Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: Series Episode
September 11, 1977 was the night. that ABC made history.
The Hardy Boys debuted in 1927 and Nancy Drew in 1930. And despite them sharing a TV show — alternating weeks of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries — they had never crossed over.
Yes, one week, we got Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy looking earnest in turtlenecks, the next Pamela Sue Martin — not yet Fallon Carrington Colby — looking like a million bucks while solving crimes. This was a moment in time and Pamela Sue Martin was already getting frustrated with playing second fiddle to the Cassidy-mania machine. She’d walk before the season was out, replaced by Janet Louise Johnson.
But for two golden hours, we got the ultimate prime-time crossover: The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula.
Wait. I’m already excited about the crossover. And Dracula?
Oh, young Sam.
Paul Williams too.
We open on a dark and stormy night in Transylvania.
Don’t we always?
Fenton Hardy (Ed Gilbert)—a dad who seems to spend 90% of his screen time getting beaten into near comas in foreign lands—is being driven up a treacherous, rocky pass to a subterranean fortress. The taxi driver is complaining about some degenerate American rock singer who has rented out the local castle for a festival. Fenton rolls his eyes, grabs a flashlight and wanders into the dark ruins alone.
Within four minutes — almost a record — Dad Hardy gets the shit kicked out of him by a man in leather boots who has pale skin, a ruffled shirt and a ruby ring. Then he gets thrown down the steps!
Meanwhile, in Paris, Frank (Parker Stevenson) and Joe (Shaun Cassidy) are suited up at the morgue because pop’s been missing for two weeks. Thankfully, the body they’re shown isn’t dad. Somehow, the Hardy Boys are like cops or have some kind of license to detect, because they’re soon shown their father’s hotel room, just in time for Inspector Hans Stavlin (Lorne Greene, not yet Commander Adama) to be caught looking through their pa’s stuff. Also: Lorne Greene, Canadian star and sometime crooner, does a Romanian accent in this.
Stavlin claims Fenton Hardy was acting as Interpol’s main liaison on a massive European art heist ring, tracking millions in stolen museum masterpieces. He tells the boys that he disappeared right after calling in a breakthrough lead from Paris and urges them to go home to Bayport. But the Hardy boys don’t go home. They know that their father had a hiding spot and discover that he was planning on going to Transylvania for a Dracula festival. A Dracula music festival!
Frank and Joe hire a garage band performing on the Paris street corner to be their cover story, hopping into a sweet ’70s van. As they hurtle across Europe, everyone sings “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and I wonder if they had to pay for that.
As they arrive at a hotel for the festival, they learn that their room was already rented out.
Nancy Drew (Pamela Sue Martin) struts in, looking like a goddess come to our mudball, clad in a crisp white cape, matching calf-length skirt and high-knee black boots. Accompanied by sidekick Bess Marvin (Ruth Cox), Nancy thinks the hotel front desk has made a mistake. She was sent by her dad, Carson Drew, to meet a man named Mr. Fredericks to compare notes on the stolen art ring. Yes, Interpol and Nancy Drew are on the same case.
Down in the dining room, Joe is trying to order food, but Nancy swoops in and steals the waiter right out from under his nose. After a hilarious luggage-swapping shuffle orchestrated by an overworked hotel bellman who randomly keeps giving Nazi salutes, everyone ends up in the elevator together.
If you are too young to have watched this on TV when it aired, Nazi humor used to happen. Life was wild.
When Frank tries to grab his suitcase, Nancy doesn’t hesitate to wipe him out. She executes a textbook hip-throw, sending Frank flying onto his back on the carpet. Once they stop grappling and compare passports, the pieces come together: Nancy’s father had a client whose high-end art was snatched during a concert, and all the heist dates match up with the tour schedule of American rock superstar Alison Troy (Paul Williams).
