I suspect that most of us are familiar with that seminal piece of American literature and theater, The Dukes of Hazard. Initially starting as a series of novels by (I believe) J.D. Salinger and William Faulkner in their only known collaboration and then later adapted into a series of stage plays and then a television series by (again, I haven’t cross-checked my sources, but I believe this is accurate) David Mamet, these thoughtful and quietly insightful tales of life in Georgia’s Hazzard county delighted Americans throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
One of the crucial aspects of the series was a 1969 Dodge Charger stock car, which was used to further the plot in meaningful and subtle ways, whether by cleverly summarizing the human condition of near-constant desires by jumping over a ravine, or by making a subtle but pointed commentary about humanity’s inhumanity to their fellow humans by jumping over some cop cars.
Here’s the opening credits, if you need a reminder to be put in the mood:
A cultural icon, for sure. And yet, it’s one sullied by one unfortunate detail when watching today: the Charger there is named the General Lee, after Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and the Confederate battle flag has a place of prominence on the roof.
The Confederacy just doesn’t seem like something we need to celebrate; there’s no reason these references to a pro-slavery, treasonous failed state should continue to sully the complex and nuanced content of the show, which also pioneered what was at the time the smallest jean shorts denim scientists could craft.
So what can be done? Well, thanks to CGI, and other advanced technologies, we should be able to replace the General Lee and its troubling references with other General-themed cars that would do the job just as well without also being a symbol of a genuinely crap part of American history.
Let’s look at some options, as developed by a complex FORTH program running on the Autopian’s AI experimental station, a 16K Commodore Pet, seen here doing a test run of the AI Car Concept generating software:
Here’s what it came up with:
General DeGaulle
The only real requirement was that the car be themed after a General of some kind, so it’s not surprising to see this one based on General DeGaulle of France, who led the Free French resistance fighters against the Nazis during WWII. The car is a Renault 5/Le Car, and with those sporty wheels and tricolor on the roof, should easily be as exciting to see on screen as that charger.
Les Duke boys sont dans un sacré pétrin!
General Anesthetic
Okay, I think the algorithm got into a little trouble with the concept of “General.” But this could still work! This early-2000s Camry is the perfect car for the concept of general anesthesia, being sort of forgettable and invoking deep slumbers. A white square replaces any sort of flag on the hood, and I think the misspelling on the door just adds to the general sense of ennui that the show has always cultivated. This could be a bold choice!
Because I only had 16K to work with and no real internet connection for the PET, the set of data used to formulate these concepts was limited, so instead of another general here it seems to have flipped over to captains, selecting Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch, and then promoted him to Admiral. Then stuck it all on an Amphicar.
If we’re willing to try an Admiral instead of a General, I think an Amphicar could actually really enhance the show and, if a remake was desired, give lots of water-based opportunities for chases down canals and estuaries and creeks and rivers and reflecting pools and so much more. A Special Episode where the Duke Boys go to Venice, Italy could even finally happen, just like they always wanted!
General Grievous
What about a cross-over? With a new crop of more serious, powerful media from the Star Wars universe, like the show Andor, perhaps the General reference in question could be General Grievous, that strange droid with a bunch of biological organs in a jar inside him, whose primary character trait was a wet, hacking cough, like he had a combination of emphysema, a 55-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and a bad catalytic converter:
Now, we wouldn’t need the coughing droid itself on the show, just his ride, which was that big monowheel thing you see up there. I’m sure that could get through all kinds of Hazzard county mud!
This is just a place to start – all sorts of other general-themed cars could be considered: General Malaise (almost any mid-70s American crapbox, maybe a Vega), General Electric (if you want an EV), General Mills (if you wanted it to be more breakfast-coded), General Lee (but this time Bruce, not Robert), and so on.
Also, I should confess: none of these were actually computer AI generated. They were BAI, biological AI, where my human brain made a crude simulation of intelligence. Hence the typo I didn’t feel like fixing on that Camry.
Put a body kit on a white panel van that looks like a takeout box and call it the General Tso.
A new Charger called the ‘General Electric.’
This was a missed opportunity
Or General Mayhem when it accelerates out of control?
No, no, they’re saying it’s supposed to do that.
I asked Gemini to generate an image of a car a Klingon would drive and call it the “General Martok” but all it gave me were examples of what the Batmobile would look like if Marty and Moog built it. No Qapla’ today, AI has brought disgrace to the empire.
Well, if it had two headlights, it was the Changling impersonating Martok.
General Shaka, when the walls fell. (Sherriff Rosco, when the patrol car sank?)
Thats easy! The pimped out Cadillac from Superfly.:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=superfly+car&ia=images&iax=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F86%2F97%2Fe5%2F8697e53396e6851a3628d80d1880da71.jpg
You’ve inspired me to name one of my junks “Dollar General”
That’s a good one. I can only think of dark things for some reason.
I have seen Chevettes with that on the roof.
An oil tanker named after the commander who led the invasion of Iraq, General Franks.
I’m still a fan of the General Grant. https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2018/07/interesting-twist-on-dukes-charger.html
Rob Kinnan had a small write up on this in Hot Rod a while ago. Only that was back when the modernish Charger was actually new. He proposed turning it into a two door. I remember loving the illustration’s paint scheme.
