I was really big on the Hardy Boys when I was growing up, maybe 5th grade? I got every book from the library and read them one by one. I owned a lot of them. I’d get them for Christmas and my birthday and I built a collection.
I even saved them since I thought it’d be cool for my future kid to see the stuff I read when I was that age.
Fast forward to now, and they just seem so ridiculously dated. The world has changed so much. I knew the books were set in another time when I was reading them in the early 90s but 30 years later I don’t know who would even want to read these which is kind of weird.
How many fights can you have while getting punched in the solar plexus? The only reason I even know that word is from those books.
It just seems crazy I’ve saved these books for 30 years and then what?
When my kid is 10 I don’t know that he’ll even want to read these.
by baconwrappedapple
20 Comments
I think that’s part of the charm! It’s neat to read stuff from a different era.
They are VERY dated. I read them in the voice of a radio announcer from that era to make the stories even more entertaining.
I remember learning the word ‘jalopy’ from those books. lol
They hold up only slightly better than the Bobbsey Twins and housekeeper Dinah.
It becomes like time travel. Which may or may not appeal, depending on one’s inclination.
I don’t really know the context because I’ve jever read the books. But the solar plexus is a main target in a fist fight.
I loved Hardy Boys as a kid, though. Them and Animorphs got me into reading.
Also, looking up the words I didn’t understand helped with my vocabulary. A few I remember:
Circuitous
Corpse
Dog runs
Jalopy
Careen
Everything about the Mayans and Aztecs I found fascinating after Jungle Pyramid
Sushi
Unconscious
Lieutenant (no idea how it was spelled when I was young)
And likely so so many more.
Huge part of my childhood. It’s just something from a different time. It’s a representation of that era. I don’t think the Maltese Falcon holds up to The Matrix, but it’s still a great movie. Biff, Chet, Iola, Callie, Tony, Aunt Gertrude and the rest were great. Also, for what it’s worth, some more modern Hardy Boys were released in the 80s and 90s.
I loved them as a kid too. Haven’t read them in God knows how long.
It’s amazing how much the world changed so quickly especially with technology from like the 2000s to today. But seemed like nothing much changed before then.
Like a book in the 50s could be relevant in the 80s
The Clue of the Screeching Owl was my favorite. SPOILER! It was a puma all along.
I also loved The Detective’s Handbook.
If it’s any consolation my Dad gave me a bunch and I didn’t want to read them back in the 90s. I was hooked on the sci fi and fantasy my Mom was reading.
It feels like books from certain eras are charming, like back in the early 1900’s, but things from the 50’s, 60’s feel a little to close to our current time but are incredibly cringe compared to today. Not sure when the cutoff is but I’ve watched shows and read books from my childhood (late 70’s) and can barely get through them.
If you were reading these in the 1990s, I’m guessing the books had already been revised and updated more than once. I grew up reading a mix of the original books (pre-1950) that belonged to my older brothers and the ones either revised or published in the 1960s and 1970s. When I ran out of them I turned to my older sister’s Nancy Drew books!
IMO it’s kind of a shame that details were updated and the books “streamlined” (shortened, with some difficult vocabulary removed) to appeal to new generations of readers. No more jalopy for the Hardy’s friends, no more blue roadster for Miss Drew.
I remember as a kid getting some kind of Hardy Boys 2.0 book after I read all of the originals. One of their girlfriends got blown up in a car bomb in the beginning, and I was like “well this is different.”
Are they the blue ones? Coz those are terrible regardless of era.
The brown ones are infinitely better and do things that are way more interesting.
Honestly though, the most interesting aspects of them is that the original author hated them so much he wrote the Hardys as gay and reading them through the lens of “Queer Historical Fiction” is a fascinating exercise. Though probably one better suited to adult academia than entertaining a child.
One of the interesting things about literature is it really does preserve the voice and style of another age.
Some day people will read books from our time and say the same things about how dated they are and how silly they seem.
I was thinking of a different Hardy Boys when I saw the title of this thread lol but yes, I remember seeing that book series, but never read them.
Dated yes, but what is amazing is looking at them now and realizing there’s almost nothing there! How did my imagination come up with all those vivid images I fondly remember from all those books lol? I can still see chubby Chet and vivacious Callie. The Secret Panel and the Broken Arrow were two of my favorites. But I have to say the covers of the little hardback books, mostly from the 60’s were masterpieces of illustration. Ah, youth!
I learned about “titian hair” and the importance of a “fresh frock” from Nancy Drew.
>The Hardy Boys have not aged well
They haven’t aged AT ALL. Seriously, think about this: there were at least 100 books in the series when I read it in the 80s-90s, and in every single one, from first to last, the brothers were 17 and 18. That means they had all of their adventures in the span of a single year, or one every three or four days. Are they the unluckiest teenagers in the world?