Late Night Blogging: The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries Promos

The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: "The House on Possessed Hill" (January 22, 1978)

While driving home late at night through the town of Circle Hills, Joe (Shaun Cassidy) encounters a young woman on the run, Stacey Blain (Melanie Griffith).  

She is being pursued by angry townspeople who consider her a witch, and responsible, somehow, for an accident that has injured a child...and which she predicted.

Joe and Stacey take sanctuary in a creepy house on a hill, one that Stacey is certain is haunted by a creepy old ghost.  “The house…it runs itself,” she says creepily. 

As Joe and Stacey endeavor to stay the night in the house, Stacey hears the sounds of an angry woman screaming, and reports that the house is alive.  Its owner, John Spencer, lived in 1743 but is now haunting it...allegedly.

Frank (Parker Stevenson) arrives soon, and helps Joe and Stacey solve a mystery of a very different type: one involving a bank robbery and money hidden inside the house’s old walls for nearly twenty years…

Two significant guest stars make “The House on Possessed Hill” a fun entry in the Hardy Boys canon.  

The first is the haunted house itself, which “starred” as the home of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), Psycho 2 (1983), Psycho III (1986) and Psycho IV (1990). The old house’s interior also looks very familiar, and there’s a joke in the episode about Hitchcock, and the house’s appropriateness for one of his movie thrillers.

Here -- as seems appropriate for a house of this silver screen stature -- there’s also much talk about the structure being alive. Unfortunately, that talk never really goes anywhere.

The second guest star of note is Melanie Griffith, who in 1987 became a star in Working Girl, and then parlayed that success into an A list career. Here, she plays the psychic Stacey, an insecure young woman who reports that she knows things and feels things, “things in the air around her" and “Things that happened” and “will happen.”  

Even a good actress would have trouble with lines like that, but the youthful Griffith does a good job of projecting both innocence and strangeness. She's vulnerable, and also just oddball enough to seem, possibly, like a danger to herself and others.

“The House on Possessed Hill” features two intertwined narratives. 

One concerns a human crime, and the other concerns the supernatural world. As one might expect, the human crime is solved and justice is served.  At the end of the episode, the supernatural mystery lingers, however.  

In particular, Joe sees the ghost of the house for himself, but rather than investigate its presence, tells Frank to drive away in their van. But as viewers, we see the ghost (who wears a large ring on his finger) quite clearly, thus proving the existence of the supernatural in this series’ universe.

It seems a bit like a ploy, or even a little cheap, to conflate the two mysteries, and to conclude without exploring the history and existence of this particular ghost.  

On the other hand, the series was always a little cheeky, and the episode’s “surprise” ending conforms to that tradition.

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The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula

This detective/mystery series -- styled after the mystery books by Edward Stratemeyer -- starred teen heartthrob Shaun Cassidy ("Da Doo Ron Ron...") as Joe Hardy and Parker Stevenson (later the husband of Kirstie Alley...) as his cleverer brother, Frank. 

On the Nancy Drew side of the equation, Pamela Sue Martin portrayed the dedicated part-time sleuth. 

At least that was the case for the first two seasons of The Hardy Boy/Nancy Drew Mysteries. 

Then she permanently exited the series, breaking the hearts of pre-adolescent boys across the nation. Concurrent with her departure, Pamela Sue Martin shed her Nancy Drew image forever by posing nude in Playboy.

Little known fact: I still own that particular issue...

But for today, I want to direct your attention to the two-part, second season opener of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, the charmingly-titled "The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula," which aired on September 11th and September 18th, 1977.

In this particular tale, hapless Hardy Senior -- Fenton Hardy (Ed Gilbert) -- disappears at Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania (on June 4th, 1977...). 

Weeks later, Joe and Frank go in search of him...in Paris. 

Then, they run into the lovely Nancy Drew in Munich, and learn more about their father's unusual disappearance. Fenton and Nancy were "comparing notes" on a mystery involving international art thefts. Many of the world's most valuable paintings have disappeared, and Fenton was on the case.

The three amateur detectives concur that all roads lead to Transylvania, where a Dracula Festival is being held at Vlad The Impaler's historic castle. 

Shooting a rock concert there for ABC is the rock sensation Allison Troy...really the incomparable Paul Williams (who appeared EVERYWHERE in the 1970s, including in Battle for the Planet of the Apes...).

