
The Secret Syndicate Behind Nancy Drew - Pharmakon
https://daily.jstor.org/the-secret-syndicate-behind-nancy-drew/
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le-mark
I often wonder why, in this age of reboots and cinematic universes, no one has
mined this series, and the Hardy Boys for material. Iirc, there was a tv
series for each in the '70s.

Related; there was some really great writing for television back then; Circus
Boy and The Rifleman are two examples.

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dragonwriter
> I often wonder why, in this age of reboots and cinematic universes, no one
> has mined this series, and the Hardy Boys for material.

As of last year, a Nancy Drew series whose pilot had been rejected by CBS was
in development at NBC.

> Iirc, there was a tv series for each in the '70s.

Also (and they flopped) the 1990s (in Canada, I believe.)

And Nancy Drew had an ABC TV movie intended to launch a series in 2002, but no
series emerged.

And there was a 2007 Nancy Drew movie.

So, it's not exactly a property that's been ignored, even if there hasn't been
much success with it since the 1970s.

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ghaff
The Stratemeyer syndicate also published, in addition to the Hardy Boys books
mentioned in the article, the Tom Swift SF juveniles.

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tomcam
And the Rover Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and others.

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barking
I read some nancy drew from the local library as a kid but I preferred the
hardy boys. They had a secret hideout in their junkyard, a caravan buried
under junk. The bad guys always seemed to drive a black sedan though I had no
idea what a sedan was.

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ubermonkey
I'm totally there for you on "sedan" and other throwback words.

I'm 48, so I read the Hardy Boys books mostly in the mid to late 70s. That
whole era seemed to be stuck in time; lots of pop culture sort of pushed as
"current" was clearly from at least 10 to 20 years before, but even as a kid
it was pretty clear there was a disconnect. The Hardys never watched TV, for
example. They used terms like "jalopy" and "sedan". Etc.

I assume the mismatch was partly because of the rapid societal changes that
took root starting in the 60s, plus a sort of refusal to acknowledge those by
the generation just ahead of the boomers that were really still in fundamental
control through the 80s.

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lowercased
> They used terms like "jalopy" and "sedan". Etc.

And Chet was rarely fat, but often 'portly', 'heavy-set', 'chunky' or 'stout'.
:)

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barking
I was thinking of chuck but you're right it was chet!

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lb1lf
...or Chester, as his aunt (I believe) insisted on calling him - probably the
only person to use his given name!

In retrospect (I read 75-80 Hardy Boys books as a kid, many of them over and
over), it is amazing how formula-based the story trajectories were and how
one-dimensional all the characters were. I bet with some practice, an author
could churn out a book in the time it took me to read one.

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tomcam
The Hardy Boys series had to be rewritten hastily in the 1970s due to phrases
like “there’s a [n-word] in the woodpile”.

Many of the bad guys in Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys were described as
“swarthy”. My girlfriend’s father, who was a truly lovely man, would go on to
use that word to describe me back in the 1980s. She and her mother were
horrified but I thought it was hilarious.

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AlexCoventry
Does "swarthy" have offensive / embarrassing connotations? It doesn't matter,
because I never use it, but I didn't know that until now.

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lmm
It means dark-skinned (e.g. Mediterranean) and so tends to be seen as racist
now.

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SamReidHughes
Holy shit. I always thought it meant somebody with a rough, rugged sort of
appearance, that you'd get from a drunken wind-swept life.

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lostgame
I often felt that ‘Goosebumps’ must have done a similar thing. I never thought
even as a kid that ‘R.L. Stine’ was a real person.

Edit: I’m shocked to find out from the Wiki article that it seems as though he
really did write them!

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ticmasta
Check out the various fairies series by "Daisy Meadows" \- there has to be at
least a thousand of them. They mine a theme/set with a book for each element
(the seasons, rainbow colors, precious gems, etc) and they follow the exact
same plot for each one. My wife and I used to joke that "D.A.I.S.Y.
M.E.A.D.O.W.S. has got to be a acronym for the computer program that writes
them all.

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derefr
If I've learned one thing from YouTube, it's that there are definitely content
creators whose brains are built in such a way that what they want out of life
is to put tons of effort into building up a library of highly-structured and
predictable content. (I'm not talking about the "putting pre-fabbed CG parts
together to make a buck on infants" videos here; I'm talking about things like
the infinite stream of nail-art tutorials, or things like SummoningSalt's
timelines of speedrunning efforts of a particular game.)

Such people _could_ vary their formula—they're not doing this as work-for-hire
with strict requirements under a producer, this is just the stuff they publish
as a hobby. And you'd expect a "normal" person in such a situation to get
bored and _want_ to vary their formula, especially as they gain more
followers. Most creators do, but these ones don't. They just keep on makin'
what they're makin', to a strict standard that lets them continue to pump out
a _lot_ of it, rather than making each successive work more of a production
than before. It's what they like doing.

I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't say for sure _what 's_ going on with such
people (though I've heard the phrase "systematizing personality" before and it
_sounds_ applicable here.) But I can say for sure that such people certainly
do exist.

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TheAdamist
Was expecting some algorithmic analysis of the books to cluster the works to
different authors and attempt to match them to other works with known authors.
But thats not the case. Entertaining background about the business though.