Up at the castle, Alison Troy is holding court and then does an amazing version of “The Hell of It”, straight out of Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise while concert goers gyrate glad in their finest Ben Cooper masls. While Joe takes the stage to belt out a tune—because you physically cannot air an episode featuring Shaun Cassidy without letting him sing—Frank creeps down into the dark, forbidden caverns below the castle. Down in the dungeons, the town mayor and council are getting a tour from the castle caretaker when a council member goes missing. Frank wanders into the subterranean cells, finds the missing man unconscious on the floor and gets locked in from the outside. Nancy saves him and they soon learn that the councilmember is dead, killed by…a vampire!
Or maybe not. Part two starts with Inspector Stavlin rushing into the dungeon after Bess raises the alarm. The bitten man isn’t dead—just drained and unconscious. And Nancy brings the Hardy boys some vital intelligence: Fenton Hardy is alive! A local order of monks found him dumped near the river and have him resting in a stable condition at their monastery. Nancy drives the boys to the retreat for a quiet reunion.
Back in town, the Transylvanian locals are going full Hammer, nailing garlic over their doorways and brandishing pitchforks to protest Alison Troy’s rock festival, claiming the noise is rousing Count Dracula from his eternal slumber.
Meanwhile, Nancy and Frank pair up to search Troy’s hotel suite. There’s some genuine sexual tension as Nancy gushes over finding a master lock-picking kit in Troy’s luggage. “Do you always get like this when you’re excited?” Frank asks. “When I get excited, you’ll know about it,” Nancy retorts with a smirk.
Holy shit, they’re gonna make a book baby.
Later that night, the mayor is attacked inside his own locked office, left unconscious with matching fang marks on his throat. Stavlin immediately assumes temporary control of the town. To make matters creepier, a bat flies through Nancy’s locked hotel window, sending her screaming into Frank’s arms—a moment of pure Gothic romantic melodrama before she snaps back to her tough-girl persona and steps away.
Look, if Nancy Drew ends up wearing a diaphanous nightgown and holding a candelabra, I’m going to just take all the drugs in my house and die, because life won’t get any better.
It can’t.
It won’t.
Stavlin attempts to wrap up the case by arresting Alison Troy, claiming to have found the lockpicks and stolen museum schematics planted in Troy’s car. But Joe points out that he and Bess searched that exact trunk an hour earlier and it was clean. Cornered, Stavlin tries to play up the supernatural angle, suggesting real vampires are loose in Transylvania, before releasing Troy. That night, Frank and Joe head deep into the restricted castle vaults, past a heavy iron door stamped with the Dracula crest. Inside, they find a secret, fully furnished lair complete with a roaring fireplace, an ornate velvet coffin… and a massive pile of priceless stolen oil paintings.
As Frank reaches to open the coffin, a shadow falls over them. Lorne Greene steps out of the gloom, pitching his voice down into a deep, theatrical Dracula purr: “You should not have come here.”
Stavlin is the bad guy! Facing forced retirement from the police force, he used Troy’s tour dates as a smokescreen, robbing museums across Europe all while using the Dracula legend to scare locals away from his castle vault storage. The vampire bites were just a clever trick to keep nosy investigators out of his hair without committing murder.
Before Stavlin can spring a trapdoor beneath the boys, Nancy, Bess, the recovered mayor and a conscious Fenton Hardy burst through the doors with the local police. Thanks for joining us, Fenton, with five minutes left. Stavlin is handcuffed by an officer, but asks to grab his hat from a nearby wardrobe. As he opens the mirrored door, Joe looks over, freezes and realizes that Stavlin has no reflection.
These episodes were directed by Joseph Pevney, who directed 14 episodes of the original Star Trek, as well as The Secret Empire episodes of Cliffhangers!, the TV movie Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women and Man of a Thousand Faces. It was written by Michael Sloan, who created The Equalizer and The Master, and Glen Larson, who made every show you watched in the 80s. Seriously, The Fall Guy, Knight Rider, Magnum PI, Battlestar Galactica, Automan, Manimal and so much more.
And yes, that was Bernie Taupin in this episode.
You can watch this on YouTube.