In 20 years I’m surprised that Dodge never did an April Fools’ prank announcement of a 2-door Charger, complete with glamour shots of multiple Chargers (including a police car) with their back doors simply removed and gaping holes on either side of the back seat.
Should be a Mach 1 Mustang though.
Also, we had a “Justicialista” built in Argentina during the peronist regime. It was a crappy, inefficient, overbudgeted cheap car with innards designed by Nazi refugees. It was named after lieutenant colonel Peron (he upped himself to general, so it doesn’t count). It’s the perfect automotive metaphore.
Nobody going with the VW thing in Afrika Korps tan called the General Rommel?
Or we can swap the VW for a Cybertruck.
Well done! Also, I bet the VW Thing could smoke a cybertruck off road.
The two don’t really look as different as they probably should, either.
I would think Minister of
PropagandaMisinformation, Goebbels might be better suited for the Cybertruck.You have a point but I think any Nazi will do really. Plus, the whole Elon-South Africa thing.
That overweight monstrosity would be the General Göring.
If i was gonna pick a German general who wasn’t really on board with the Nazi shit, I’d go with Heinz Guderian, who put 2-way radios in every military vehicle, which was a game-changer.
Makes me think of Mercedes’ recent CB article that I liked.
Interestingly, the top shot looks to be a fiberglass? Charger shell on a tube frame. it looks hollow. Also, the rear wheels look to be painted steelies, not the American Racing mags.
If it’s from the TV show, it’s probably a complete car. They ruined so many Chargers filming that show. I think they picked that model because they were unloved and available very cheaply at the time. Paint on some racism and send it.
Late in the show’s run the supply started drying up and they swtiched to fiberglass bucks, etc… I’m sure it’s a shot from the show.
They extincted an entire car model. That’s impressive.
I’ll let others dig into the full details, but given that it’s a mid-air shot it is likely that’s one of the many “mules” the show used as stand-ins for the “hero car” Charger.
Well, since la Regie Renault collaborated with the Nazi occupation, I guess the General De Gaulle would rather drive a Citroën, since both André C. and Boulanger low keyed sabotaged their own production line and trucks in order to screw the Nazis they were building the vehicles for.
De Gaulle jumping over things in a Mehari would be a delight, indeed. A 2CV would also work, for historical accuracy.
It was still les Freres Renault who collaborated. It wasn’t until after the war that the company was nationalized, and that was the reason for it.
Still, putting the dipstick marks way lower than they were supposed to be so the truck was operating under constant oil starvation was a brilliant piece of sabotage and I hope the French national museum has a copy of the TSB they put out after the war.
Yes, you are correct. Thanks!
A more fitting option would be a Renault Alliance called the Marquis de Lafayette.
Who would be quickly renamed as Marquis de Lafailette.
Yeah, and there’s the well-known incident where an assassination attempt on de Gaulle was foiled when the Citroën DS he was riding in successfully escaped despite having at least one tire shot out; thereafter for the rest of de Gaulle’s presidency the DS remained his car of choice.
Yes!
A GTA-style version of the original that almost looks like a Charger, but not quite. Call it the Generally.
White and red striped Corvette with the KFC logo on the roof – The Colonel Sanders
He’s gonna need a twelveth spice to get that promotion.
Just meet them head on with a General Sherman Chevelle 454 with a big ol Stars and Stripes on top.
I would think I would get a giant bull dozer with flame throwers and call it the General Sherman.
Whatever can lay waste to the General Lee with spectacular results.
When I was a very imaginative child, I came up with a counterpart to the General Lee. It was to be dark blue, with the crossed swords of the Union army, and be called the Stonweall Jackson. 1971-2 Charger. And because I was a young lad when I devised this, it had big fat tires on the back and a massive blower on the hood.
And I came up with this despite being Canadian.
Realistically, I should have done it with a Pontiac Beaumont with a big maple leaf on the roof and called it General Isaac Brock.
Jason, you missed a real opportunity with this piece, not having a General Tso car (it has been done, but still…)
Stonewall Jackson was a Confederate
And I was a Canadian kid. I didn’t know and better at age 11.
Being Canadian you coulda made a General Cornwallis, it only drives from the Carolinas to Nova Scotia.
Sorry.
North bound and up?
Maybe we could swap the car altogether for some sort of plane (even more and longer possibilities for the „General“ to get airborne) and call it „General Aviation“.
Stormin’ Norman, a Hummer H2 with a Hellcat transplant.
In reality the new car for the New South is the Ford Bronco Sport. I’m seeing a huge number of them, challenging the usual Jeeps and Subarus you usually see here in the Blue Ridge and Smokie mountains.
You could probably pick just about any recent GM SUV to be the “Generally”, then substitute in a different model and no one would even notice.
General Patton, a CJ-2A.
The answer is right in your driveway. The Changli is now the General Tso.
Swap in a Tesla Motor out back(with a chainsaw) and go run from the po-po while delivering Baijiu.
