The boys in pop culture

[MacGyver]

Here's a pretty cool project- scenes from The Hardy Boys books enacted via still photographs of action figures- pretty cool! It's reminiscent in style to what Robot Chicken does (though definitely without the vulgar content of course) and the comic stories Toyfare magazine does.
The blog has photos done for The Tower Treasure and The House on the Cliff (both revised versions as far as I can tell.)

[MacGyver]

Here's a picture from a recent play production that seems to be spoofing The Hardy Boys-

Read more about it here- http://finearts.uvic.ca/blog/?p=1707

[MacGyver]

Okay- this isn't exactly Hardy Boys related, but I thought it was worth posting- I particularly thought tomswift2002 would appreciate this one.
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=44618&mobile=FULL

Who knew Shaun Cassidy (aka Joe Hardy on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries) sang a song on the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Not me, anyway. Yeah- A Star Beyond Time- a classic I will have to check out later. If you look through the forum posts above, someone on there was kind enough to provide a Youtube link, along with a number of other interesting songs.
So there we have it- a Hardy Boys and Star Trek connection! Awesome! Totally groovy! And definitely far out! (I mean, really far out- they're out in outer space- the final frontier, man.)

[tomswift2002]

Okay- this isn't exactly Hardy Boys related, but I thought it was worth posting- I particularly thought tomswift2002 would appreciate this one.
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=44618&mobile=FULL

Who knew Shaun Cassidy (aka Joe Hardy on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries) sang a song on the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Not me, anyway. Yeah- A Star Beyond Time- a classic I will have to check out later. If you look through the forum posts above, someone on there was kind enough to provide a Youtube link, along with a number of other interesting songs.
So there we have it- a Hardy Boys and Star Trek connection! Awesome! Totally groovy! And definitely far out! (I mean, really far out- they're out in outer space- the final frontier, man.)

I had never heard of that before. 

Looking it up on Memory Alpha, the track was only released as a Promo in Japan back in 1979, and then, apparently because the buzz of the movie was over by the time it was to be released in the US in 1980, the track was sent back to the Paramount vaults and was not reissued until 2012 when La La Land records released 10,000 copies of an expanded version of the Star Trek The Motion Picture Soundtrack, with the song ending up on Disc 3.

But it looks like the track was reissued by itself on iTunes.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture_%28expanded_soundtrack%29

[MacGyver]

Thanks for the further information- that's just kinda cool and kinda funny at the same time. 

[MacGyver]

Magician Christopher Manos apparently offers a workshop about the history of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew... interesting. Perhaps he'll focus in on titles like The Billion Dollar Ransom, Tricks of the Trade and Murder By Magic.

[MacGyver]

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned a number of the various stage plays that have offered light parodies (or sometimes darker ones) of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Here is a review of The Secret of the Old Queen- a 1996 production- from The Chicago Tribune. (It also mentions a Nancy Drew parody stage play that was done in 1993- The Clue in the Old Birdbath.)

[MacGyver]

I just saw this on Amazon.com- a 1985 issue of National Lampoon that contains a Hardy Boys parody- The Undiscovered Notebooks of Franklin W. Dixon- Anyone ever seen this before?
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81LMAdTu0PL._SL1500_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/810jGOqbISL._SL1500_.jpg

[MacGyver]

A funny little jab at The Hardy Boys from a Sunday comic strip called Can You Solve The Mystery?, based on the book series of the same name (which starred Hawkeye Collins and Amy Adams. It was very much inspired by Donald J. Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown books.)

[MacGyver]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but I'm pretty there is an episode of Friends where Ross and Chandler are called The Hardy Boys by Phoebe (or one of the other girls.)

[MacGyver]

In "The Friendship Algorithm" episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon and Leonard visit a bookstore and as Sheldon looks in the children's section, you can clearly see a stack of the Grosset & Dunlap hardback printings of The Hardy Boys books.

[MacGyver]

First Lady Laura Bush is a big fan of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, as she apparently had some figurines of all of these characters made to set up on display in the White House around Christmas in 2004. (It seems reasonable President George W. Bush is probably a fan too, hopefully.) Why not? President Obama has made clear he's a fan of comic books and characters like Superman and Spider-Man (and he got a guest star appearance in one of The Hardy Boys graphic novels). Here's another brush The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have had with the President of the United States of America.
Check this site for the picture of the figurines.

[MacGyver]

While The Clock Ticked always seems to be such a memorable cover (sometimes remembered for various things, apparently.)
I found this black and white rendition of the cover on a site and thought it looked cool. (If you check the site it came from, you'll see what I mean about the cover meaning different things to different people.)

[tomswift2002]

Which site?  That black and white picture looks like it was just a scan of a flashlight edition that was then Photoshopped into black and white.

[MacGyver]

It was from The Boston Phoenix news site. (www.bostonphoenix.com) Yeah- it may have just been a photoshopped scan of the book cover- I just thought it looked interesting.