I’m from the American Southeast. I’m American by birth, Southern by grace of hashem. Sure, I was born around New York to Jewish parents from the Bronx (and for one of them, Havana before the Bronx), but I moved to North Carolina when I was two, and, aside from a nearly 20-year stint in Los Angeles that I very much enjoyed, I’ve lived my life in the South. That’s why I feel like I’m qualified to make judgments about pop culture and media that are set in the South, like the infamous Dukes of Hazzard.
There was a certain kind of cartoonified idea of the South that became especially popular in American culture in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and The Dukes of Hazzard is probably the best-known example of this. It’s a ridiculous show about the Duke Boys getting into jams and scrapes and hijinx that ends up with them having to jump their Confederate Battle flag-emblazoned ’69 Charger over mud pits and ravines as Daisy Duke wears Daisy Dukes and corrupt local police chew the scenery.
The cars, of course, are the grits that hold the whole show together, and, as you may expect, they’re almost all American Iron, with a smattering of the expected Volkswagens and an occasional Honda. You can look at the IMCDB page for the show and see what I mean.
But there’s one weird outlier, and it shows up in the opening credits of every episode. Look:
See the car that gets its tires shot with arrows loosed by Bo and Luke? It’s a pretty tight close-up, so it’s hard to see exactly what that car is, I know. I mean, it’s just a wheel. But it is a distinctive wheel.
Luckily, what seems to be the same car shows up in at least one other episode:
It’s a Peugeot 504! A 1972 one, it seems. An icon of French motoring, and while these were imported to the United States from 1968 to 1991, they were never really all that popular, despite being excellent, rugged cars. When they did sell, they tended to sell in the more urban areas, where people were a little more open to driving something weird and so unashamedly foreign.
The Dukes of Hazzard takes place in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia, home to the equally-fictional Civil War Battle of Hazzard County. I went to college in Atlanta for a couple years, and spent a lot of time driving around rural Georgia, along with many years of traveling around all sorts of North Carolina counties and other lovely, humid Southern backwaters. I can tell you for a fact that there were not many Peugeots around.
Sure, where I grew up in Greensboro, we had a handful of Peugeots buzzing Gallically around, but as you got further and further from the city, you were a hell of a lot less likely to see anything like this. Which brings me to my question: who the hell had the Peugeot in Hazzard County?
Now, I have a sort of theory: in many hick counties I’ve driven through, I’ve found plenty of junkyards. And those junkyards almost always have one solitary weird car. I just drove out to Kinston, NC, for example, and on the way saw an Autobianchi at a scrapyard, propped up high on a sign. I’ve found a lone Renault Dauphine in a field behind a barn, too. There are some weirdos out there.
So, maybe this 504 is Hazzard County’s lone weirdo? I’d like to think it’s driven by a French-Canadian academe who is undertaking a large-scale cultural anthropology project about the American South, and they’ve embedded themselves in Hazzard County, driving around in their Peugeot, taking notes, watching, scrutinizing.
Is that why the Duke Boys are shooting arrows into its tires? They don’t appreciate being subjects of a study? Did they read an early draft and feel they were being condescended to? Or did they feel the work wasn’t properly footnoted, and they’re shooting an arrow for every missed citation?
I wish I knew. This Peugeot makes as much sense in Hazzard County as a rabbi at a pig pickin’. If I were this hypothetical Hazzard County Peugeot owner, I’d at least consider painting a cocarde tricolore on the roof and naming the car the Général du Gaulle.
Then I’d jump over a huge ravine to elude Gendarme Coltrane and Chef Porc.
Maybe that was the first French car the owner had purchased, and soon realized that going down the foreign car habit rabbit hole was non bon. Get one, you just want more from other countries and that way lies ruin.
Yep, that person may have been the first to recognize that 504 = bad gateway.
I spent some time living in a deeply rural part of Michigan. Which is admittedly different in many ways from the rural South. However, Michiganders, being from where cars were made, might have been even more disinclined to buy foreign cars than Southerners were.
Yet you could drive down any rural road and see a derelict and oddball foreign car sitting in a field or peeking out from behind the barn. Peugeot, FIAT, Renault… all manner of stuff that would make you say, “Who bought that HERE??”
“a handful of Peugeots buzzing Gallically around”
My first read was ‘galactically’, but that made no sense.
My second thought was ‘glacially’, because I have at least once (and maybe twice) been stuck behind an old 504 diesel…IYKYK
Upon realizing you were referring to a synonym for French, I chose to revert to my second take.
Huh, I didn’t know that Peugeot sold 504s here before 5 MPH bumpers. All the ones I’ve seen here have the big rubber diving board bumpers.
I still can’t believe that NYC used 504s and 505s briefly as taxi cabs.
