I'll kidnap my old college roommate, tie her up, throw in the San Gabriel River, and when her body washes up three days later, I'll offer my crack detective skills to discover that it was Old Man Herman in a fit of jealous rage when he caught her offering her services to another man! It would be backed up of course by the evidence that everyone knew my roommate was a ho, and I'll be a hero not only for solving the mystery, but by preventing anymore unsuspecting men from catching any of the numerous diseases she was carrying in her vagina. That's what I call a two-fer.

I loved the Great Brain books as well as Encyclopedia Brown. There was also a series of short stories about a bunch of nerdy kids who solved mysteries and stuff that I believe was called the Mad Scientist's Club. My favorite and all time winner for batshit-weird but cool were the Ghost Squad books, where several members of the group who investigate the crimes are *dead*, but still able to communicate with some of their living friends. Of course, they can walk through walls and listen in on conversations unnoticed, but the living friends have to figure out how to get the evidence needed to convince the authorities. It was bizarre.

That said, I agree that Hardy Men could have been an interesting movie; I'd also like to see a grown-up Nancy Drew who has, you know, put all her detective antics behind her and is doing something like public relations or tax law or something, and run across a mystery to solve... and for some reason (even though I never liked Friends), I totally see Jennifer Aniston as a thirtysomething Nancy.

I love how perfectly pat everything was in Nancy Drew. Every book had a scene along the lines of, "While Hannah made sandwiches and Carson called the police, Nancy went upstairs to change into fresh clothes." That's all I recall from my childhood reading of that series.

Harriet the Spy was leagues better.

The ND movie doesn't look like much--that said, IMO Nancy Drew is ripe for satirizing. It would be great to see that done well.

Never read Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. To me those characters will be forever represented by Pamela Sue Martin, Parker Stephenson, and Shaun Cassidy of late 1970s TV awesomeness.

For my childhood detective-reading pleasure I enjoyed already-mentioned Brain and Harriet the Spy and the fabulous Trixie Belden.

Maybe it's just me, but in the Nancy Drew trailer didn't we see young Nancy murder whatever poor utility workers were down in the maintenance shaft where she threw the bomb? Shouldn't a girl genius know that those aren't bunkers? Yikes.

Malice Alice - you are talking about the Three Investigators, who had a cool clubhouse with not one but three secret entrances. They had an official detective business card with three question marks on it. I loved that series!

Malice Alice -

I hear you. They recently did the same to the Judy Blume series--I remember hearing on CBC the laments over Blume "updating" Margaret's 60s-style feminine protection (straps) to tampons. Seriously--even when I read those books as a prepubescent girl c. 1980 (aka the tampon and self-adhesive pad era), I could figure it out. So much for the cultural history lessons/learning something about previous generations/gettin' with context.

I call these "dumb-'em-updates".

Wow, the Mad Scientists Club - I'd forgotten that one; they were great! Also, the Hitchcock one, that had 3 (maybe 4?) boys that solved mysteries with occasional assistance from Alfred Hitchcock.

And I must admit, in spite of the intensity of my previous rant against this piece of crap they're foisting on us, I always preferred Trixie Belden to Nancy. Trixe was often bratty and immature, and usually wrong at some point, which made her so much easier to identify with.

Anyone else remember the McGurk series? A ten-year-old named Jack McGurk who has a detective agency and solves crimes like who forged a Santa note? I ate those up as a kid, mostly because McGurk and his buddies were a bunch of geeks (like me) making some pretty cool detective cases out of fairly mundane events. Great series. Hopefully Hollywood will leave it alone so McGurk doesn't turn into a hip, coke-sniffing fifth grader.

I LOOOVE TRIXIE BELDEN!!!!!
I wanted to BE her.

How it warms my heart to even know someone else in the universe is thinking of her in this era!!!

Still, I doubt my daughter (now 6) will derive the same pleasure from her when I force her to read and/or listen to me read her books.

i don't know who re-covered "kids in america" but the muffs cover from clueless rules!

Oh WOW I haven't thought about Encyclopedia Brown in years. I loved those books. I remember he solved one about a rigged contest . . . something about a word with three double letters in a row (bookkeeper) and the person who rigged it so she would lose should have gotten the answer right because she WAS a bookkeeper. And someone coming down the stairs from a bath filing her nails. Which of course you can't do to recently wet, soaked nails.

I'm geeking out here, and I don't care a bit.

ew. Nancy...ew..Drew. Sob. That's not Nancy Drew. I'm going to call that girl Fancy Shrew or something.

Loved all those mystery solving series, but what about the English investigators? I adored The Famous Five series...(not a Secret Seven girl) always wondered why on earth you would want to eat a 'potted tongue sandwich'? Fantastic satire of the series by British Comedians in the late 80's - The Comic Book Presents... can't remember the rest of the title, something Like Five Go Mad in Dorset? Starred Dawn French, Adrian Edmonson & all that mob. Fantastic! were the books ever published in the US?

I so profoundly preferred Trixie B. to Nancy D. I can't really say why, I just did. I think Nancy was too rich and perfect for my taste. Anybody read the creepily racist early Nancy Drews?

Loved Sweet Valley High, the romance series that began with "P.S. I Love You" (young Jeanne Tripplehorn on the cover, FYI), and the Twilight horror series - yes, all from the 80s. I could go on.

that was the most painful movie preview ive ever seen in my life...nancy drew?! i read like 5 of her books in middle school and thought she was too goody goody...and she's even more annoying here...and that was a complete rip off of clueless, kids of america belongs to that movie...whatever!

Alfred Hitchcock's The Three Investigators was the series that captured my childhood imagination. The three teenage mystery-solvers had a secret office-workshop that was hidden in the center of a scrap yard. The Master of Suspense himself was a character in the novels. The series was created by Robert Arthur, a writer for The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In the mid-1980s, Random House removed all references to Alfred Hitchcock from new editions of the books. Boo-hiss.

Generation Douchebag, indeed!

I gotta say, it would be tough to revamp the Hardy Boys into something as interesting as Veronica Mars makes Nancy Drew.

...issues, pretty dark issues.

Thanks

michelle, you might be surprised. My daughter (almost 9) has loved Trixie ever since I read the first one to her when she was 7, so there is hope.

Also, I hate to admit it, but TB (all of these series, really) had its own fair share of subtle racism/stereotyping in a few of the stories. I just remind myself that they are products of their time, and make sure to explain the inappropriateness to my daughter.