Every once in a while I get an opportunity to add some crazy items to the collection, things that we never knew existed, or that shouldn't exist. Things that were a part of the production process of either the show or the collectibles. Things that are so unique that they have to be one of a kind. In the past, I was fortunate to add pieces like the
cast and crew belt buckle mold, the
slot machine decorations, and the screen used
CNH 320 license plate to the collection. I just added another one of a kind item to the collection. Read all about it after we look at a few pieces of golden era children's clothing.
Ok, the piece at the bottom of this blog post is one of a kind, but this bad boy is super super rare. You may remember
twelve years ago when I was able to part our good buddy Rush Pedder with his beloved Dukes swim trunks. It wasn't easy, but that was one of my first big acquisitions that took place after, and basically because, I started this blog. I don't think I would have met Rush if it wasn't for ol' DukesCollector. Those trunks are a prized piece in the collection, and I felt pretty great about owning them, until later that year when I saw
Dave DeWitt's Coy and Vance version of the trunks in his beautiful traveling museum. I still feel great about the original pair of trunks, but I finally, after a dozen years of looking, added the Coy and Vance pair to my collection.
These little blue trunks are in perfect condition. They appear to never have been worn. Every once in a while an item pops up on ebay at a too good to be true buy it now price, and it turns out to be true. I was very fortunate to jump on these right away and at a decent price.
The Coy and Vance pair are slightly bigger than my Bo and Luke pair as they came in different sizes. They have the same graphic of the General Lee, but Bo and Luke's image is larger. I'm pretty sure this drawing of the Gen'ral is unique to these trunks and not used anywhere else.
The C&V pair was released in 1983. It must have been a tough time for memorabilia manufacturers to remake so many items with Coy and Vance's likeness and replace Bo and Luke. I guess "so many" is an overstatement as there are maybe two handfuls of items that this happened on.
The B&L version came out two years prior in 1981. These Coy and Vance trunks are incredibly rare. The Bo and Luke ones are rare and the other ones had to have a smaller production number. I am very excited to add them to the collection. This is a great addition!
Next up are a few pieces of Dukes kids clothes that I thought were fun and I jumped on. I have quite a few articles of Dukes clothes for youngins. There was much more kids clothing produced in the golden era than there were adult attire. That changed in the silver and modern eras as the newer clothes were geared toward the same consumers who had grown up. These days
Cooter's is THE place to get Dukes garb and they have a variety to fit Dukes fans of all ages.
This is a fun Boss Hogg pajama top that I picked up on ebay because I just love the image. Boss looks like them Dukes just foiled another one of his schemes. Them Dukes, them Dukes! I love how the Ss are subtle money signs. You almost miss that little addition. I'm a sucker for anything Boss Hogg related. He is such a great character!
Next up is a logo t-shirt, that, if it wasn't kid sized, I would totally wear today.
The font is very uncharacteristically Dukes. It looks so '70s and almost disco-y. I could totally see a kid in a Sears catalog wearing this shirt and bellbottoms. This shirt is great.
This final piece of Dukes kids wear before we get to the showstopper piece features the one and only Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane!
Rosco is counting money and without question making his iconic kew kew kew laugh. Boss must have just given Rosco his twenty percent of his twenty percent of the undoubtedly dirty money. I wonder about the kids that wore Boss and Rosco shirts to school back then. Were they looked at as villains, or just fun characters? Did other kids wear Cobra or Skeletor shirts? How about Doctor Doom or Lex Luthor shirts? Nah, Boss and Rosco were so good at being bad that everyone loved them. I love having these shirts in the collection. What's the best way to display t-shirts?
Ok, here it is. The item I've been bragging about all this time. This is an Inter-Office Memo from Warner Bros that was never meant to be seen outside of the studio. This piece is amazing.
Before we go any further, I want to discuss the parties involved. William Raynor was a writer on the Dukes in California and wrote some great episodes. He wrote many of my favorites including The Meeting, Carnival of Thrills, The Dukes Meet Cale Yarborough, Baa Baa White Sheep, 10 Million Dollar Sheriff, Birds Gotta Fly and twenty seven others. He was responsible for many classic Dukes moments. Al Garbade was a friend of William's that lived in Felda, Florida. Mike B. is a new friend of the blog from Michigan that had the piece for over twenty-five years since his mom bought it at an antique store along with some Dukes autographs. Now that we know the players, we can begin the story of what exactly this is and how it's flown all over the country to arrive in my collection here in Pennsylvania.
Above is the original envelope it came in. It has the WB logo on it and below Wm.'s name is "Dukes of Hazzard #166998." I wonder if that number was a designation for the production or something. Just an envelope with WB and Dukes signage would be cool to have. But this one has such a cool story.
Al didn't tear the envelope too bad when he received the correspondence decades ago. Thanks for keeping it mostly intact Al!
The back of the envelope has the address to the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California.
Along with the actual memo, William sent a note to his good buddy Al. This is the adult language part I noted in the title of the blog. Nothing too bad, but it would make this article TV14 or PG-13. It was the '70s, anything goes. So Mr. Raynor is letting Mr. Garbade know about the hoops he has to go thru to "immortalize his friends." What does that mean? The actual memo provides a lot of great info.
