The other day, inspired by the recent episode of MY Name Is Earl, I downloaded Jerry Reed’s East Bound and Down (the theme song from Smokey and the Bandit) to my iPod.
Despite nearly getting three speeding tickets since then, I have enjoyed the nostalgia.
But it raises a question about the film: why were they bootlegging beer? I don’t remember much about the film other than the car and Jakcie Gleason saying “Junior…when I get you home…I’m gonna slap yo’ mama!”
But a line from the song says “The boys are thirsty in Atlanta and there’s beer in Texarkana…”
So the film was about the bootlegging of beer from Texas to Georgia.
But why would they bootleg beer? Was it illegal in Georgia at the time? If so, was there none available closer?
IIRC, they were illegally transporting Coors from West of the Mississippi to East of the Mississippi. Back in the day, Coors was not available in the East. Why it wasn’t available I’m not sure, but it wasn’t.
Apparently when the movie was made (the '70s), Coors beer in particular was illegal to be exported to the East Coast. That’s why it was a big deal that Bandit and Snowman were bringing the Coors back to Atlanta. I don’t have a cite, but my friend Cowboy Matt, the #1 Burt Reynolds fan, said he had looked into it at one point.
Frankly, I’ve had Coors beer, and we on the East Coast were better off without it.
It is covered in the movie… but IIRC, the primary point of it was the bet that they could not get there and back in X hours (18 I think)… the bootlegging part was because the city they originated in was dry.
That’s because you’re too young to understand the mystique of Coors.
Back in the days of S&TB, Coors was unpasteurized. That meant it had to be shipped cold, and couldn’t be sent very far. Distribution varied, but it was always west of the Mississippi (in Missouri, you could get it in Kansas City, but not St. Louis).
Of course, anyplace where Coors wasn’t available, there grew a great legend about what a great beer it was. Fraternity brothers would be instructed to bring back whatever they could stuff in their luggage when they came home from break. Traveling salesmen would carry the stuff back from Godforsaken small towns in western Kansas.
Given that 99+ percent of people outside of Colorado had probably never tasted Coors, a good scriptwriter could easily build a story on the efforts to haul it in from hudreds of miles away before the load had a chance to spoil.
At the time, Coors had a certain cachet anywhere you couldn’t buy it. I remember carrying cases of it back to Alaska from California in the 70s and selling them for vastly inflated prices. “Cowboy Kool-Aid” was cool, once upon a time.
As I recall the Coors company conducted a very successful ad campaign that was designed to do an end run around the competition of the bigger brewing companies. They ran a series of ads depicting their product as superior in quality and limited in production, ie: rocky mountain spring water, Colorado Kool Aid, rocky mountain perfume. When the time was right they invested in expansion into a national market and, for a short time, their sales skyrocketed. I think internal management squables caused the company to lose much of this advantage.
It wasn’t so much product placement for Coors as a unique situation presented by a product. “Harold & Kumar go to White Castle” leverages a similar situation.
The truck was Bandit’s, but he needed someone to drive it while he ran interference in the 1977 Pontiac (full name) Firebird Trans Am. The T/A was definitely product placement – there were a lot of Firebirds sold because of this movie. I bought one myself, just like this one.
Bandit’s job was to keep the police busy chasing him, while the truck sped toward the ultimate goal. He made good use of his reputation as a rake and scofflaw, relying on his trusty CB radio to set up traps for the police.
The national speed limit of 55mph was in effect at this time, and made all the difference. Nowadays the time challenge present in the movie doesn’t exist – you can get on the freeway and book along at 70/75, no problem.
Thanks for asking this one, middleman! I’ve long been curious about exactly what the deal was. [slight hijack]As a fan of country music, some songs from this era mystify me. What was the deal with Trucker culture, CB radios, and from whence sprang the animosity against law enforcement that seems to underlay it all?[/hijack]
Bingo! At Florida State in the early 70’s, we had a bunch of guys in the dorm drive to Mexico and back one weekend. The goal: (1) switchblades in Mexico, (2) Coors in Texas.
Trucker culture is one of the mainstays of Country music, or it was back then (along with Mama, prison, marriage problems and getting drunk). Remember all those 50,000-watt radio stations with the all-night show dedicated to truckers?
WBAP and KVOO come to immediate mind.
CB radios were selling like wild to truckers in the mid-70’s. Note the lingo used in the film.
The animosity against law enforcement? Look at some of the songs of the day…Tom T Hall’s "A Week in a Country Jail," or Kenny Price’s “High Sheriff of Boone County.” The phrase “You’re in a heap of trouble, boy” takes on new meaning. I don’t believe it was actual animosity against law enforcement, but disrespect of self-important authority figures.
I distinctly remember Coors being unavailable in Georgia when I was a kid. Not that I was drinking at the time (“No drinking until you’re thirteen,” Dad told us), but we took a family trip to Oregon in the late '70s and my father and uncle made a big deal about being able to get Coors while we were out there.
Back in 1974 I was working in a grocery store here in Topeka. Two women came in and asked for help carrying out their purchase, 21 cases of Coors. One said she owned a tavern in St. Louis and this was how she was getting the Coors she couldn’t buy in Missouri.
All that beer was loaded into a* Volkswagen*, with the two women. It’s a drive I wouldn’t have wanted to make!
It’s funny how your parents can surprise you. Looking to try a recipe I found online (beer can chicken) I bought a six-pack of Coors as it was on sale. I put it outside the fridge and was promptly told by my mother that Coors has to be kept cold at all times. (I doubt that this is true now.) Anyway, it turns out that she knew that because when she was going to the University of Maryland she knew someone from Colorado and he’d come back from every trip home having loaded his car full of coolers of Coors which he kept cold the whole drive back to Maryland. I didn’t know what I found harder to believe–that my mother knew this or that Coors used to not be distributed nationwide.
