Everyone remembers the “Dukes of Hazzard”, right? Redneck porn featuring the adventures of Bo and Luke Duke (and their cousins Vance and Coy for a season) as they go up against the scheming Boss Hogg and his lackey Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, the show ran for 147 episodes over 7 seasons from 1979-1985 and featured Waylon Jennings as the faceless narrator, or “The Balladeer” as he’s credited, who sang the theme song and interjected often-somewhat-humorous witticisms when the show went to commercial.
Controversial now because of what’s arguably the main character—a 1969 Dodge Charger called the General Lee that is named after, of course, Confederate General, traitor and racist Robert E. Lee and which features the Confederate battle flag on its roof—for some reason in the early-80s, we were somehow okay with glorifying the legacy of slavery on TV. (And none of that “Southern Heritage” bullshit, thank you very much).
At any rate, as a member of GenX, I was too young and naive, like so many of my fellow GenXers, to care and just wanted to watch the sly Duke boys outsmart the bumbling Boss Hogg while jumping (and somehow not destroying) the General Lee off of the plethora of conveniently-placed ramps throughout Hazzard County. So, every week, I’d plop down on the couch, no doubt sometimes while eating a Saltillo Dinner, and consume the show.
And while I don’t care these days for the Southern Heritage/glorifying slavery/implied racism that the General Lee entails, I still like the theme song.
Performed by Jennings, the song reached #1 on the Billboard Country Charts in 1980, it still gets regular airplay on country stations today. In fact, it was covered by Alvin & the Chipmunks in 1982:
And the original intro to clean your sonic palate:
My brain, being what it is, came up with the thought, “what if this banger went on for 100 minutes?”
So, I used some AI magic to extend the song to 100 minutes long. And then I thought, “well, the intro should probably be 100 minutes long as well”. So I grabbed a copy of it, brought it into Final Cut Pro, and retimed it using Optical Flow.
Stretching a one-minute-long video clip to 100 times the original size does some weird things as Optical Flow tries to fill in the gaps between frames:
Nightmare fuel, amirite?
At any rate, here’s my newest, stupid creation: