Rover Boys - The Legacy of The Rover Boys

The Legacy of The Rover Boys

• While often overshadowed by better-known and longer-running children's book series such as The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift, the Rovers were highly successful and enormously influential. They established the template for all later Stratemeyer Syndicate juvenile series to follow.

• It was Stratemeyer's first series, and one of his favorites. Stratemeyer did all of the writing himself, rather than hiring ghostwriters.

• The Rover Boys were parodied in a 1942 Warner Brothers cartoon as The Dover Boys. The characters from this Rovers parody would go on to appear in an Animaniacs cartoon in the 1990s and in the 1996 film Space Jam.

• In the 1950s a vocal group named after the Rover Boys had a Top 20 hit single with the school-themed "Graduation Day".

• Over a million Rover Boys books were sold and the titles remained in print by Grosset & Dunlap and later Whitman for years after the final title was published. The most commonly encountered are the green and brown cover editions published by Grosset & Dunlap in the 1910s & 1920s.

• Three-quarters of a century after embarking on their final adventures, yellowed copies of the Rover Boys books can be found in American thrift shops and flea markets.