General Lee - Love 'em hate em,.. or indifferent?..

[greenpigs]

I have wondered if the company that produced the fake stunts convinced the TV production companies that the fake stunts were safer and cheaper.

  My guess is the plastic model thing started when the shows life was over & it didn't matter if people thought it sucked because the shows days were numbered.
   It is ALWAYS about the money with hollywood.

[WB General Lee]

No there is no thread on these cars. The first car I bought from WB about 3 years ago and the second car was sold at an auction in California that WB gave a few cars to and the guy who bought it sold it to the guy who I bought it from.

[Mike DC]

  

Miniature stunts in the early 1980s TV shows -


It was a combination of saving money and also broadening the scope of what they could do.  In the case of "Knight Rider" they used models to branch out into destroying buildings, bridges, running the car through hot lava or ocean water, earthquakes, military tanks & planes & helicopters, etc.  Sutff they would never have been able to afford to shoot on a TV budget if it had to be done full-scale.


In the case of DOH, by the time they started doing model stunts their competition had already been doing it for several years.  It broadened the action some but it mostly just saved the producers money.  (The cars themselves were still quite cheap for them.  But the price of staging, safety-proofing, filming, and insuring all that stuntwork made it cost a lot more than just the car being wrecked.)  The show's budget was repeatedly getting cut throughout the series.  The producers didn't really have a lot of respect for the show.  They eventually just tried to invest as little into the production as possible and see how long it would run before it died.  

 

[Ghoste]

Wait a doggone minute here!!!  Are you telling me that K.I.T.T. never really drove through lava??

[68coronetGLwannabe]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4MFAR-l724&feature=related   

[Brock Samson]

wow! what a boneyard!   

[Mike DC]

Wait a doggone minute here!!!  Are you telling me that K.I.T.T. never really drove through lava??

LOL 
   

[440]

  @ the John Schneider Interview....

I'd say it was fake but "it's hard to tell"....

Awkward moment though.

[WB General Lee]

That was a weird video. I have heard different things about John. I can say he was a super nice guy when I met him and very willing to talk.

[Mike DC]

  
John has a good rep with fans over the years.  The occasional bad stories are far outweighed by the good ones.    

He still likes to make a buck off his DOH days when he sees a chance.  But that's about the worst complaint you could make.    



(Now, Tom Wopat on the other hand . . .  ) 

[tatrick2me]

Well I'm one of the old guys that bought a new Charger back in the day.  I never got into the show except for a few extended looks at Daisy.  When the second generation Chargers came out they were viewed as a classy looking gentleman's hot rod.  As others have stated, the show kind of erased that image and turned it into a hillbilly car.  For that reason, I just have never been much of a fan of the GL replicas.  To each his own though.  Bob

I second that!

[70rr 69ch]

So I bought a 69 Charger about a week or 2 ago. I was just going to drive it for a while. A buddy of mine has been looking for one for a while to build a General Lee for the Family and his Daughter for graduation. So I sold to him.

Another General Lee is about to be built.    I think it is great to build your dream car... and I get to take it for drives too  

Hey thats my new car.  Looking forward to building my new General Lee

[Bobby41909]

So I bought a 69 Charger about a week or 2 ago. I was just going to drive it for a while. A buddy of mine has been looking for one for a while to build a General Lee for the Family and his Daughter for graduation. So I sold to him.

Another General Lee is about to be built.    I think it is great to build your dream car... and I get to take it for drives too  

Hey thats my new car.  Looking forward to building my new General Lee

Awesome!  Another General Yee Haa!!!!!   

[djcarguy]

So I bought a 69 Charger about a week or 2 ago. Another General Lee is about to be built.  :e

    SINCE IT IS ALLREADY YELLER ,,,,,,,,MAKE IT A GENERAL CUSTURRED ,,,YELLOW CAR

[The70RT]

Too nice of a car for a general lee 

[kamkuda]

Too nice of a car for a general lee 

Its a Perfect car for a general Lee 

[bill440rt]

So I bought a 69 Charger about a week or 2 ago. I was just going to drive it for a while. A buddy of mine has been looking for one for a while to build a General Lee for the Family and his Daughter for graduation. So I sold to him.

Another General Lee is about to be built.    I think it is great to build your dream car... and I get to take it for drives too  

Hey thats my new car.  Looking forward to building my new General Lee

Uh.... is that a REAL R/T you're going to turn into a GL?? 

[kamkuda]

So I bought a 69 Charger about a week or 2 ago. I was just going to drive it for a while. A buddy of mine has been looking for one for a while to build a General Lee for the Family and his Daughter for graduation. So I sold to him.

