A Yankee Boy goes to the Movies

I done learned in on the TV.

I got to admit that we get a lot of what we know or think we know from television. Today the “Dukes of Hazard” movie opens across the country in theaters. It was a show that I watched as I grew up. It was a show that shaped my prejudices about what Southerners were like. If you be Dixie born and bred what do you think of this stereotyping?

I mean it swings both ways. One of the reasons that I watched the show was because I thought that Daisy Duke was hot. I know the girls went gaga over the Duke boys. The carefree attitude about life and the thumbing your nose at authority were like eating candy. So here we are with a movie version ready to reinforce our Southern prejudices.

One reviewer; Eleanor Ringel Gillespie from the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says this:

“All them grinnin' yokels from the CBS hit series that ran from 1979 to '85 are back for the movie version. Those wild 'n' crazy moonshine-running Duke boys, Bo and Luke (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville). Black-hearted Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds). The souped-up '69 orange Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag painted on its roof. And, um, cheeky Daisy Duke, played by Jessica Simpson, who's fittingly introduced butt-first.”

So here us Yankees wonder if all the Southern police are plain stupid and are crooks themselves, if anybody really has a job, if it’s ok to break the law in the South as long as you don’t get caught and can drive fast…

But most of all leaves us wondering about the wonderful ethnic mix that is found in the south. Shows like this simply don’t embrace it. They miss the cultural wonders by a wide margin but manage to poke fun at a whole bunch of people and reinforce negative stereotyping.

So which Duke character are you?