Nancy Drew Blog Party Day 25: Nancy Drew Consulting - Lucas Films

Nancy Drew Consulting:
Lucas Films Edward Stratemeyer
Documentary DVD Extra

Volume 1 of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles released on DVD features the episode Spring Break Adventure in which "Indy and his girlfriend Nancy Stratemeyer, whose father created the Nancy Drew mystery series, visit the fascinating laboratory of inventor Thomas Edison." Of course this is fictional, as Edward Stratemeyer didn't have a daughter named Nancy, however with the release of these Young Indiana DVDs, the filmmakers put together some really nice companion historical documentaries on the various people and places in the episodes.

They put together one on Edward Stratemeyer, "The Mystery of Edward Stratemeyer." Fellow collector and researcher James Keeline and I provided quite a few images for the documentary and are credited. I recommend the DVD, as this is the first documentary put together on Stratemeyer. There are some inaccuracies to it--like the scene where it shows numerous ghosts typing away at typewriters as if Stratemeyer really had a fiction factory going at his disposal like that ;-) It looked interesting for the piece though, but not exactly how it worked. They also interviewed Kathleen Chamberlain and Cynthia Lum, great-grand daughter of Edward Stratemeyer.

I was first contacted about this project through Simon & Schuster--Lucas Films needed some scans of Nancy Drew images and some from the books of text and other info. So they put me in touch with some people who were working on the documentary. This was several years before it actually came out on DVD, so it was a long process to produce this documentary on their end. I provided scans at very high resolution of the Nancy Drew covers you see in the documentary. I received a small fee for my contributions and once it was ready, a DVD of the documentary arrived. I enjoyed it very much!

Jenn:)