And this hypothetical so-and-so has a point. It is usually just trucks -- which, if you haven't noticed, don't exactly have the adventurous dexterity of a car or motorcycle. Trucks are great for having loud horns and for making 30-point turns in the middle of intersections while you're on your way to work, but as a figure in movies that are meant to pump the blood? Maybe I'm just spoiled by the fact that I've gotten more Fast & Furious movies than calls from my best friend in the past decade. But even before Smokey And The Bandit, trucker movies were abundant, as American audiences were delighted by things like White Line Fever, B.J. And The Bear, Movin' On, Hijack!, and a movie that was named specifically after my middle school fan fiction pseudonym, Moonfire.
But one thing that set Smokey And The Bandit apart from earlier trucker films was the copious use of CB radio, which truckers could use to talk to each other and service stations in intricate code that sounds like a parody of what it actually is. And maybe it's because mid '70s Burt Reynolds could look cool if he was snacking on a dog turd, but Burt made talking on a CB radio look soooooo fun. Who could he contact on that thing? The president? An animal sidekick? Luke Skywalker? It was such an integral part of the movie that they slapped a CB radio microphone in the title on the poster, as if to include a third character in it: Smokey And The Bandit And The Bandit's Radio, Chuck, Who Has Feelings.
Hollywood was so enamored of driving big vehicles and talking on little hunks of metal that they pumped out movies like Handle With Care, Convoy, and Breaker! Breaker!. Convoy was inspired by a song called "Convoy," which was a hit in its own right. That's right, CB radios were so oddly huge that they were basing whole movies off of novelty songs about them. Think about that the next time you complain about some new comic or book adaptation. People heard this song and thought "This. This is where we shall build our empire." And for a stretch of time, they were right.
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