The Hardy Boys: Season Three

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Product Description ------------------- Follow the clues to adventure as the Hardy Boys: The Final Season comes to DVD for the first time! Inspired by the hugely popular books teen sensations Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson star as brave super-sleuths who continue to solve spooky mysteries. .com ---- When the first of many Hardy Boys books was published in 1927, nobody could have imagined this version of the amateur crime-fighting duo: feathered hair, bell-bottoms, the action set to a disco beat. But that's what you get in The Hardy Boys: Season Three, a vintage '70s experience. (The show had be with the Hardys rotating with episodes featuring Nancy Drew, but she was quietly erased for this final season.) Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson play Joe and Frank Hardy, whose adventures in crime fighting take a new twist when they're recruited to join their dad as US secret agents. There's a lot of globetrotting involved, although stock-footage establishing s of London, Greece, Hawaii, etc., take the place of actual location shooting. The two-part opening episode sees Joe go after the killers of his fiancée, a trauma that is mostly forgotten by episode three. The stories are serviceable, but frankly the season is most notable for its cascade of incredible '70s style and its wild gimmicks: government-trained killer sharks at a secret California beach? Bring it on! Stevenson and Cassidy (who enjoyed/endured a phase of teenybopper stardom at this time) boast the kind of hair that belongs in a Smithsonian exhibit on what was notable about the 1970s, and if you remember the soft-rock band Bread, be advised that group leader David Gates and the band are featured in another two-part episode that features lots of Bread songs and also Cold War defection espionage ("Bread isn't the only thing on the menu tonight," Stevenson notes at a suspense-filled concert). The season lasted only 10 episodes, and given the shoddy production values and the mostly subpar writing, that is no surprise. Future blockbuster screenwriter Steven E. de Souza worked on the series, and the guest cast is the usual collection of '70s regulars: Nehemiah Persoff, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, June Lockhart, Dana Andrews, Dane Clark, etc. Don't go for quality, but if you have a weakness for Smiley Face camp, this does the job. --Robert Horton