Just Them Good Ol' Boys

As September starts, we will be inundated with new televisions shows none of which will doubtfully be as great as the benchmark of great television, The Dukes of Hazzard, the latest induction into the Scooter Hall of Fame. In my youth when bed time was promptly 8:00 but was allowed to stay up for one show a week and this was the show that was always chosen. The show definitely stood the test of time because years later, thanks to TNN (now the unwatchable Spike channel) would rerun the show in the afternoon and would routinely become a staple around the dorm in college. And The Dukes of Hazzard Playstation game got its share of playtime during that time. I actually had a roommate who would start up the game to hear the theme song.

As the song goes, the show stared two good ol’ boys, Tom Wopat and John Schneider. Schneider of course would go on to play Clack Kent’s dad while Wopat would go on to, well, guest on Smallville. The cousins in one large family tree also had a female cousin and an Uncle Jesse who fathered none of them. Now I was way too young to understand the greatness of Daisy Duke during the first run of the show but definitely appreciated her in the nineties when the daisy dukes came back in style.

Yeah the Dukes were an entertaining crew but the most entertaining characters were the bad guys led by Boss Hogg, who pretty much owned all of Hazzard County and was always trying to get the Duke boys arrested for something. And that is where Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane came in with his trusty basset hound Flash (full disclosure: I had a stuffed animal Flash that I think is packed away in a box awaiting for me to knock up some chick to give to that offspring). And down the power chain, the dumber the police were as Deputies Enus and Cletus were even more inept than Roscoe.

Filling out the cast were Cooter (greatest nickname ever), the Dukes mechanic and Waylon Jennings who served as the narrator and sang the theme song. But the real star of the show was the General Lee, a 1969 Dodge Charger. It is a good thing I was way too young when the show was on to drive otherwise I would have had tried jumping rivers and other things that were featured on the show. But I did go threw a phase where I refused to use a car door, instead entering and exiting solely threw the window.

Now I could do a whole post on how the Theme to Dukes of Hazzard is the greatest theme song ever (seriously, I won’t hear an argument for anything else), instead I will lent you see for yourself below coutesy of YouTube:



Just for the record, just like many building do not have thirteenth floors, there was never a fifth season of The Dukes of Hazzard. Along those same lines there was never a feature film version featuring a blonde Daisy Duke.

Download the first two season of The Dukes of Hazzard on iTunes.