I loved this show, I have the first season the DVD. The first few episodes were definitely grittier and the morality of the Dukes more questionable. That would have made a better series IMO. Instead everything got more cartoony.
But still a good show, until the Coy and Vance showed up.
How did the Duke clan support itself? Maybe Jesse was on social security and Daisy had her waitress job, but how did Bo and Luke pay for those dynamite arrows?
Wasn’t the Duke place actually a working farm? Agriculture was never the FOCUS of the episode, but I seem to remember it being established that Bo & Luke were there to help Jesse work the fields.
Alternately, they got money through the same rip in the space-time continuum that Cooter used to get parts for everyone’s vehicles.
What’s the exact nature of the relationship between Uncle Jesse, Bo, Luke, and Daisy? How are they all related? Does that have anything to do with them being in trouble with the law “since the day they was born”?
I remember reading a satire of the Dukes and they supported the family because Uncle Jesse had the contract to supply Hazzard county with new police cars! With an average of 3 cars being destroyed in each episode, that could be quite profitable.
I always thought that Uncle Jesse had made money from the moonshine days and they were living off that as well as the income from the farm.
So you sat through the last couple seasons? Did you notice they were using models for the General Lee?
A black sheriff?
Were there any nobodies who later became somebodies? “Look, it’s Brad Pitt!”
How did the Dukes make their car fly through the air and still land in one piece? Everyone I knew who tried that stunt, the families couldn’t even have an open casket funeral afterwards.
Mythbusters tried to duplicate it, and I think they got the car to leap that distance and land upright, but in no shape to continue. I may be mis-remembering.
Does Daisy ever show any camel toe?
Achoo: “It worked in Blazing Saddles”
(I bit, yes I did)
The recasting is usually blamed, but I have to think the gay incest didn’t help.
The landing is the problem. If you have a nice angled landing ramp it’s not too hard. I don’t know how much they balanced these cars and how different the suspension and frame is from stock, but these X-Games rally cars really take some punishment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBEExpNfHZY
Untrue. It was Daisy’s sexual relationship with Flash that earned the censor’s ire. And by ire I mean envy. Or possibly regurgitation.
I can cover a few of these questions as I am a bit of an expert.
Jesse Duke had three brothers, each of which died, along with their respective spouses, in the same major car accident. This left young Luke and his brother Judd without parents, the same for their cousin Beauregard (“Bo”), and other cousin, Daisy. Widowed uncle, Jesse, took them under his wing and raised them on his farm. Jesse’s wife, Lavinia, died years earlier.
They went through over 300 Generals Lee. They showed landings from small jumps at the end of big jumps. (And, yes, the miniatures they used toward the end of the series were ridiculous, and I blame them partly for the demise of the show).
The stunt crew developed a harness which was held by bungee cords to the roll cage. This helped prevent spinal cord compression on hard landings. The same stunt crew still works in the business, mostly doing stunts for DukesFest and a few other major events. The main driver for modern jumps is Corey Eubanks, the son of Bob Eubanks. Corey started working for the stunt crew during the show’s production when he turned 18.
Jonathan Frakes appeared in an episode as Boss Hogg’s nephew.
Ernie Hudson appeared in an episode about a year before the world came to know him as the fourth Ghostbuster.
And, for what it’s worth, most strangers to Hazzard were “bad guys,” regardless of skin color. On a rare occasion, a friend or distant relative would show up. One of the most notable was in an episode called “Cooters Confession,” where an old friend of Cooter’s was framed by Boss Hogg and Cooter confessed to the crime to save his friend. That friend was a black guy, [gasp!], and the Dukes helped him out. The show employed a few black actors in the 80s and sometimes portrayed them as good guys. The first few episodes shows more close family friends than just Cooter, one of which was Dobro Dooley, and he was black.
Okay, I swear I saw part of this episode, but nobody seems to remember it. I even asked Guy Waldrup’s grandson [who is hotter than Hell on German night, incidentally] about it when I was in a play with him, but he didn’t remember the episode.
There was an episode I saw a piece of in which the Duke Boys and Roscoe/Boss are chasing a little bitty space alien through Hazzard. Did this really happen (I mean, within the reality of DOH)- was there really a space alien or did it turn out to be a dream or a hoax or whatever?
“Strange Visitor to Hazzard” is the alien episode. It, along with “Robot P. Coltrane,” is a source of embarassment for fans (due to excessive corniness). Yes, the alien was, in the storyline, a REAL alien, with the ability to teleport and everything.
The shows creator was Gy Waldron, by the way.
Why?
Either way his grandson is hot.
So how did the alien plotline resolve? Did he go away or anally probe Lulu or…?
What I think’s really interesting is the first few episodes. It was a much more serious show- more comedy-drama- in those episodes. Boss was a much darker character, not a buffoon but more of a flat-out crimeboss, while Roscoe was still conflicted- an intelligent person and a good sheriff who was bitter over losing his job and having to come to his brother-in-law for work, but beginning to make more money and feeling a little less bad about the gray areas. These were also the episodes actually filmed in Georgia. It would have been interesting to see how long they could have kept this up rather than turning first into an hour long sitcom and then a live action cartoon (in addition to the Saturday morning cartoon).