Books & Movies

NOOOOOO!!!! What have they done to Nancy Drew????

I just came across the "Nancy Drew Movie" website & it looks like they have changed this classic character into the latest geek-turned-cool-chick a lá "She's All That", "Never Been Kissed", "10 Things I Hate About You" etc.

I remember devouring this series of detective stories voraciously in my pre-teen years. I think I must have gone through the entire series before moving on to the"Hardy Boys" series, which, by the way, was made into a short-lived TV series starring Parker Stevenson (whom I had a teeny weeny crush on) as Frank Hardy & Shaun Cassidy as Joe Hardy. I vaguely remember the Nancy Drew TV series as well, but I don't think they brought it into Singapore. If they did, it didn't make much of an impression.

Targeted at adolescents, the Nancy Drew books were unique because its main character was a girl, with brains (gasp!), had a cute boyfriend and leadership qualities (gasp again!). Given the fact that this character was created in the 1930's, you can see how unusual this was. And the series has endured because of these qualities. She made it cool to be smart.

And now look what they've done. Watching the trailer, it seems like the producers have tried to make it more appealing to the modern-day teenage girls by making Nancy Drew's transformation from geek to cool dudette, the focus of the story. And her best friends George & Bess seem to have disappeared as well.

It's always tricky trying to make a movie from a beloved book or series of books. The Harry Potter series was pretty well done, for the most part, depending on which installment one is talking about (although nothing beats reading the books). And the Lord of the Rings has been done true to the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien's books; I ploughed through all three books consecutively which I would never had done had it not been for the first movie "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring". Although I enjoyed the movies more than the books, I thought that Peter Jackson stuck to the core of the story & brought out its soul when he translated the written word into the amazing visual images we saw in the three movies.

I hope that I will be proven wrong in my preliminary impression of the Nancy Drew movie, although it doesn't look promising from the trailer.

:(