Say it isn't so! The Hardy Boys movie with Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise?

I grew up reading the Hardy Boys, used to watch it on TV with Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy when I was little. I bought the Case Files. And now, as they did with The Dukes of Hazzard, Hollywood is planning to ruin a popular in the name of making a fast buck on a spoof film.

Why can't they make a serious film out of it? Give us something that will let people look back on what they loved about the Hardy Boys? Why do they have to create what TMZ (speaking of Stiller's efforts to convince Cruise to star in Hardy Men) describes as: "...But insiders tell TMZ he hasn't given up on recruiting Cruise into a part that would allow the megastar to poke fun at his super-serious Ethan Hunt alter ego...." Why does this have to be done in a capacity that would be poking fun at anything? Why can't it be a movie done on it's own merits as a movie about the teen detectives that so many grew up reading about?

I know there are some, like my brother who was annoyed that I would sit and read a Hardy Boy's novel cover to cover in one night, that will scoff and say that there is nothing serious about the Hardy Boys. There are a lot that will look at it now as adults and browse through a novel and scoff at the writing styles. The novels were written for 10 to 15 year old boys in the 1920's and 30's people, of course the writing style may seem a little off to someone that reads about Pokemon and Power Rangers and whatever else comes out of Japanese marketing campaigns.

I hope that Stiller rethinks his plans to do the movie as a spoof comedy of the Mission Impossible movies. The man does not need to crawl along on Tom Cruises movies coat tails, just give us a decent movie with enough light comedy tossed in to make it enjoyable and let us see what made the series such a hit.

Show us why 11 year old girls scoffed that Nancy Drew could not hold a candle to the Hardy Boys (I mean, come on people, one of her cliff hangers was she was trapped in a large attic and somewhere in there was a black widow spider ohhhhh scary. Joe and Frank were tied up and left with a time bomb ticking away beside them. Now that is a cliffhanger.)

Anyway, I just had to complain about a classic children's detective series being crushed under Hollywood's chasing after the all mighty dollar. If they want to make movies about them shows and books that were a hit they should try to respect what it was that made them a hit, they would get a lot better reception from the people that had originally made the shows great to begin with.

But that's just my humble opinion.


::pondering going off and starting up a Hardy Boys fan fiction site to counterbalance the disgrace that Hollywood is about to unleash on the world::: Wonder what the legal ramifications on that are -- they ain't dropped into public domain have they? Is that how Stiller is able to do this to them? .... 1927 to 2007... 80 years... hmmm... Hey Grosset & Dunlap! can I write in that setting? ::pleading look::