A 1969 Dodge Charger built as a General Lee replica, the car type launched into TV history on November 11, 1978. Photo: Sicnag via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Forty-eight years ago today, on Veterans Day 1978, a film crew in small-town Georgia pointed an orange 1969 Dodge Charger at a Hazzard County patrol car, floored it, and launched the most recognizable stunt in television history. The General Lee jump lasted about three seconds on screen. It also totaled the car, and that was the plan.
The jump became the opening shot of The Dukes of Hazzard, which ran on CBS from 1979 to 1985 and turned a Detroit muscle car into a cartoon-level folk hero. Here’s what happened on November 11, 1978, what became of the car that made the flight, and why gearheads still argue about it.
The General Lee Jump That Opened a TV Show
According to the This Day in Automotive History archive, the crew filmed the credits jump on November 11, 1978. Fan site OnScreenCars places it at Seney Hall on the Oxford College campus (now part of Emory University) near Covington, Georgia. The car was an orange 1969 Charger known to fans as Lee 1, and it cleared a patrol car for Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane at roughly 16 feet high and 82 feet long.
Flying a full-size muscle sedan is not subtle work. Lee 1 carried at least 500 pounds of concrete in its trunk as ballast, per AgWeb’s deep dive on the car, so the nose wouldn’t pitch down and send the Charger end over end. The landing was brutal. The frame and suspension bent, the differential broke, and the windshield cracked. The crew had what they needed on film, and the car was done.
Why a Charger? Chrysler Built Plenty of Them
The crew could afford to wreck cars because Chargers weren’t scarce yet. Chrysler sold about 85,000 of them in 1969, so the stunt coordinator bought every one he could find. Each car got roll bars, heavy-duty suspension and modified brakes, and the cars that actually flew carried concrete in the trunk. Over the show’s run, more than 300 Chargers were used, and a huge share of them ended up wrecked. That’s the dirty secret behind the show: it did to the 1969 Charger what a demolition derby does to a parking lot.
The jump has been copied ever since. Stunt fans keep recreating it, sometimes with better results than others, as in our story on a General Lee fountain jump that ended in unexpected drama. Nobody’s topped the original for pure, unapologetic attitude.
What Happened to the Car From the General Lee Jump?
This is where the story gets very car-guy. After the jump, the wrecked Charger was repainted green, numbered “71,” and reused as a crashed race car in the fourth episode. In December 1978, according to AgWeb, transportation coordinator Don Schisler traded a pile of wrecked show cars to Cliff Shaw of Shaw Automotive in Dawsonville, Georgia, in exchange for transmission work. Lee 1 sat in the pine woods behind Shaw’s shop for years.
In 2000, Travis Bell found it and paid $400 for the car, and $1,200 total with two police cars thrown in. It later passed through Ohio buyers for $20,000 before collector Marvin Murphy bought it and had Bell restore it. The rebuild took about 16 months and used 1969 sheet metal, plus period details like the crooked “01” on the doors and the cracked windshield. It’s also the one General Lee with chrome rocker panels, which is how fans pick it out of a lineup.
Murphy sent Lee 1 to Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale in 2012, where golfer Bubba Watson won it with a $110,000 bid, according to Fox News. One account puts the final total closer to $121,000. Either way, a car that spent years rotting in the woods ended up a trophy. For contrast, another original General Lee recently failed to sell when it missed its $125,000 reserve, so a famous nameplate doesn’t always guarantee a payday.
Why Enthusiasts Still Care About the General Lee Jump
Part of it is the car. The Charger is a ’69 B-body with a divided grille and a coke-bottle shape, and the General Lee made it a poster for the muscle-car era. Part of it is the stunt culture: Lee 1’s flight is the ancestor of every TV car jump that followed.
And part of it is the sad, glorious waste. Many General Lees were wrecked on camera, and the leftovers can end up as a museum piece or a rusting lineup in a Georgia field. The hobby’s love for the show is still strong enough that Ben Jones’ passing this year sent fans back to Cooter’s Garage, and John Schneider’s stolen General Lee made headlines. It’s a TV car in the same hall of fame as the ones in our most famous TV and movie cars list, and it shares a fate with the Partridge Family bus, another famous screen vehicle that nearly disappeared before anyone thought to save it.
That’s the real lesson of November 11, 1978. A stunt car doesn’t need to be special when it’s built. It only has to fly well, land badly, and survive long enough for somebody to realize it matters.
Sources
- This Day in Automotive History: November 11, 1978 – The Dukes of Hazzard films iconic jump
- AgWeb: General Lee Reborn: How the Greatest Car in Television History Was Lost and Found
- Fox News: First General Lee sells for $110,000
- OnScreenCars: Famous Jumps, Dukes of Hazzard – Seney Hall
Images: Sicnag, Greg Gjerdingen, Haha169 (CC BY-SA 3.0) and Jeremy from Sydney, Australia, all via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0 unless noted).
Lead image: Sicnag via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
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