for all later Stratemeyer Syndicate series. 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 Merrie Melodies cartoon as The Dover Boys, subtitled "The Rivals of Roquefort Hall" (as opposed to Colby, both terms being cheeses). The cartoon was directed by Chuck Jones. The characters from this Rovers parody would later appear in two episodes of Animaniacs (Frontier Slappy and Magic Time) and its 1999 series finale Wakko's Wish, as well as the 1996 movie Space Jam. In the 1951 detective novel The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald, a police lieutenant accuses protagonist Lew Archer of running “a murder investigation as a one-man show.” He mocks Archer by asking if he has been “[r]eading The Rover Boys at Hollywood and Vine.” In the 1952 movie Macao starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, the Mitchum character, Nick Cochran asks “are the Rover Boys still here” referring to 2 thugs sent to find him. The 18th episode of the first season (1953) of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is titled "Rover Boys" and features a narrative driven by a disagreement between Ozzie and his neighbor Thorny concerning the plot of a Rover Boys story. In the 1955 MGM musical It's Always Fair Weather, there are two references to The Rover Boys. The first is in the beginning of the movie when a bartender exclaims, "Well if it isn't the Rover Boys" as the three main characters walk into his bar. The second is toward the end of the movie. While trying to evade thugs, the character named Ted borrows a jacket which has "The Rover Boys" embroidered on the back. In 1956 a Canadian vocal group named after the Rover Boys had a Top 20 single with the school-themed "Graduation Day". The names Tom, Sam, and Dick Rover are mentioned by Scout in Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird in reference to a game of pretend in which Dill, Jem, and Scout all had good parts. In a 1965 episode of I Spy called "Carry Me Back To Old Tsing-Tao", Scotty referred to the three money-hungry sons-in-law of an aged Chinese criminal mastermind as "The Rover Boys" by saying, "...Now can the Rover Boys be far behind?" The Rover Boys books were mentioned in the