quote:
Originally posted by MopedFred:
This Myth is totally busted! As a kid my dad used to tell me that they would replace the 'General Lee' after every jump they made.
If you 'wiki' the General lee it clearly states that none of the cars survived any of the jumps.
"Through the history of the show, an estimated 309 General Lees were used. Twenty three are still known to exist in various states of repair... These Chargers performed many record-breaking jumps throughout the show,almost all of which resulted in a completely destroyed car"
To begin with I agree with what MopedFred had to say.
As far as I’m concerned I think the Mythbusters did a good job in the way they handled this myth. Primarily the stuck pretty close to what we are led to believe is fact in the movies.
Yes, I have seen heavily modified cars make some extraordinary jumps and survive intact, however, the key to this is the fact that they are heavily modified. Yes I am sure that given enough time and resources the car could have been modified to a point whereby it would survive, however, this puts it outside the scope of the myth.
Although the General Lee is, ‘according to the movie and TV show,’ a Stock Car, as in a car built to race in the stock car classes, as far as I’m aware this does not include modifications which would allow the car to land intact after a significant jump.
The car used in the myth landed exactly how stunt drivers from many movies and TV show have said cars land when flown, that is they land nose first. All anyone has to do is to watch any of the interviews with stunt drivers from the Dukes of Hazzard and they all say the same thing. weights were placed in the rear of the cars to allow them to land flat. Also listen to their descriptions of how the cars are trashed after the jump sequence.
As for the movie, watch the making of special! They clearer show and describe how many of the jumps were made and the illusion of a landing configured. Many of the larger jumps where made by firing the car via a pneumatic catapult. There are no ambiguities here, there are many interviews and videos out there of this being done some included with the DVD. As a side note there were 26 Chargers on hand for the movie.
This is an extract from an interview with Rhys Millen: The Stunt Drivers Behind The Dukes of Hazzard Movie By John Pearley Huffman
The 26 Generals The Dukes of Hazzard have always had a voracious appetite for Dodge Chargers. During production of the TV series' 147 episodes between 1978 and 1985 somewhere near 300 Chargers were destroyed portraying the General Lee. For the film a total of 26 Chargers were acquired (14 1969 models plus eight 1968 and four 1970 editions modified to look like '69s) and each was built to fill particular needs during filming. Not all of them survived.
Hard Jumps and Soft Jumps The climactic General Lee jump of the film was shot in Clinton, Louisiana, in January with, initially, stunt driver Mark Hager piloting. Planned to go 140 feet with the Feliciana Parish courthouse in the background, the first attempt wound up only going about 70 feet. So it was later reshot with a driver-less car shot into the air pneumatically.
While the flights wound up performed by unguided Charger missiles, those invariably ended with devastating - survivable by neither human nor Dodge - crashes. Of course, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson weren't around for the on-screen landings; they were all accomplished by the stunt men. "Pretty much every big jump was followed up by what they call a soft ramp jump," says Millen.
"You had to drive out of the jump to continue the scene. Some of them were a one ramp, where we had run two wheels up onto it and give the car a big twist, and then land and come down. Others were actually full jumps. I had the opportunity to do two of those. One was across a creek, and then was kind of side-by-side, when Billy Pricket and the General Lee were racing each other. So that was pretty neat. And now I'm able to say that I jumped the General Lee. The landings though weren't so great, because the suspension is not modified. Typically, you were landing into soft gravel on the roads, or something like that would really absorb a lot of forward energy out of the cars. And some that were a little bigger than those, I actually chose not to do because of a back injury I got last year."
Those jumps however weren't the hairiest moments on the shoot. "There are particular shots in the movie where Rhys comes around and throws a power slide 90 and makes a left turn and then does a 180," says Scott with a touch of awe in his voice. "At that 180 the trunk of his car crossed underneath the camera. So we were probably - when he threw that 180 - probably within 6 to 8 inches. I don't know if he agrees or not, but that was one shot that certainly got my attention. I was on top of it."
The full article can be read
here
