The secret of eternal youth
Forty-two! Twelve! A hundred and fifty! Three numbers by way of introduction for the uninitiated to The Three Investigators. A hundred and fifty episodes. Twelve million books sold. Forty-two million audio recordings. WHAT THE …???
We are on the case of The Three Investigators, the most successful serial radio program ever broadcast in Germany, where the children's series is listened to mainly by adults and known as Die Drei ???, or The Three Question Marks. But why is that? We thought we’d investigate to commemorate the 150th episode.
Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw (known in Germany as Justus Jonas and Peter Shaw), and Bob Andrews are the heroes of the juvenile book and radio play series. They live in the fictional California town of Rocky Beach somewhere near Los Angeles, where they run an amateur detective agency (“Detectives? Aren’t you a bit young for that?”) out of an old camping trailer in a junkyard. The stories generally involve a mysterious crime, usually sprinkled with a few supernatural elements which invariably turn out to have been be caused by humans once the evildoers have been apprehended.
So far it all makes sense. But how to explain a hundred gold and multiple platinum records? The list of superlatives is long and includes 32 years of radio productions featuring the same actors who still sound like teenagers – and there is no end in sight. Hundreds of thousands of adult fans storm record release parties for “pre-listenings”, gather in trendy bars for radio play nights or flock to “full playback theater” productions featuring staged pantomimes to the original soundtrack. Live tours frequently sell out, with 15,000 listeners attending just one evening show at the Waldbühne amphitheater in Berlin. The German web boasts dozens of trivia-packed fan sites and forums. Popular musicians and bands dedicate songs and whole albums to the detective series, name themselves after individual episodes (“Karpatenhund”, or “Carpathian Dog”), appear as guests on the show (the German hiphop band Fettes Brot) or name Rocky Beach as a favorite holiday destination (Moses P.). The series has spawned two standalone spin-offs (Die drei ??? Kids and Die drei !!!), computer and mobile games and an interactive app that lets listeners play detective, too. There is a Three Investigators Advent calendar with a daily mystery and abbreviated radio plays available online for download every other day. A third full-length feature film is in the pipeline following two hugely successful cinematic releases. No one is ashamed to admit listening to the children's series; on the contrary – the Three Investigators are hip. The whole brouhaha began with a simple German adaptation of an American juvenile detective series that had been canceled years before in the States due to weak sales. What possible explanation could there be behind this phenomenon?
The answer is no mystery, as the Three Investigators have naturally also been the subject of academic research for some time now. One student wrote a master’s thesis packed with interesting factoids about the audience.
The average age of fans surveyed was 30.5 years, and most of them initially heard the series when they were 8.87 years old on average. This also explains why the show is listened to almost exclusively by people in what used to be West Germany – the fans who have remained faithful to the detectives for over 20 years (80% of whom first listened to the mysteries on cassette) were already tuning in before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And talk about devoted: the average fan owns no less than 120 episodes, which they listen to over and over again.
A researcher from Chulalongkorn University in Thailand claims that the sensational and enduring success of the series in Germany, in contrast to its country of origin, correlates with a specifically German perception of America.
He posits that Germans have a tradition of projecting their values onto America as mythical “other”, as evidenced by the extreme popularity of 19th-century author Karl May, whose adventure novels were set in the old American West. This set of uniquely “American” values is a blend of liberalism, individualism, egalitarianism, populism and a kind of antiauthoritarian laissez-faire. The sleuthing trio defies all of that, however, as a hierarchical, well-organized team of overachievers with a precociously elitist, intellectual leader and embedded within a social context of unyielding authority and static norms – family, school, instruments of state control. The three protagonists bear little resemblance to typical American heroes: a pudgy know-it-all, a scaredy-cat animal lover and a studious “records and research” man – or, as their archenemy Skinny Norris dubs them, “Fatso Sherlock Holmes and the two dumb bloodhounds”. The Three Investigators are characters with whom most Americans simply cannot identify. It’s no wonder the series was not a hit in the US. According to the study’s author, “the combination of intellectual, softy, and bookworm is about the worst-possible choice as far as possibilities for commercial success in the U.S. are concerned.”
But intellectual aptitude, timorousness and hardworking discipline are apparently far more compelling to German audiences. Adding to the appeal is the kind of cases the teens solve: word puzzles that require more deductive reasoning and logic than action, combined with classic elements of mystery and suspense. The trio faces every challenge head-on and finds that everything has a logical explanation in the end. Instead of a lone hero defying every convention, the three detectives all have assigned tasks as part of a group, sometimes even calling themselves by their numbers: “First!”, “Second!”, “Third!”. Learning , deductive reasoning, rationality, bravery, structure and team spirit save the day.
That’s quite a combination – and it throws an interesting light on what kinds of values and ideals resonated with German youths in the 1980s. Yet is Germans’ putative passion for knowledge and reason not a bit too facile an explanation? In point of fact, more than 40% of surveyed fans of the series are college grads, and another 18% are currently enrolled students. That certainly might lead one to conclude that there is a certain egghead element among the audience. But listening to children's cassettes as an adult is not something that can have much to do with reason.
Instead, the crime series functions as a sort of emotional fountain of youth – a time machine taking listeners back to the emotional states of childhood. The three eternal teenagers glide through the decades effortlessly and timelessly, outlasting authors, media formats, communication technologies, fashions and generations. The radio actors are all approaching 50 and yet still manage to sound like teenagers. And they let their audience listen like they did when they were young, transporting them back to the halcyon days of their childhood – in Rocky Beach, the world is at it should be. And time stands still in what feels like a never-ending summer vacation.
So when do Three Investigator-heads tune in to the radio plays? More than 40% listen daily or almost daily and two-thirds at least once a week, saying they listen to relax (20%) or to fall asleep (more than half). And a whopping 75% admit to listening to the episodes “too many times to count”. Obviously then it’s not the thrill of a new adventure or solving a new mystery or puzzle that keeps loyal audiences coming back, but instead the allure of the familiar. It’s about the warm, fuzzy feeling of something that never changes, about familiarity, security, and reliability. The Three Investigators give listeners a piece of their childhood back; they give them the past. And the past is everlasting.
