It’s 1978, and a stuntman launches a 1969 Dodge Charger up a ramp and over a police car for a scene in a network TV show. Not surprisingly, the car is totaled. But the 82-foot-long, 16-foot-high jump makes for a memorable moment in television history. The vehicle is the General Lee, perhaps one of television’s most famous cars, and the show is “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
The CBS-network television series would run from 1979 through 1985, and feature about 329 General Lees, a car as famous as the show’s Daisy Dukes, the name of the short, tight cut-off jeans worn by Catherine Bach in her role as Daisy Duke.
Dodge creates an icon
The Dodge Charger debuted in 1966 as a sportier, two-door version of the midsize Dodge Coronet. The hardtop coupe featured a fastback roofline, hidden headlamps and an interior sporting buckets seats and a center console.
Dodge’s long-lived 230-horsepower 5.2-liter V-8 was standard, but buyers could opt for a 265-hp 5.9-liter V-8, 325-hp 6.3-liter V-8 with dual exhausts, or a 425-hp 7.0-liter Hemi V-8 with dual four-barrel carburetors and dual exhausts. All engines came with a three-speed manual transmission. A 4-speed manual or 3-speed TorqueFlite automatic were optional.
The Charger didn’t change again until 1968, when it was redesigned along with Coronet as its sportier sibling. Now boasting rounded sheetmetal below the car’s beltline, the new “fuselage” styling would be used on all Chrysler Corporation models well into the 1970s. For the Charger, it lent the car a simpler look, one that worked well with its coke bottle beltline. It maintained its trademark hidden headlamps, but now boasted a flying buttress roofline, replacing, yet recalling, the previous model’s ungainly fastback.
Sales improved dramatically, reaching 96,100 units, far more than 1967’s total of 15,788. Engine choices remained the same, except for the addition of a 375-hp 7.2-liter Magnum V-8. Power steering, power brakes, power door locks, heavy duty differential, cruise control, air conditioning, tilt/telescope steering wheel, dual exhaust, an AM radio, tachometer, and a vinyl roof were among the options.
The only significant alteration to the Charger for 1969 was the inclusion of the Charger Daytona, a vehicle designed to steal the NASCAR championship from Ford. It wore a two-foot long extended nose cone, a 3-foot high rear wing and curved back glass. The other change was the option of a 145-hp 3.7-liter Slant Six, although only 500 were sold.
But it was the show’s star turn on the Dukes of Hazzard that made it a cultural star.
It ain’t high art
The show’s premise is well-known. Cousins Bo and Luke Duke (played by actors John Schneider and Tom Wopat respectively) are constantly in trouble with the officials of fictional Hazzard County, Georgia, led by the crooked Boss Jefferson Davis Hogg and his sidekick Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane. The Duke boys have their share of help from their Cousin Daisy and Uncle Jesse.
But it’s the car chases, a staple of ’70s moviemaking, that prove a key part of the show, and the star was the General Lee, an orange 1969 Dodge Charger with a Confederate flag on the roof, a horn that played “I Wish I Was in Dixie” and the numbers 01 on the doors. Inside, a Citizens Band Radio keep the boys in touch with Uncle Jesse.
The series was created by Gy Waldron, who had written and directed a schlock action movie named “Moonrunners” in 1975. In it, Grady and Bobby Lee run moonshine for their Uncle Jesse. Like the later TV show, country singer Waylon Jennings is the balladeer. Sound familiar?
The car everyone remembers
Throughout the series’ seven-season life, 1969 Chargers were decade-old used cars, not collectibles, and being that Dodge built 89,700 of them, they were easy to find, at least initially. Each car was fitted with a roll cage, heavy-duty shock absorbers and springs and modified brakes to easily enable a 180-degree “Bootleggers’ Turn.”
Yet as producers destroyed their share of Dodge Chargers due to stunt work, they created a shortage of 1969 Dodge Chargers in the final years of the series. So, in a fit of desperation, producers began looking for 1969 Dodge Chargers in parking lots, asking owners if they wanted to sell them. It didn’t work.
So producers switched to using orange AMC Ambassadors or shooting miniatures.
Nevertheless, the General Lee proved popular. During the shows initial run, the car received approximately 35,000 fan letters monthly, quite a fanbase for an inanimate object.
Why the car was popular
The Charger survived into the 1970s, becoming a personal luxury coupe as its performance and popularity waned, a trend that started with a disastrous 1971 redesign. It was replaced by the Magnum for 1979, the year that “The Dukes of Hazzard” debuted. By then, high insurance costs and government regulations had relegated the muscle cars of the 1960s to history. The American landscape was changing.
Proof came in 1981, when the Dodge Charger ignominiously reappeared as a subcompact three-door hatchback powered by a 2.2-liter 4-cylinder engine producing a mere 84 hp. Its name was retired in 1987, re-emerging in 2005 on a rear-wheel-drive sedan, the same year it became a movie starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds, Willie Nelson and Lynda Carter.
For Charger fans, the General Lee upheld traditional values in a transforming American landscape, a charming cultural relic of the 1980s. For others, the show was racist due to its use of the Confederate symbols, be it the Confederate flag, the “Dixie” car horn, or names like General Lee and Jefferson Davis. The controversy was sparked by a white supremacist, who murdered nine worshippers at a historic African American church in South Carolina in 2015 while wearing a Confederate flag. The massacre sparked an outcry as Confederate symbols became a cultural anathema. As a result, the show’s reruns on cable network TV Land were cancelled.
But the show still has fans, including Schneider, whose replica of the General Lee was heavily damaged by Hurricane Ida earlier this year.
“That car is me,” he told The Daily Mail.