As an 8 year old growing up, north 40 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line but still IN the Appalachians, I had no idea how bad it was to have a car named the general lee with a Confederate battle flag on the roof.
There are an uncomfortable number of Confederate flags still seen in rural PA.
Yes growing up there, it was like the further north in PA you go the more it was the deep south.
see: New Hampshire.
and MInnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas.
So, like those maps on teevee, basically anywhere there’s a largely homogenous culture and long stretches between even small- or mid-sized cities.
I did not want to generalize and get called out I was only mentioning places where I have personally seen it.
Northern Michigan has, sadly, entered the chat.
And SW Michigan too.
It works out though because when I see one I know I don’t need to interact with that person on any level. Saves time.
Also rural (and even not-so rural) Maine
Pittsburgh in the west, Philadelphia in the east, and Alabama in between.
I grew up in Harrisburg. NO arguments with your comment. I miss the mountains, Amish markets, and the Birch Beer and not the people.
You’d be surprised (or let’s get real, not actually surprised) how many confederate flags you’ll see in Plattsburgh, NY, which is basically the Canadian border. Outside of northern Maine, you don’t get more northern really. Yet apparently this is “heritage”.
Before anyone claims these are people relocated from the south, very, very few people relocate to the rural northern tier of NY. People only leave. The weather alone is about as miserable as it gets.
Well said I also do not meet too many southerners (I know at least one) who have relocated to northern MN with also very bad weather.
In (very mild) defense of DofH… in the 1970s almost all of us were still in the grip of not really knowing it was terrible… influenced in part by the Saturday morning Bugs Bunny cartoons that always had Bugs Bunny (the hero) as a Southern soldier and Yosemite Sam (the villain) as a Northern officer.
Fortunately most of us have grown up and put away such childish things.
I wonder how much of that is timing.
When I was a kid, there was this obsession over rural living. You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing John Denver or Kenny Rodgers or the like. HeeHaw was on all the time. The Dukes of Hazard were on TV too. Even shows that were not specifically rural would have episodes based on country living (like I vaguely remember the A-Team and Kitt being in rural Southern towns sometimes).
It’s like the 50s and 60s were all Westerns and the 70s and early 80s were all “Southerns” for entertainment. And the quickest way to say “this show is based on the South and not Southern California (where it was obviously filmed)” was to show rebel flags regularly. Like the Dukes of Hazard doesn’t look like the South most of the time. Not enough pine trees and Kudzu for a start. But because everyone is showing off the Rebel Flag and playing Dixie, you think “ah it is the South.”
As a kid, wherever my parents drove, the gas stations or tourist traps all had Rebel themed stuff because “Southern Country Cooking” was a popular place to eat. I could be in upstate NY and there would be some place to eat that sold “down home cooking” that sold crap with the Rebel flag on it. Even the Amish places in Central PA had Rebel flags being sold somewhat regularly (that could be the proximity to Gettysburg, I guess).
When I moved to the South in the 1990s, that country living theme was no longer it. Seinfeld and Friends were the big shows on TV. Sushi was replacing catfish at places to eat on the side of the road. As for being in the South, the only time I see Rebel flag was at Civil War gravesites or battlefields. I can’t remember the last time I saw iton the back of trucks or flying outside of houses. It used to be fairly common in PA.
I don’t know if that was a general shift in our culture (away from Southern as an ideal) or if it was that the higher African American population levels in the South wouldn’t allow their neighbors to be so naive to think that flag only meant “I like fried food”. But since I moved South 30 years ago, I see a LOT less Rebel flags now than when I was a kid mainly around DC, WV, MD and PA.
You forgot about one of the best wartime generals that humanity has ever witnessed. General Electric. Only seems to prefer driving Chevrolet Volt vehicles.
Have you thought about reading the article?
The General Tso would an excellent hot hatch.
Also, wrong car – you of all people know what make and model the General DeGaulle HAD to be…
https://www.jalopnik.com/this-day-in-history-a-citroen-saves-charles-de-gaulles-1847533029/
And it has racing heritage!
https://i0.wp.com/windingroad.com/wp-content/uploads/assets/uploads/image/citroen-ds19-monte-carlo-1964-1.jpg?resize=677%2C452&ssl=1
The General DeGaulle looks like it could be Remy Julienne’s daily driver. And Les Freres Duc could do a lot worse for a stunt director. But I would not want a French version, if for no other reason that 2CV bodies in good shape are getting rarer.
Don’t forget the good ol’ General Mayhem from Roadkill!!
And the General Maintenance, too.
R.I.P. If you haven’t heard, it got t-boned on the last day of shooting the last episode of Roadkill.
Honestly, that could be a modern day dukes car. they would just be running hot rod parts and diesel delete system to California from Canada most likely.
I nominate the General Grant
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShermanPosting/s/WaJNF3p0Ti
I remember a muscle car magazine that had a single panel story/one picture of a General Grant Charger back in like 2007. Wonder if it’s the same car or if there’s more than one running around!
It was good enough for MPC when trying to figure out what to do with their General Lee tooling.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModelCars/comments/10zakpx/mpc_county_charger_aka_the_general_grant/
NGL that looks REALLY tempting