Does anyone know exactly how many Dodge Chargers were used throughout the filming of “The Dukes of Hazzard.” In some episodes it’s painfully obvious that the car did not survive it’s landing. Yet in the next scene it’s driving along as though nothing happened.
A shitload.
I remember reading somewhere they had a couple of cars that were used for closeups and “normal” driving. The same article told how many cars they had already run through.
I always had a problem with the fact that the tires squeeled a lot on dirt roads…I know it can happen, but not as much as the soundtrack would lead you to believe.
Something else I remember: They would be chasing, say a Chevelle, but when the big crash scene came up, a Nova would be wrecked. This was a common occurance in that show.
I know, stupid show in the first place, but the attention to detail means a lot to me.
It’s a common occurence in every show–why kill an expensive car when you can wreck a cheap one?
Would that be an English shitload or a Metric shitload?
I once had an audience with Pat Proft (sp?), the Executive Producer of ‘The Blues Brothers’. He was asked this same question regarding the number of police cars used in the filming. His response was “surprisingly few.”
Almost every squad car was used in the chase scene. This was (IIRC) shot early in the filming to maximize the number of cars in the scene. This was before computer methods could make 20 cars look like 1000.
Cars that were crashed were fixed overnight (quick body work and paint - some of which was still wet during the next day’s filming) and some were not fixed at all. If the scene was to be shot such that only the passenger’s side would be seen, some cars with dents in the driver’s side were used. Other such tricks were commonplace.
I imagine that the same held true for DoH. A few “complete” cars were reserved while others were fixed quickly. The still set cars (without windshields - recognized by bouncing people in car and revolving scenery in the background) were most likely just the front half on a frame.
*Se non e vero, e ben trovato. *
I heard a while back that they used 7 cars for each jump. Seemed a bit high to me, but what the hell do I know? I actually used to <I>like</I> that show when I was a kid…
Strange, I would have thought it would be cheaper to keep stock footage of all the “jump spots” (after all, hazzard county didn’t seem too big. they always jumped over the same 3 or 4 places) and reuse, recycle, renew.
I can’t imagine really using that many cars over the course of several seasons…
Actually, being a Dukes’ aficionado, it looked like to me that they did occasionally use the same jump footoage for different. I mean how many times would you film the General Lee jumping a hay truck for different shows.
Hey, you’d think that two good ol’ boys who have intimate knowledge of the backroads of Hazzard County would remember that dang bridge is out EVERY week… But anyways…
According to Hank Nesel, who was the transportation coordinator of the show, there were three or four General Lees used for every episode, as well as four or five police cars. Some were “first-unit cars” that were used for close-ups and such, while “second-unit cars” were the ones that did all the flying, bootleg turns, and two-wheel driving.
Cars that could be repaired and reused were, but due to the ahem “flight characteristics” of the 1969 Dodge Charger, they went through a “shitload,” as Mr. White already pointed out, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 or so. It got to the point that in later episodes, the producers used stock footage when they could get away with it, and used miniatures when they couldn’t.
In case you were wondering, modifications for flight included a NASCAR-style fuel cell, gas-charged shocks, and concrete blocks added to the trunk as ballast to counter the weight of the engine, anywhere between 100 and 600lbs. depending on which car they were about to use. (The cars used whatever engine was stock, ranging from the 273 V-8 to the big 440 Magnum.) Without ballast, the cars would have landed nose-first all the time.
Why do I know so much about such a crappy show? Dammit, I need a hobby…
quote:
A shitload.
Arken asked:
Actually it’s an English shitload. One English Shitload equals 36; one Metric Shitload equals 39.
I wouldn’t touch an English Shitload with a 3.048m. pole.
According to ‘The Dukes of Hazzard: The Unoffivial Companion’, there were more than 150 Dodge Chargers used in 145 episodes, and three times as many squad cars and other cars. By the way, they didn’t actually re-use that much footage until the later seasons. In the later seasons, the jumps started to get completely unrealistic (as opposed to slightly unrealistic, I guess) and used scale model General Lees. As to how the jumps were performed, they used weights, most often in the trunk, to keep the cars from landing smack on the front end of the car. John Schneider and Tom Wopat (Bo and Luke) actually did quite a bit of their own driving stunts, like the bootlegger turns, quick stops, and spins. The jumps were done by stuntmen, althought they wanted to try a jump by themselves, but they couldn’t incase something went wrong and they lost the stars of the show.