[dl] DVDs
With Nancy Drew's latest adventures
headed to DVD, discover how much you know about our greatest
teenage crime-scene investigator. By Bryan Reesman
Nancy Drew is a pretty ordinary teenager,
except that in her spare time she solves crimes. That means she's
been threatened, tied up, knocked unconscious, poisoned with gas,
pursued by a ferocious canine, and attacked by an erratic robot -
among other things. So it makes sense that Emma Roberts was cast as
the tremendously talented teenage sleuth in Nancy Drew, a
modern, big-screen adaptation that is now out on DVD. After all,
who's more "ordinary" than the look-alike niece of America's
sweetheart, Julia Roberts? To prepare you for the DVD's release, we
share six things you don't know about Nancy Drew.
1The new Nancy
Drew and the old Nancy Drew have plenty in common. Though
Nancy Drew has popped up on TV in recent years, the last time the
character headlined her own feature fi lm was in the 1930s. Back
then, an actress named Bonita Granville starred in a series of
Nancy Drew movies. Like Emma Roberts, whose dad is actor Eric
Roberts, Bonita Granville was the daughter of a fi lm actor -
Bernard "Bunny" Granville. And also like Emma Roberts, who made her
big-screen debut at age nine, Bonita Granville made her fi rst fi
lm at age nine. Both were in pretty good company. Roberts starred
with Johnny Depp in Blow, and Granville was in
Westward Passage with Laurence Olivier.
2
There is one case that even Nancy Drew can't solve: the
case of the missing creator. Nancy Drew's author, Carolyn
Keene, was not quite J.K. Rowling, but she was plenty popular back
in her day. Keene received and answered a plethora of fan mail,
according to Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew
and the Women Who Created Her. Rehak also says Keene was so
well known that she was asked to join the Authors Guild and was
listed by Who's Who in America. Thing is, she wasn't real.
The original installments in the Nancy Drew book series were
written and edited by various employees of the Stratemeyer
Syndicate. Most of the books were penned by Mildred Wirt Benson and
Harriet Stratemeyer, the daughter of the syndicate's founder,
Edward Stratemeyer. But the two battled over who should get credit
for Nancy's development. "Both Harriet and Mildred each honestly
felt that she had made the character the success that she was,"
Rehak says. "They had a long-standing disagreement, which their
families have continued throughthe present day, about who was
really responsible for the creation of this character."
3
Nancy Drew's real creator did not have a daughter who dated
Indiana Jones. Because, you see, Indiana Jones is not
real. In an episode of the TV series The Young Indiana
Jones Chronicles, young Indy visited Thomas Edison's lab with
his girlfriend - Nancy Stratemeyer. "People always said that she
was one of Edward Stratemeyer's daughters or one of his daughter's
daughters," Rehak says. "But she was not real." So, you had a
fictional character dating the fictitious daughter of the real-life
creator of a fictional character. Go figure.
4
She's not Nancy Drew everywhere. The original
proposal for Nancy Drew conjured up a series of generally
alliterative appellations for her: Stella Strong, Helen Hale, and
Diana Dare, among them. Thankfully, her creators abandoned those
names. But overseas, Nancy isn't Nancy. In France, she's Alice Roy.
In Finland, Paula Drew, and in Sweden, Kitty Drew. In Germany,
Susanne Langen. Russia comes the closest: There, she's Nensi
Dru.
5 TV
cut into Nancy's word count. The original printings of the
first 34 Nancy Drew books were each 25 chapters long. Later
printings, toward the end of the 1950s, had only 20 chapters. "That
started because television had really come up as a competitor to
these books," Rehak says. "They were trying to gear them toward the
shortened attention span of kids." The revisions varied
dramatically from book to book. "Some were rewritten to take out
politically incorrect things and dated language. Some of them had
their entire plots rewritten, and other books just had small things
changed or cut down." Not surprisingly, these days the early
printings can fetch a generous sum on eBay.
6
She had girl power before it was cool. Nancy Drew
"was pioneering when the books started coming out in the '30s,"
Rehak says. "For a lot of women who grew up in the '40s and '50s,
she was the only female character they had to show them that they
could get what they wanted and be smart and have adventures."
Detective
Stories
Can you tell the real Nancy
Drew titles from the ones we made
up? |
|
1.
The Secret of the
Looking Glass
2.
The Secret at
Shadow Ranch
3. The Mystery
of Crocodile Island
4. The Mystery of
the Locke
5.
The Sign of the
Twisted Candles
6.
The Sign of
the Black Smoke
|
|
7. The Clue of the Countdown Timer
8. The Clue of the Dancing Puppet
ANSWERS:
Nancy Drew books: 2, 3, 5, 8.
Things we made up, using stuff from ABC’s Lost: 1. The Looking Glass is the underwater jamming station where Charlie died; 4. As in John Locke; 6. The monster in the jungle is made of black smoke — or something; 7. The countdown timer was inside the hatch. |