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.
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.
Seney Hall on the Oxford College of Emory University campus in Oxford, Georgia, where the General Lee jump was filmed. Photo: Haha169 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
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.
A General Lee replica next to a 1977-78 Dodge Monaco dressed as a Hazzard County Sheriff cruiser, the pairing at the heart of the opening-credits jump. Photo: Greg Gjerdingen via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
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.
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…
