The Hardy Boys are back and ready to solve crimes
Long a staple in books and on TV, Hardy Boys adventures revamped for modern audience
The Hardy Boys Debuts March 5, Ytv/stack TV
Hardy boys, indeed.
Since the first adventure of small-town brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, The Tower Treasure, published in 1927, The Hardy Boys have entertained young readers with more than 50 novels of teenage mystery and crime-solving. And those original novels, first updated and revamped in the late 1950s and continuously in print for almost a century, have been translated into 25 languages, selling on average a million copies each year.
And they in turn have sparked several other print updates and spinoffs, not to mention several TV shows and even video games. It seems every few generations there's the need for a new take on The Hardy Boys.
The latest is a new all-canadian production from Corus Entertainment, 13 one-hour live-action TV episodes airing in Canada on YTV, streaming on Stacktv and in the U.S. on Hulu. The series stars Rohan Campbell and Alexander Elliot as Frank and Joe, respectively, and James Tupper as their father, Fenton Hardy.
The original Hardy Boys novels were the brainchild of U.S. writer Edward Stratemeyer, who established a literary empire in which he created characters and provided outlines, but farmed out the completion to various ghostwriters. One of these ghostwriters, Leslie Mcfarlane, a Canadian journalist from the small northern Ontario town of Haileybury, wrote 19 of the first 25 Hardy Boys novels — all of which appeared, regardless of who wrote them, under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon. (The Stratemeyer Syndicate was prolific, its stable of writers also producing stories of the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, Nancy Drew and Tom Swift, among others.)
So in a video call with the pandemic-scattered cast (Elliot in Ontario, Campbell in Vancouver and Tupper in Los Angeles), it seems a natural starting point to ask if they had read or even heard of the books. Tupper, being the eldest, had read the books as a boy and is now reading them to his young son.
“I did, for sure,” Campbell says. “We were just talking about book fairs — the Scholastic book fair. That's where I found The Hardy Boys when I was younger ... And obviously when this came along, I was like mindblown that I would even get the chance to touch it, let alone be Frank Hardy. It's crazy.”
“I'm a different generation,” says Elliot. “I'm too young to have read these growing up. I hadn't known about them until after I got the role. But once I got the role, I really kind of dove deep into the legacy of these books.”
“But they needed to reboot this series,” says Tupper. “No one was going to go back and watch Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson,” he says, referencing the 1977-79 TV series. “They needed a reboot and they needed to make it relevant.”
The new series, set in the early 1980s (pre-cellphones, pre-internet, information to be found in books in the library) was shot in Toronto, Hamilton and a few smaller Ontario towns, all filling in for the fictional U.S. town of Bridgeport. (In the original books, it's Bayport.) The boys and their father move to the smaller town from the larger Dixon City (a nice shout-out to the pen name) to be closer to their grandmother Gloria — played by Linda Thorson, who once had her own role in an adventure series, replacing Diana Rigg in the 1960s British spy series The Avengers.
There, in typical Hardy Boys fashion, they stumble upon a mystery that of course conceals hidden secrets and danger. As in the books, Scooby-doo-like, they have a handful of friends to help them on the case.
But as befits an update, girls play a much more active role in the crime-solving along with the boys.
One significant change in the latest reboot is the age difference between the brothers. In the originals, Frank and Joe are 16 and 15, later 17 and 16. In this version, Frank is 16 but Joe is only 13. And that changes the dynamic.
“What's really important, and what we really focused on,” Elliot says, “was the relationship between the brothers and building kind of a contrast there.” Frank “is kind of reserved, problem-solving, analytical,” whereas Joe “is a lot more spunky, kind of rowdy, funny and a lot more lighthearted.
“So they're not so similar anymore,” Elliot says, “but they need each other just as much. And I feel that the contrast brings more light to the fact that they 're real people, you know? They are these detectives, but Joe has to worry about doing his homework on time, and Frank has a social life.”
“It also serves the long-format storytelling, in my opinion,” Campbell says. “There's a certain friction between the boys, and there are differences of personality. And I think we tugged at a few loose strings in the relationship from the books. I think people will understand why it was done. This is an origin story, right?”
“I think (the creators and writers) improved it,” Tupper says. “Everything in this series is quite intentional. They talked about the time period, they talked about the difference in ages. The needs of a teenager are quite different than the needs of a young boy.
“And for me, when I was a kid reading these,” Tupper says, “the idea was that they were teaching kids now to be courageous, how to face their fears and use their intelligence to overcome odds and solve the mystery. And I feel they accomplished that.”
What's really important, and what we really focused on, was the relationship between the brothers and building kind of a contrast there.