your memories
The Dukes of Hazzard and their orange Dodge Charger first crashed onto our screens 45 years ago
In the fictional town of Hazzard, located somewhere in Georgia, the bad guys were a law unto themselves. The locals couldn’t trust their sheriff, so they went to a family of good guys instead. These were the Dukes: two fun ‐loving, fast-driving, hillbilly kids and their beautiful cousin, who lived on a farm with their Uncle Jesse. Their main pleasure was baiting bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (James Best) and corrupt county commissioner Boss Hogg (Sorrell Booke).
Another key ingredient was car ‐t o‐car, driver-to-driver battles on the dusty country back roads. There were plenty of wheel-spinning take ‐offs, screeching spins and stops. Not only could the Dukes’ orange Dodge Charger wheel-spin clean across a river in slow motion, it often went airborne. But it was an unrealistic world where nobody ever got hurt – or had to stop for petrol! Despite one critic predicting the series would be cancelled after its first commercial break, it ran for seven seasons.
Writer Gy Waldron had scripted a successful movie, Moonrunners, released in 1975. This tale of a wily bootlegging family dodging the law was inspired by characters from his Kentucky childhood. A producer at Warner Bros Television asked him to write a TV pilot with the same flavour, but as a comedy, and The Dukes of Hazzard was born.
John Schneider was cast as Bo Duke, Hazzard County’s best driver. Schneider, who’d been performing since he was eight, was only 18 when his agent sent him to audition. He pretended to be a 24-year-old southern boy, only confessing he was born and bred in New York when they shot the third episode.
Half of the fan mail for the show was addressed to the General Lee
STRANGE TIMES
By the seventh season, the show finally became more experimental. In one episode, Boss Hogg replaces Sheriff Rosco with a robot. In another, a flying saucer lands in local Skunk Hollow, and the Dukes make friends with its pint-sized alien pilot. But such plotlines could also be seen as increasingly desperate, and the show was finally cancelled in spring 1985. Most of the cast reassembled in 1997 for a TV movie, The Dukes of Hazzard Reunion! This time there were budget restrictions. The Dukes’ car couldn’t jump and none of the cars used for it could be damaged. It still won high enough ratings for CBS executives to give a Dukes-style “Yeee-hah!” and commission a second sequel: Hazzard in Hollywood in 2000.
Tom Wopat was a late casting as th