Another General Lee is about to be built.    I think it is great to build your dream car... and I get to take it for drives too  

Hey thats my new car.  Looking forward to building my new General Lee

h.... is that a REAL R/T you're going to turn into a GL??  

Read earlier, its a 318 car with a 440 transplant.

It looks good in pictures but this car is going to needs some work to get it right.

It is the perfect car for a general lee because it is a 69 and it was a 318 car and it needs some work but it has all the right parts and more importantly, it is being built for his family, (Frank is a great family guy and his whole family loves the General Lee) and its his car to do with what he pleases.  

It will be great   

[MaximRecoil]

But I also think the GL has aged a whole lot better than some other cars that are from the same era and trends.  It would have been just as normal for the era if the GL had been painted with stripes all over it, big chromed sidepipes below the rockers, really cheesy wide wheels, the car all jacked up with air shocks so those wheels don't hit the fender lips . . .

The General Lee was actually quite tastefully done for a custom car born in the late '70s. The graphics are all clean "vector" type graphics (solid colors with sharp edges), with nothing to date them (as opposed to say, airbrushed graphics). The flag on the roof was a great idea, because the roof is already a smooth canvas so to speak, and it already has the aspect ratio of a typical flag. Additionally, the "rebel flag" is the best looking flag design I've ever seen, even better looking than the American flag (which is also a great looking flag design). The rebel flag is particularly suitable for use on a car roof because it is a symmetrical design, so it looks right from any viewing perspective. Its colors go well with the orange paint too.

The numbers on the door are about as basic as you can get, which also lends to their timelessness. Think of the fonts that were popular in the late '70s. They could have easily used something that would look ridiculously dated today, but they didn't. Even the "General Lee" text was a timeless sans-serif, similar to Verdana. Imagine if they had used Cooper font for example.

It also didn't hurt that they chose the best looking car ever built (second generation Dodge Charger) to put their custom graphics on.

The General Lee could be thought of as an aftermarket option package / conversion for a '68 or '69 Dodge Charger, with an original production run of about 300; kind of like Winnebagos, school buses, conversion vans, 4WD vans, etc.; the difference being that they were never sold to the public. However, the public saw them in their living rooms every Friday night for 7 years, not counting syndication which still continues today I believe.

As far as replicas go, I like any car that is built to a standard (as long as it is a standard that I respect). I respect the factory standard because they designed and manufactured the car in the first place. I respect the Warner Brothers General Lee standard because it looks good and provided me with many hours of entertainment when I was a kid (and I still like watching the show today).

"Correctly" restored Chargers today are actually partial (to varying degrees) replicas of the factory standard. They usually have at the very least, new trunk floors, quarter panels, and paint. Those new parts look like the ones that were originally installed at the factory, but they are not; thus, partial replica.

I love "survivor" cars, and I would take an untouched Charger with average wear and tear over the prettiest restorations out there (and I would leave it untouched). However, if you need to replace major body panels and paint anyway, it doesn't really make a difference if it ends up wearing paint that looks like it could have come from the factory, or wearing paint that looks like it could have come from Warner Brothers' mechanics. In other words, they are both about the same distance from being factory original, even though one carries a greater illusion of being factory original.

I've often wondered if I would be a Charger fan if I wasn't first a General Lee / DoH fan (I first saw the show when I was 4 in 1979, and loved the car immediately). There isn't any way to know for sure, but I think I probably would be. Even as a kid I wasn't fooled by those cheap unlicensed toys that would slap orange color and an "01" on the side of something that looked more like a second generation Road Runner than a Charger; so the Charger's lines appealed to me, not just the "uniform" that it wore. I was a big fan of Knight Rider as a kid, but I don't really care about third generation Firebirds today; they wouldn't even make my top ten list of favorite cars, nor any list of favorite cars for that matter.

[BY RSCO]

VERY tastefully stated Maxim....!

[BIGBLCK11]

VERY tastefully stated Maxim....!

x2

[kamkuda]

Maxim... first post... well said

[greenpigs]

Sure I like the 69 Charger because of the DOH but I never wanted a GL, I think it is mostly because I don't like the color orange EXCEPT on 1st gen Chargers. 

[firefighter3931]

Too nice of a car for a general lee 

Its a Perfect car for a general Lee 

Oh NO....not another GL !

What's next...a 5.7 hemi under the hood 

After seeing some of Franks paint/body skillz i'm confident that this will be a stunning resto-mod 


Ron

[Kern Dog]

Maxim.... Professional columnist or just a great writer?
YOU make the call!