Another General Lee is gone...

[squeakfinder]

This is your Charger.......


               

[squeakfinder]

          This your Charger on DOH....

[squeakfinder]

Any questions?

[70charger_boy]

This is your Charger.......


               

I like this one better

[Mike DC]

That chick was a VERY wise choice on the part of the producers.  She functions as cute eye candy, without being a 21yo bottle-blond that can't lift a wrench (whose presence would have just seemed ridiculous).  Finding a chick like Carrie for that show was probably a lot harder than just finding a typical hottie.


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70Chargerboy,

As for the Dukes stunts?  Only the new 2005 Dukes movie was cable-launched empty car shells.  The producers publicly call it safety issues, but the truth is that they just didn't want to spend the money to do real-live drivers.  (The old TV crew had actually done live-driven GL jumps bigger than any of the ones in the 2005 movie.)

It was almost all live-driven jumps & rollovers during the original 1979-85 TV series.  Seasons#1-6 were all real stuff.  For season#7 the producers tried using miniature model-car footage to cut costs, but it looked pretty obvious onscreen.

It was about a dozen guys who did all the driving on that TV series.  They jumped heavily rollcaged & fuel-celled cars with 400-700 pounds of ballast in the trunk (to keep the car level in the air).  They basically wore a 5-point harness, a helmet, a neck collar, and some arm/leg pads. 

They ended up inventing a custom-made torso harness starting in the third season to take the weight off their lower back vertebrae during the worst jump landings.  It was basically similar to a parachute harness.  It straps their shoulders to the rollbars above their heads with (VERY stiff) bungee cords.  They wear this thing in addition to the 5-point harness and all the other stuff listed above. 

The stuff they figured out on "Dukes" has become totally standard gear & methods for all kinds of Hollywood car stunts & jumps.  The crew (and their kids) still do real-live car stunts at the Dukesfest shows every year. 

[70charger_boy]

I find it amazing to this very day how beautiful those jumps look on the TV show.  Now, I truly have tons of respect for the guys who actually did it!!  Who do you know that would put up with all that pain and not sue?  I already knew the answer to my question, but I needed someone to affirm it.  You came through once again, Mike 

[0X01B8]

          This your Charger on DOH....

Whatever happened to that car?  Did that crook Ronnie Duke put it back up on ebay?

[Mike DC]

 
HLPAG ended up buying that wrecked R/T in the pics.  They "restored" it and put it on sale again.  I don't remember whether it sold or not. 

Honestly most of us were just assuming that their "restoration" was probably a rebody.  (That idea is not based on anything specific, other than the fact that the pics of the resto looked pretty decent.  Given the fact that it's HLPAG, and rebody just sounds more likely than believing they actually did a decent job of fixing something.)


The whole thing sucked.  But at least Hardcore Racing went outta business like a year later so it's not likely to happen again. 

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The live-driven jumps are really a piece of work.  I think I've seen them do seven GL jumps in person now, and it never gets old. 

It's tough just getting the car up into the air and flying level with the small ramps they use.  (Evel Knievel can use a nice gradual ramp that's a couple hundred feet long.  But in Hazzard county the ramps have to fit underneath a little pile of bushes.)  The ramps are small/steep steel-framed setups with about a 2" thick layer of plywood boards bolted onto the top surface. 

Both ends of the cars' suspension will absolutely always bottom-out hard when they hit the ramps.  They sometimes hit the ramps violently enough to twist the unibody in the process of taking off.  (The car's quarter panels can actually show visible buckling in the mid-air footage sometimes.)  The GLs' front pushbars have to be cut down to clear the ramps, and the leading edge of the Chargers' K-frames usually still dig in & bust chunks off the plywood as the car goes upward.  They have all that trouble with the ramp clearance even though the jump-car GLs always have their torsion bar height adjusters cranked all the way up.


All that, and then trying to keep the cars level in the air for a 40-70 yard-long flight?  Not easy. 

It's a bit of the same problem you get with shooting a rifle:  The longer the shot, the farther off-course the bullet gets with even the slightest imperfection at the launch.    So the huge jumps have to take off with a lot of precision to avoid flipping over wrong in the air.  Too flat and it hurts the driver, too steep and the car will front-flip.  Landing diagonally down on the front end is best.  Gotta get the unibody's front clip to crush and absorb the impact. 

[squeakfinder]

          This your Charger on DOH....

Whatever happened to that car?  Did that crook Ronnie Duke put it back up on ebay?

I wish I knew. THAT car, if it really was an RT should have been restored back to originall. It had a 4 speed

[70charger_boy]

Yeah, mike I'm amazed at how level their jumps were