Don’t Mess with Nancy Drew
Previews have started for a Warner Brothers Nancy Drew movie,
opening June 15. The preview suggests that they are going to pull a “Brady Bunch Movie” on her, taking her out of her time (the wholesome 1940′s and 1950′s) and making her a smart, loveable dork in today’s teenage den of hedonism. They will make her the butt of jokes, even as they let her solve the crimes.
Here’s my friendly advice to the WB executives, in the unlikely event that they happen to read this blog: Don’t mess with Nancy Drew. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into if you do. You see, Nancy Drew is an icon, not only to women my mother’s age, but to women my age and younger women, too. She was was smart, resourceful, with a nice and helpful boyfriend (Ned Nickerson), and two really good best friends (Bess and George), and a loving and supportive father. (Sadly, her mother died when she was three, but her housekeeper Hannah raised her.) Nancy respected adult authority, but not blindly–after all, she knew that adults committed crimes too. And adults respected her in return. She was a role model for lots of young women. She was independent but connected, resourceful, but respectful.
In the 1970′s when I was reading Nancy Drew, you couldn’t get it out of the libraries– they weren’t considered sound good reading material. Ridiculous! As a conseuqence, however, somewhere in Cumberland RI there is a musty stash of about 100 Nancy Drew books, presents for birthdays and Christmas. (Sorry, mom, II promise ‘ll get them the next time I’m home.)
You don’t need to update Nancy Drew to make her relevant–play her as a timeless, period character. I remember being charmed and intrigued by some of the details from my mom’s generation of books–what was a “roadster” –Nancy Drew got a new one ever year, from her well-to-do father, the prominent criminal lawyer Carson Drew. Was there really a time when phone service would go out every big storm? Wow. Nancy went on a plane ride, and wore a “traveling suit”–what’s that? The anachronism was part of the fun. It was not something to mock–it was something to enter into.
I think it would be interesting to see how many women in prominent places today read Nancy Drew–and thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could be a little like her!
We saw the movie trailer for this recently, and it looks dreadful.
I never clicked with the Nancy Drew stories (secrets in old attics paled next to Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”), but my husband enjoyed them until his older brother told him they were for girls only.
For anyone interested in the Nancy Drew phenom, I recommend “Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her” by Melanie Rehak.
NPR also recently ran a review of “Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody” by Chelsea Cain, a posthumous “confessional” by the “real” Nancy Drew, which sounds like a delight.
Read the review here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9255546
Great post! Modern updating of Nancy Drew: gag.
Apparently they did the same thing to the Nancy Drew books that they did to the Hardy Boy books? That is, totally rewrite them in the 1960s to make them more hip (supposedly). When I was growing up, my dad loved taking me to old used bookshops and buying the original 1920s versions of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Dave Dawson, etc. He instilled in me a deep contempt for the way that the Hardy Boys books were rewritten in the “modern” 1960s editions. Perhaps this is yet another reason that I’m instinctively suspicious of (although not necessarily opposed to) liturgical innovations carried out in the name of Vatican 2! :)
These days, of course, it’s much easier to find the originals, given Abebooks. Plus Applewood Books has reissued some of the originals. See http://www.nancydrewsleuth.com/sightingsbookawb.html and http://www.amazon.com/Original-Nancy-Mystery-Stories-Applewood/lm/1SWS9QLPRHFH1
This is also a good article: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/10/07/hardy_boys/print.html
Here’s why I like reading the books to my own seven-year-old:
“The Applewood books feature beautiful dust jackets bearing the original cover illustrations. Most important, each of the six Applewood volumes is five chapters longer and substantially different in tone and pace that the Grossett and Dunlaps.
In the originals, McFarlane had taken it upon himself to educate the wee heathens in his audience by dropping in references to Shakespeare and Dickens, and using multisyllabic words like “ostensible,” “presaged,” and “inelegantly.”
Yes! None of this dumbed-down crap from the 1960s for my kids.
Careful, Stuart, or you will turn your kids into weirdos like mine.
My son learned words like “dessication” and “viaduct” (not to mention the plots to several operas and how a bookmaking operation works) when he was a second grader watching my beloved Marx Brothers movies with me.
It was pitiful to watch him eagerly try to share these movies with his friends, who rejected them out of turn because a) they weren’t in color and b) didn’t have aliens or anybody they’d ever heard of in them.
The trick (and I hope to be successful at this) is to convince your own kids that people who know only current pop culture are morons. :)
Emphasis on the “only” there, by the way. Nothing wrong with knowing just a bit about current American culture, as long as you don’t sneer at everything that came before Britney Spears.
There were a couple of goood series from the sixties; Alfred Hitchcok and the Trhee Investigators. Encyclopedia Brown.
Wow, Jean, Poe. I still can’t read him –too scary.
I think, Stuart, in terms of past and present, Buffy wouldn’t be anywhere without Nancy Drew.
The funny thing is, all this stuff stays in your head. I can still remember the name of Nancy Drew’s father, which I last read more than thirty years , but I can’t remember dates I read in my History of Australia book last night.
Just being tongue-in-cheek (somewhat) about the 60s. Encyclopedia Brown was good. So were the Henry Reed books and the Alvin Fernald books. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Reed_(fictional_character) and http://www.alvinfernald.com/ (And if you twist my arm, I’ll admit that I was a Buffy fan.)