And here (in Part I), Williams performs a great song from one of my favorite movies: 1974's Phantom of the Paradise.

Anyway, the Hardy Boys go undercover as members of a band called "Circus"....which is just a transparent excuse for Shaun Cassidy to sing "That's Rock'N'Roll" ("Come on Everybody, get down, get with it, come on everybody get down, get with it...")

While Joe sings his heart out for costumed revelers, Frank and Nancy Drew separately investigate the creepy caverns underneath the castle; a locale they have been warned about repeatedly. Before long, Frank ends up locked in a dungeon with the apparent victim of a vampire attack.

Soon vampire bats are attacking a night-gowned Nancy Drew in her hotel bedroom (!) and the Transylvania town elders start panicking. Before long, they are on the receiving end of vampire neck bites too. 

Inspector Stavlin, played by Lorne Greene -- a traditional sort-of-guy -- hints that Dracula may be perturbed that his castle is being used for such crass commercialism (meaning Allison Troy's concert, not this two-part Glen Larson episode...).

But deep in the caverns -- behind the ancient Dracula family crest -- a secret chamber awaits. 

And there, Frank, Joe and Nancy finally learn the truth about vampires, and international art thieves too.

Directed by Joseph Pevney and written by Glen A. Larson and Michael Sloane, "The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula" is a show I vividly remember from my childhood. 

I guess I was seven years old when I watched it originally, and, well, what can I say? it had a lasting impression on me.

For instance, I've always recalled the Dracula-"stalking" scenes that dominate this two-part episode. We just see Dracula's stylish boots as the count hunts his prey in the dark caverns. 

Of course, the villain was filmed in this manner so we couldn't discover Dracula's real identity. But there was always something unsettling (to my young mind, anyway....) about the way those shiny boots came out of the darkness and followed everybody through the catacombs.

And, of course, how can you not love Paul Williams? 

The performer gets to camp it up here as an egotistical rock star. 

I love that he sings "The Hell of It" in this episode, because it features nihilistic song lyrics that aren't exactly as kid-friendly as the rest of this landmark Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew endeavor. 

The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries had fun stories, featured engaging performances and depicted some great tales about The Bermuda Triangle, King Tut, the Phantom of Hollywood and other weird 1970s era obsessions. I often write about TV series as "time capsules" for their era, and -- my god -- what a time capsule this show is. 

It's just a whole lot of goofy, 1977-style fun.

Outré Intro: The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (Season One)

The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries from producer Glen A. Larson aired from 1977 to 1979, and made stars -- at least briefly -- of Shaun Cassidy, Parker Stevenson and Pamela Sue Martin.

At my house, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries was required viewing, and I retain a special fondness for the episode set at Dracula's Castle, starring Lorne Greene as the Count, and featuring a guest musical performance from Paul Williams.  I'll post about that show later this morning.

I haven't revisited the series of late in anything approximating a global way, but episodes are available on Netflix, and the ones I watched remain highly entertaining.

The opening title sequence for the series in its first season is a terrific representation of the program's subject matter. 

We begin at a high angle, looking down on a giant outdoor maze.  

The maze is the central symbol of this introductory montage, and course, it's an appropriate image for a mystery series.  A maze promises twist and turns, false starts, and a (presumably) unexpected exit or outcome. 

Again, those are all qualities you can readily apply to the mystery genre.

As the title card appears on screen, the camera begins to sink, moving lower to the ground, until we are on eye level with the maze.

This too is an important conceit.

From a high angle or view, we can see the way out of a mystery, can't we?  From ground level, we see only blind alleys, turns, and dead ends. Each turn represents a new danger, a surprise, or even a clue.

Next, under glaring moonlight, we push in towards the maze, as if we are to enter it ourselves (a metaphor, of course, for our experience of watching the series).

Super-imposed over the maze, we see two of our leads: The Hardy Boys.  They will enter the maze for us, and we will follow their trajectory. They are our guides (as is Nancy Drew).

Next up, we find a reason to trust our guides: a life-time of adventures shared together in print.

I especially enjoy how we see Frank and Joe, and later Nancy, as characters featured in the long-standing books, explicitly connecting the literary series to the TV series. These books are the "mazes" that Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys have already solved.

In the following frames, we meet our cast-members, or stars, and again, see them positioned against their literary counterparts and narratives.

Here's the montage in its live-action mode: