Hardy Boys get mentioned on a weird podcast

[Scott]

I listened to this weird podcast posted on You Tube called "Crybabies"---two women talk with guests about books, movies, TV, music and the like that make them cry. 

Their guest was comedian Andy Kindler. Kindler says he blubbed watching a Pixar movie on an airline flight. "Of course, I cried again when they booked Larry the Cable Guy later for Cars," he quipped. 

One mentioned parents she knew who wouldn't fly on the same plane together because, if it goes down, their children would be left orphans. She thought taking separate flights just doubled the chances that one or the other of them would die. One said that, as a child, she wanted to be an orphan after watching Annie. They discuss something that came up on the other HDA board--that Audrey Hepburn was terribly thin due to wartime deprivation and that this was also why British musician Keith Richards and others from that era were so thin---British wartime rationing continued for years after the war. 

They played the ABC World News Tonight theme because it reminded them of the death of Peter Jennings. One of them is moved at the sound of the stop watch on 60 Minutes but Kindler is aggravated by audible clocks.

They ask Kindler what the first book was that made him cry. He can't remember. "The first book that made me cry...was...probably...was anything sad in---probably something with an animal. Black Beauty? Was Black Beauty sad?"

They discuss how the animal dies in every book about animals.

"I never read sad books when I was a little kid," Kindler says, "and I read the Hardy Boys."

"Oh. Those are sad."

[JD]

Um.  I've never noticed the Hardy Boys books being terribly sad!     [Fanfiction, now; that's another kettle of fish.  THOSE are sad, very often!]

[josie]

Maybe he meant the sadness of their eternal teenagehood... but then, with their life, it's not so bad

[Scott]

She must have just blurted it out without thinking. But one of them thought the stopwatch on 60 Minutes was sad, so maybe she did find The Hardy Boys terribly emotional.

By the way, was Black Beauty sad?

[josie]

It's about a horse, so probably I read it yeeears ago, don't really remember it well enough to be sure.

[Shane]

I've never read Black Beauty, but I've read a fair bit about it. Anna Sewell's goal was to highlight the mistreatment of horses at the time, so it's probably a bit of a downer. I know it ends well, with the horse getting to retire and put his hooves up in a meadow somewhere.

As for the description of the Hardy Boys, maybe she was in deadpan snarker mode and was dissing the books by using the word in its more disparaging sense.

[Scott]

I was thinking I saw Mark Lester in Black Beauty 48 years ago, but it was Run Wild, Run Free . 

There must have been SOMETHING sad in the Hardy Boys. There was the teacher quitting his job in humiliation in Kickoff to Danger. Didn't they help an impoverished shoplifting child in The Short-Wave Mystery?

Oh, and, yes, of course---Iola was horribly murdered. So that would have been the big thing. Sorry---I never read the Casefiles.

[Stormwatcher]

Having read Black Beauty, yes, I found it pretty depressing in some places. Beauty and his stablemate Ginger had some really unkind masters. Beauty got lucky, but there was horse death, due to abuse. : (

But the HBs being sad? That I don't quite get. I never found 'em sad until Casefile 1.

[josie]

Jun 27, 2017 5:54:17 GMT Stormwatcher said:

Having read Black Beauty, yes, I found it pretty depressing in some places. Beauty and his stablemate Ginger had some really unkind masters. Beauty got lucky, but there was horse death, due to abuse. : (

That sounds vaguely familiar... maybe I remember it/was more scarred by it than I thought

Shane: as in "oh, how sad, you read those lame books"? Ouch, but yes - other than Iola, I can't think of anything sad about them either. And once Vanessa comes along she's pretty much forgotten about, so even that isn't as sad as it could have been. In the actual books. As JD said, fanfic on the other hand...

[JD]

I recall that Black Beauty was dreadfully sad because the people were so mean to the horses.  Never, EVER cared for that book; definitely never read it twice!

[PaulinaAnn]

I was reading Black Beauty at school in 5th grade and the teacher came over to make sure I was all right because I was crying during class! Yes, Ginger and Beauty went thru a lot. Poor things.

As for HB being sad? Hmmmm, can't say that rings true. Maybe they were being facetious (and I'm not sure I spelled that right) or just didn't have a clue.

[Rokia]

Casefile 1 was sad but I didn't find any of the rest to be.

[Stormwatcher]

Hm....What about that trilogy sort of thing in the Casefiles where the guys thought Fenton had been killed? I can't remember which 3 books it was, but I do remember feeling pretty sorry for them, and for Laura- and feeling a both a little relieved and a little indignant when it turned out otherwise.

[JD]

I didn't like that whole trilogy!

[Scott]

Thinking of other mysteries---I haven't read either one of them but Murder on the Orient Express and The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side by Agatha Christie had pretty depressing backstories.

Most of the novels of Ross Macdonald dealt with family tragedies, like in The Instant Enemy and Sleeping Beauty. And there was Chester Himes' The Real Cool Killers.

The Instant Enemy starts with the private eye hired to find a teenage girl who ran off with a disturbed youth trying to figure out his past. He had been found as a pre-schooler with the body of his murdered father. A retired detective who had worked on the case at the time continues to investigate. 

In Sleeping Beauty, the private detective tries to find a suicidal young woman who vanished with a bottle of sleeping pills and delves into a decades-old murder. 

In all of these, it's the people in the cases they investigate who suffer, not the detectives themselves. 

I was thinking maybe they should sadden up the Hardy Boys books, but that's probably not a good idea.


There was a Hardy Boys book I found disturbing---I don't remember which one. The boys and their friends go camping. They're going to go spelunking. Frank disappears into a cave, they don't know if he's alive or dead or horribly injured, but they decide to wait until morning to try to rescue him.