To your point about southern towns having one weird car, I remember driving through a very rural part of Virginia once years ago and seeing a Renault LeCar sticking up over the fence of a junkyard, perched on the top of a stack of car-casses. Also, when I was in college in Virginia in the early ’00s, the school’s fleet of vans included a couple of ’91 Chevy Sportvans that had dealer badges on the back from a Chevrolet-Peugeot dealer—there’s a weird combo.
In the opening credits of most early episodes of Murder, She Wrote, there’s a shot of Jessica Fletcher riding her bike down a Cabot Cove (/Mendocino) street past a number of parked cars, mostly anonymous ’80s boxes; there’s a longer version of the shot in the pilot movie, and the last parked car she passes at the end of that longer version is a 1971 BMW Bavaria, or possibly an earlier 2500/2800. Feels like a car that would have been exotic enough in Mendocino in the mid-’80s, and probably pretty unheard of in Maine!
Historically all the imports especially the stranger ones do well in college towns. I always assumed they were closer to Athens then Atlanta maybe some kind of writing professor with a cabin or an ag or botanist. A Cajun relative would be funny. Acadiana flag on the roof driven by old Cajun guy with his liberty overalls and no shirt helping make the liquor and run it around or bootleg maple syrup from relative in Quebec.
When I lived in Newhall California and attended CalArts, auto transporters loaded with General Lees would pass through on their way to Valencia Oaks Movie Ranch in Lyons Canyon. And transporters loaded with wreckage at the end of the day
Peugeots are somewhat more common there, ask Columbo.
So, it looks like the Atlanta Metro had a Peugeot dealer in the early 70’s, Atlanta is listed as the nearest major city, early episodes were filmed in Covington, which is about halfway between Atlanta and Athens.
I’m not saying it was a member of R.E.M., but I’m not saying it *wasn’t* a member of R.E.M.
Cousin Jean-Claude Duke was visiting.
Have been informed that Florida “Is Not The South” when I lived there. That must be why there were all sorts of Euro cars that came into my shop for repair. Many Volvo, Saab, Peugeot and Alfa sedans along with the common German and British stuff.
There’s a reason why Bugs Bunny sawed Florida off the map.
There are so many reasons to do that in the now times…
That’s wild, I always assumed the wheel receiving the arrows was a Mopar police car wheel. Never dreamed it was a Peugeot.
Yeah, like the way a 1971 Subaru FF-1 most unexpectedly shows up in the background in the 1976 documentary film Harlan County USA which was about the 1973 coal miners strike in southeastern Kentucky: https://www.imcdb.org/i524521.jpg
https://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_524521-Subaru-FF-1-G-1971.html
I’m just one state further south (though in a pretty cosmopolitan area where much of its identity is as a college town) but it was still a surprise when my kid acquired his first car which was a 1983 Subaru station wagon (with the Cyclops headlight FTW) a decade ago while in high school and he would talk with various people online & IRL about things Subaru and it turned out he personally knew someone who had grown up in Harlan County and actually knew the family that owned that Subaru FF-1. Talk about a small world…
It’s de, not du, at least according to the key fob in my French car:
https://live.staticflickr.com/5219/5387317565_c3daf65d2e_z.jpg
Didn’t many episodes revolve around someone passing through, getting stuck by one of the police many traps to extort $$$? This was obviously left by some liberal arts major from California on his (or likely her) way home to Boston for a holiday, and didn’t make it.
Now she’s washing dishes at the Boars Nest.
Inspector Clouseau came to Hazzard County on a tip. Something about a pink panther running from the law.
Naturally he rented something he was comfortable with.
That would also explain the arrow in the tires. They don’t take too kindly to foreign-folk asking a lot of questions.
All I can see is a scantily clad Catherine Bach. If there something else of note in that photo, I missed it.
I am a fervent Autopian and faithfully married man, but, yeah, this. Certainly early teen me at the time this show was airing agrees.
Obviously this thing belong to “Coy and Vance Duke” who spent the first few seasons stalking Bo and Luke, studying every move, every mannerism and the inner workings of the General Lee until they finally made their move – secretly sowing discord between Bo, Luke and the show’s production team, then finally stepping in and passing themselves off as legitimate Duke cousins. Amazing job they did hiding their accents. Who knows how much intel they gathered before Bo and Luke returned and quietly dispatched them.
This is why this site is so damn precious, because my entire life I’ve wondered THE SAME DAMN THING!!
I do remember watching that episode back when it aired, and if memory serves the car was actually part of the inventory at a used car dealership, the owner of which the Duke boys had a beef with. Again, if recall correctly they were going to cut the car in half if they didn’t get what they wanted from said dealer (no idea what that was). But the shakedown worked and so the Pug lived to see another day in its very peculiar home.
Beau and Luc Duc
We keep it around for profiling purposes, along with a Lada.
Les garcons duc ?