Now this is the meat of the package. This is an actual memo that was sent around the production office during preproduction of the season two episode Road Pirates. Road Pirates is a great episode where Boss buys stolen TVs with the intention to resell them, but they are stolen from him and he tries to pin it on the Duke Boys and Cletus, who is filling in for Enos. The character who sold Boss the TVs and steals them back from him is named Marty Garbade. That sounds familiar.
The point of the memo is to make sure names of characters and business in the show are not accidentally real names or close to real names. Have you ever seen the fictitious persons disclaimer in the credits of movies and shows that says something like "This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental." Well apparently it's someone's job to make sure the coincidence doesn't get too close to the actual. Writers like William have to come up with fake names and some rely on names of their friends to include in their work. It seems that William used Al's last name when he came up with this week's bad guy and someone at the studio figured it would be a good idea to give Garbade a first name so actions wouldn't offend the Garbades that live anywhere near where the fictional Hazzard County might be. Since the Garbade in question is based in Atlanta, the studio worker checked the phone books from Atlanta and found there is a Jennigs and a P.E. there and suggested giving the character a first name so these two people wouldn't "file a claim against us." That seems like a lot of work just to clear a name. William wasn't lying in his note to Al. Seems like William landed on naming the fictional Marty Garbade, so Jennings and P.E. wouldn't sue. That turned out to be the right move, because Google tells me that Jennings Garbade is a lawyer in Atlanta that has been active since 1974. WB dodged a bullet there. Nothing showed up on P.E.
William probably made the checkmark on the page before he sent it to Al so Al would know what he was talking about on the note. I'm sure William had no idea Al would keep this memo and it would go from Florida to Michigan to Pennsylvania over the next four decades. I've never seen another memo like this and it offers such an interesting glimpse in the behind the scenes office work that goes into the production of a television show. William didn't just send the page that mentions Al's surname, but the entire three page memo and there is so much fun information on it.
The heavy hitters of the Dukes production team are all mentioned at the top of the memo. Rod Amateau, Gy Waldron, Skip Ward and Ralph Riskin are all names we're familiar with because we love to watch Rosco chase the Duke Boys around that tree during the closing credits and these names all appear on screen. We know Gy Waldron created the show and the rest were producers and writers. They all probably handled this memo. The memo was written my Linda Kodis, who Google tells me was a paralegal and script supervisor during her time with Warner Bros and addressed to Paul Picard, the legendary producer of the Dukes.
In addition to the paragraph about Garbade, there's info about the use of a nitrous oxide injector, which Bo and Luke install on Cletus's patrol car. Linda or someone in the legal department had to call mechanics in the area to make sure the use in the show makes sense. They also had to check the yellow pages and white pages to see if there is any store called "Tri-Counties Video" and contact Southern Bell, the phone company in Atlanta, to make sure there are no phone numbers that start with 999 in the area. That's a lot of checking.
And it goes on! Page two has more cool references. We learn that Boss has a relative named Agnes so the legal team had to make sure there was no Agnes Hogg in Hazard, Kentucky. This is interesting as the first page only mentions Atlanta, but now we are moving in to Kentucky and Hazard, the town that loved the Dukes and
hosted the cast several times in their Black Gold Festival. You might also remember
Carroll Fugate, a politician from Hazard, who took his admiration for Boss Hogg and his antics a little too far.
There's also direction about not showing the the newspaper and clearing any music used. The bad guys are called "Heavies" and one of their names needs to have the spelling changed. The first use of Colonial City is challenged and cleared. So much checking and clearing. Each scene and line is referenced with the corresponding page of the script on the left.
The final page has fun information too. Several of the passages are about not showing manufacture names on the boxes and crates of the stereo and TV equipment. There's also mention of the store names on the trucks, "Stereo City" and "Southern Express Co." that are both cleared. Scene 141 , page 47 is very interesting because it mentions a real highway in Georgia but is cleared to be used because the highway runs through the entire state and would not "pin-point" the location of Hazzard County. The producers were very serious about keeping the actual location of our beloved fictional County a mystery.
There is so much info on these few pages. The envelope and the personalized note really add to it as well. William sent this note to Al in June of 1979. Both William and Al passed away in the early '90s. Sometime in the late '90s or early 2000s the letter with the note and envelope ended up in an antique store along with some autographed pictures from the Dukes. Our pal Mike B.'s mom purchased the package from the store in Florida and Mike had the now collectible in his possession in Michigan for the last twenty five years. Through the power of this blog, Mike reached out to me about adding it to my collection. I love when that happens. So the piece went from getting printed in California, to mailed to Florida, to purchased in Florida and taken to Michigan to shipped to me in Pennsylvania. That's a good bit of travel for this piece of Dukes history. I have scripts and call sheets that tell me a lot about the production of the Dukes of Hazzard, but this document added a different level of information and fact checking that goes into a production. I'm so excited and grateful that Mike entrusted me with this collectible and it will be a cherished part of the Dukes of Hazzard collection.
No comments:
Post a Comment