The studio also encouraged them to get the rights from Stratemeyer Syndicate head Harriet Adams, who was in her eighties.
Initially, the rights to Nancy Drew were unavailable, so they instead focused on The Hardy Boys, first as a movie at Paramount, then as a television series at Universal. In 1976, producers Arlene Sidaris and Joyce Brotman thought of adapting the Nancy Drew books. Though the relationship between Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is largely platonic, there is an implied romance between Nancy Drew and Frank Hardy. In the first episode of the second season they meet in a hotel room in Europe the boys tracking their father, who was working on a case with Nancy Drew. In this second appearance he is played by Rick Springfield.Īlthough the characters are known to each other in the framework of the novels, in their first television encounter they are strangers. In the second series, Nickerson is re-introduced - with no reference to his earlier appearances, and in a scene in which he is apparently introduced to Nancy Drew for the first time - as a young hotshot lawyer from the city District Attorney's office. In the first series, Nickerson is a law student who does part-time work for Carson Drew.
In the novels on which the series was based, Nickerson is explicitly identified as Nancy's boyfriend in the television series, their romance is more ambiguous. Hanlon, Jr.) Another prominent character from the Nancy Drew books, Bess Marvin (Ruth Cox), made only two appearances. In addition to Nancy Drew and her father, Carson (William Schallert), her stories feature two other characters with some regularity: her close friend George (Georgia) Fayne (Jean Rasey and, later for two episodes, Susan Buckner) and Ned Nickerson (George O. She lives with her father in the fictional River Heights which, by the nature of the cross-over element of the series, cannot be too distant from the Hardy Boys east coast United States home town of Bayport. Nancy Drew is the amateur sleuth - she prefers the term "part time investigator" - daughter of attorney Carson Drew. Other characters which played a major part of the Hardy Boys books, such as Chet Morton (Gary Springer), appeared only briefly in the series. In addition to the Hardy Boys, their stories feature two other characters with some regularity: Aunt Gertrude (Edith Atwater) and a platonic female friend of the boys, Callie Shaw (Lisa Eilbacher), who also does part-time work for their father, Fenton. The two boys live in the fictional city of Bayport (on Barmet Bay) with their famous father, Fenton Hardy (Ed Gilbert), a private detective formerly with the New York Police Department.
Frank is the elder of the two and Joe is a year younger. The Hardy Boys are brother amateur detectives. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were both successful book publishing franchises, owned by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a publishing group which owned many successful children's book lines.