For such a piss-ant little community, that county sure got some big acts to play in their redneck bar on a fairly consistent basis. They’d usually explain it thusly, Merle Haggard’s tour bus was passing through town. They were going 55 miles per hour. A law was passed changing the speed limit to 54 miles an hour, just for today. They had the option of spending 30 days in jail, or doing community service by perfoming at the Boar’s Nest. :dubious:
And what about the inherent strangeness of The Balladeer? I’ve always had a theory that the show takes place 500 years in the future and this guy is passing down these mythical stories to impressionable space children.
Well, I was pretty young. I didn’t catch all the plot points as easily as I would now.
Also, my mom prohibited us from watching the “Dukes of Hazzard” at home. (“It’s too stupid!”) So, I only ever saw it at other people’s places. I didn’t catch every episode.
These guys drove around with the Confederate flag painted on their car. Yet they weren’t, as far as I recall, racists or KKK sympathisers.
For me, this flag became, based on this show, a symbol some folks used to express their Independent streak, their “Dont tread on me” attitude, and a “anti-police-state-authority” attitude all rolled into one.
When the big flak about the Confederate flag issue (South Carolina’s flag, for instance), my first knee jerk thought was “what’s the big deal?”
It took a few minutes to realise that some folks did indeed see this flag differently.
In a couple of episodes, it’s clearly stated that Bo & Luke had been busted for running moonshine, and were on parole under Uncle Jesse’s control. That’s one reason the Roscoe was always after them - if he caught them doing something even slightly illegal, they’d have violated their parole and gone back to the slammer.
I think the episode you’re referring to had a race between Uncle Jesse and some other oldtimer (I want to say Boss Hogg, but that doesn’t make any sense) to prove who the best moonshine runner. Since Jesse couldn’t run moonshine under the terms of the parole, they each had 10 jugs of water in their car, not moonshine. Part of the race was through Chickasaw county, so Boss Hogg replaced Jesse’s water with actual moonshine, so the aforementioned Sheriff Little would bust him and put the boys back in prison.
This is also why they couldn’t leave the county or carry firearms. (I guess dynamite tipped arrows don’t count as firearms.)
Its also woth noting that Bo had raced stock car in the General Lee. Thats why the doors were welded shut and had 01 on them. This is interesting because in the early days of stock car racing, many of the drivers Junior Johnson most notably ran moonshine during the week, and earned extra cash racing their same cars on the weekend.
I seem to recall that Uncle Jesse took some sort of a vow to never make moonshine again, and so Boss Hogg was always trying to get hold of his special secret recipe for moonshine, since it was the best in the state or something. Naturally, Uncle Jesse would never dream of burning his secret family recipe, nor would he ever go back on his word.
To save money, in the last season (possibly last two seasons) the producers started using models for some of the stunts, and the stunts got more highly improbable (the General jumping through giant pipes suspended by cranes and what not) to make up for the fact it was so obviously models.
I’m surprised that with all of the ridiculous suits against TV and movie producers since this show went off the air (one that comes to mind is the family that filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Beavis & Butthead blaming it on their kids burning to death) that this show didn’t get sued constantly for kids jumping cars. I wonder if people were more responsible for their kids’ actions then or if it just didn’t occur to them.
I never did see the Burt Reynolds/Willie Nelson/Jessica Simpson movie version. Was it as bad as its reputation? (It got blistering reviews at the time, though I loved Burt Reynolds as Chubby on My Name is Earl and that’s essentially a Boss Hogg-2007 character [“So come on down to Club Chubby, where sweatpants are welcome and truckers shower for free!”]).
We watched the Dukes, and the Enos spinoff, regularly.