Thanks Stuart. Now, another great set of books written in the sixties and seventies–though set at the turn of the century–die laughing books–are The Great Brain Books–they’re about Catholics in Mormon country. I still remember The Great Brain at the Academy–and how an (inferred) letter from the Pope convinced a Catholic boarding school to start basketball.
TD Fitzgerald with his high intelligence and “money-loving heart.”
Nancy Drew
The Hardy Boys
Encyclopedia Brown
Hmmm….I guess I should be looking elsewhere for a link to out-of-print books by Carlos Castaneda.
It’s the very beginning of summer, William. Full of memories of grammar school summers spent reading page turners, with no thought of redeeming intellectual value, with no thought of anything but our own amusement. We were a bit parochial, perhaps. But II think we turned out okay –or at least better — in the end.
It was a poor attempt at humor, Kathy. :)
Actually, in the neighborhood of (mostly) Italian and Irish Catholic families where I grew up, and where the smallest family had 5 kids (I’m one of 10), “The Hardy Boys” and “Nancy Drew” books were a form of currency. (If I remember correctly, “The Happy Hollisters,” a series of books about a family that solves crimes, were also popular.) They were constantly being traded and shared among siblings and neighbors. Some of my fondest memories of childhood were spent devouring such books.
Sorry for missing the point. There are, unfortunately, some people who don’t want their kids to read these books because there’s no “value-added” in terms of culture or learning or education.
I think anything (well, almost anything) that gets kids devouring books like potato chips is a good thing.
The Hardy Boys did it for me, along with the Black Stallion series; all those dog books by Albert Payson Terhune; and let us not forget the Tarzan series. I went on an historical novel tear one summer in early high school.
But you’re right: Cathy–anything that gets them reading!
I disagree quite strongly with the people referenced by Cathleen Kaveny who don’t want their kids reading such books due to the lack of “value-added” in them. In fact when kids read the original versions from the 20′s or 30′s they pick up (or at least mine did) an awful lot about the way society, culture, values, the economy and the lives of adolescents have changed over that period. And such learning is particularly valuable, because kids are figuring it out on their own rather than guessing what adults want them to pick up on. But then I have succeeded in producing kids who wish they lived in the 30′s — and sometimes think they do! Of course it can be a bit much to hear a teenager going on about the good old days.
Similar claims were made about the now classic comic books of my era (50′s and 60′s), and there are few bits of advice that I got from my elders that I am more happy to have disregarded.
Finally, a word of praise for less commercial but beloved children’s writers of that period such Robert McCloskey and Yamhill’s own Beverly Cleary.
I remember our fourth grade teacher reading us “The Box Car Children” in 1963. I combed the woods around my house hoping to stumble across a box car–or even a sturdy cardboard box–I could move into. With me as the boss, of course, seeing as how I was the oldest sister.
Apparently, this is still a beloved series, and one of my students recently wrote an essay in which she cited her “Box Car Children Cookbook.”
My son loved the Oz books, also panned by critics. We went through all of them the year he was in kindergarten.
Beverly Cleary–Ramona the Pest. “Sit here for the present.” And poor Ramona expected her kindgergarten teacher to give her a present.
Another howlingly funny book.
A la Cleary, we enjoyed the Junie B. Jones series.
Captures that transition from know-it-all preschooler of 4 and the now-what-do-I-do kindergartner of 5.
Great for first and second graders who need short chapter books, and who have enough school under their belts to realize how much they’ve learned since kindergarten.
My son dragged some home from the school book sale, and we bought others in the series. He was ready to give them up before I was.
It looks like this one has sort of gone out, but I have to note that after turning in her final paper for the quarter my daughter announced that she was going to treat herself for working hard (full time job plus challenging class) and buy a new computer game. I just walked into her room and asked her what the new game was — “Another Nancy Drew game.”
Apparently she no longer reads Ms. Drew at her age, although she is the world’s greatest Harry Potter fan.
Okay, I’m not proud. What’s the name of the game, Gene?
I honestly didn’t know the name of the game when I posted, but now I have taken my life in my hands and violated the sanctum, a procedure usually allowed only when I doing dishes or (necessary) laundry. There seem to be two games in the package (plus a William Powell-Myrna Loy DVD which I attribute to interesting housekeeping habits), one called The Secret of the Old Clock, the other Last Train to Blue Canyon. Secret of the Old Clock is, of course, the first title in the series (don’t know if it’s the 1930 or 1959 version or a horse of a different color), while the Last Train to Blue Canyon seems to be specifically created for computer gaming.
By the way, the WikiPedia Nancy Drew article seems to have a wealth of information. And it looks like it’s not quite fair to attribute the rewriting to the ’60′s, unless you mean the long ’60′s, but (as I kinda suspected from remembering the Disneyfication of the Hardy Boys) it’s actually a product of the family friendly 50′s.
Gene, Gene–I didn’t intend to put you in harm’s way!
Thanks, though!
By the 70′s Ramona the Pest and Encyclopedia Brown were great reading for kids. How abot Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing?
My youth was long before that and we were started early (for which I’m grateful) for Classic Comics – which put in Comic Book form the really good books people read like Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick eyc.