Bonita Granville played Nancy Drew in the 1930s.

Shaun Cassidy, Pamela Sue Martin and Parker Stevenson were the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew of the 1970s.

So, how have Nancy Drew’s cinematic incarnations (and the actresses involved) fared over the years? Let’s investigate further.

Bonita Granville played Nancy in the ’30s, Pamela Sue Martin and Janet Louise Johnson in the ’70s, Tracy Ryan in the ’90s, Maggie Lawson and Emma Roberts in the new millennium.

Granville was already a busy young performer when she made four Nancy Drew films in 1938 and ’39. They’ve been fodder for Turner Classic Movies and budget DVDs, and they’ll soon be released as a DVD compilation, “The Original Nancy Drew Movie Mystery Collection.”

Granville, who died in 1988, is a lot of fun to watch, as long as you don’t mind a Nancy who’s really, really high-strung.

It was the Depression, after all. Someone had to be zipping around in a snazzy roadster (one of the period elements that gets a nod in the new film), talking a mile a minute, biding her time until she was old enough to tackle something like the Case of the Rich Bachelor — precisely what Granville did in real life, in fact, marrying an oil millionaire in the late ’40s. She acted regularly, too, into the ’50s, and also established herself as a TV producer, bringing “Lassie” to the airwaves.

“I found the [Granville] films really entertaining,” said Andrew Fleming, director of the new “Nancy Drew.” “I liked the fact that there was this lightheartedness to them and this kind of pace. They made some choices in those that surprised me.”

In 1977 and ’78, TV viewers had Martin (well into in her 20s then) sleuthing her way through ABC’s “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries,” which — in the era of sexual liberation — imbued Nancy with quite a sex-kitten vibe.

She fits in perfectly with the powerful, intriguing TV beauties of the day — “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Bionic Woman,” “Wonder Woman” — saving the world with nary a hair out of place.

Season 1 is available on DVD, and Season 2 was released Tuesday. (The show’s format devoted some episodes to the Boys — Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson — some to Nancy, and some to the three of them adventuring together.) Martin went on to play Fallon on “Dynasty” in the ’80s, and then — uh, well — “Soupernatural,” a drama about what happens in a small-town newsroom when it is rumored that the Messiah is serving soup at a local church festival.

There’s actually another thrice-named actress who got a shot at the Nancy Drew role on the ’70s series: Janet Louise Johnson replaced Martin during the final season, appearing on four episodes before the show went off the air in early 1979.

The actress, who was still in her teens when she got the job, swears that she used her middle name for Screen Actors Guild membership reasons (to differentiate herself from another Janet Johnson) — and not because producers were hoping that viewers wouldn’t notice the switcheroo with Pamela Sue Martin. Johnson came from a modeling background, and despite her brief stint on the series, “it gave me confidence to pursue acting,” she said. (She later changed her name to Janet Julian.)

Julian describes her subsequent career as “mostly B movies,” and she says she gave up the business 11 years ago to raise a family. Professional high points, she says, include the 1990 film “King of New York” with Christopher Walken, and the early-’90s cable series “Swamp Thing” — which she considers her “best work.”

Nancy Drew returned to television in 1995 for 13 episodes of a syndicated Canadian series featuring an actress, Tracy Ryan, who has scarcely been heard from since.

ABC took another stab at the character in 2002, with Maggie Lawson as Nancy in a two-hour TV movie/pilot episode that failed to take off. Lawson’s current gig is the USA Network series “Psych.”
How will Emma Roberts fare after “Nancy Drew” hits theaters today? Can the character ever achieve the same popularity on the screen as she has on the page? (The books’ estimated sales are a staggering 200 million copies.)
The director Fleming says that he’s aimed for a close connection to Nancy’s literary roots: “I really tried to use the books as inspirations, because I think that’s what people have latched onto.”