If you read a Hardy Boys mystery as a kid....

.....you probably enjoyed all the aberrant characters, swarthy villains and the like. The first book I ever read was a Hardy Boys mystery given to me by grandmother, who was always looking for something new. But if your kids read one of these books it wasn’t the same book. What happened?

Well apparently many of these old kids books have been rewritten to be politically correct....to be milk toast in effect. 

‘ He and his fellow ghostwriters were equal-opportunity xenophobes: Cops were usually Irish, Italians ran fruit stands, and Scots swept floors. Another revision deleted the comment of a black character who speaks in an odd dialect while resting his feet on a train seat: “Ah pays mah fare, an’ Ah puts mah shoes where Ah please,” he says.

But as part of the revisions, the books were shortened considerably and many literary allusions and picturesque descriptions were removed. Also new: Authority figures, especially policemen, were portrayed as people to be respected and admired at all times. This is particularly evident in the case of Hardy Boys characters Collig and Smuff, bumbling detectives who in the original were routinely outwitted by Frank and Joe when it came to solving cases. In the revisions, the cops were respectable, helpful and competent, a change that rattled McFarlane, who was particularly proud of the silly Keystone Kops-like figures he created. He believed that most of his readers enjoyed irreverence and humor.’

....

Give it another 50 years and Covid won’t matter, we will all have died of boredom.

White Fang  was my favorite as a kid.....after which I wanted a Siberian Husky. No doubt today the criminal Jim Hall who White Fang kills to prevent a murder, was just misunderstood.

I read all of the Hardy Boys mysteries.....and Nancy Drew. We watched the tv series too. 

Yes indeed and Biggles, Greyfriars (Billy Bunter) Treasure Island and Kidn apped...beautiful times when the world was sane.

If most of our posters read the Hardy Boys as a kid then they were already reading a sanitized version.

According to the original article (which Moffie plagiarized and presented as his own without quoting his sources), the Hardy Boys and many other childrens series have been rewritten to remove racial and ethnic stereotypes since 1959 . . . so it's probably only ancient old fossils like Moffie and ou Maaik who are old enough to have read the originals, the rest of us would have read versions that had already been re-written.

Moffie presents this as if it's the latest example of cancel culture but the truth is ghost writer Frank McFarlane complained about these changes in a 1973 interview, nearly 50 years ago. Not sure why the pompous old coffin dodger has taken 48 years to complain about the Hardy Boys being re-written . . . perhaps he's only recently advanced to the level of Hardy Boys books . . . would explain a lot.

PS  As a kid I much preferred the Adventure books by Willard Price which wouldn't require much editing today as they were about nature and wildlife. The only things that might need editing are animals that would have gone extinct since then and places that no longer contain wildlife thanks to pro-fracking climate deniers like Moffie and his hero Bozo who couldn't give a flying fig leaf about nature or wildlife preservation.

I read Willard Price too, Rooinek  

Plagiarized.......well that’s a first. The first time a plagiarized communication is in quotes......waaaaaaaahaha, what a moron. Rooipeepie the  reason I put this in quotes is because it was somebody else’s work....ie not plagiarized. 

And here’s another bit of logic for you to ponder. If I recently, at 73, was introduced to the Hardy Boys books, that would make my grandmother, who I referenced above as giving me my first Hardy Boys book, about 120 years old. 

I always told you numbers aren’t your thing avoid them and avoid the egg dripping down you bloated Welsh face,

"PS  As a kid I much preferred the Adventure books by Willard Price"

Sh!t, something in common with Rudeneck...I'll have to re-read them to make sure they're still OK...before giving them to my kids to read.

I read a few Afrikaans translations of the Hardyboys in the 80's, but if Dr Seuss and Tintin are offensive today, I suppose nothing is safe, especially not Afrikaans books...Die Uile en Joof van Doring kloof  ook daarmee heen!

(I know it's Doringspruit)