Cooter's Limited Edition 2020 Hazzard County Christmas Ornaments

Christmas comes to Hazzard County!  Cooter's has given Hazzard Nation a whole bunch of presents this year in the form of beautiful handmade Christmas ornaments styled after all of our favorite Dukes vehicles.  

The boxes are designed with fun holiday details and little Dukes references that I'm not going to spoil.  

Front and center is the General Lee.  Cooter's design team did an excellent job getting all the little  Gen'ral details right.  The push bar, the vector wheels, it's all there.  

  

CNH 320 adorns the rear end.  This is a great ornament.  

After the General Lee, we get some really fun and different pieces.  First up is Boss's Caddy.  I love it.  

The cars have a great cartoonish design that really works.  The license plates have the character names on them.  

Rosco's patrol car is ready to chase the General Lee all around your Christmas tree.  If you don't watch out, he might crash the entire tree!  It'll be a horrendous crash!

Buckle up for safety, cause you know the tree could get scuffed!

Next up is Dixie's Jeep.  2020 has really been the year of the Dixie Jeep.  I love the Dixie logo on the hood.  

Daisy is on the plate.  

The Golden Eagle is beautiful on the hood.  I love that bird!  I really do!

The star of this show is Cooter's Tow Truck.  It's great when you can buy Cooter's truck at Cooter's Place.  Michael and the design team nailed this one.  It looks great.  

The license plate is on the front of this one.  It just looks better there.  

The Hazzard County Garage logo is on both doors and is perfect.  Each one of these ornaments are great.  

There's a Cooter's sticker on the bottom of each ornament that reads "Limited Edition Handmade Ornament."  It also has 2020 on it.  I love limited editions.  

Oh yeah, one more thing, each ornament has a sound feature built in!  The General Lee, Dixie Jeep, and Boss's Caddy play the dixie horn.  The patrol car has a siren.  Cooter's tow truck, which is definitely the center piece here, has a sound clip from Crazy Cooter himself!  Check out the video above to hear each one.  

These ornaments are limited and won't last.  Add them to your collection before they jump the pond and are never seen again.  You can get them at any of the three Cooter's locations and of course from CootersPlace.com.  

New Dukes Stuff - 2/26/2015 - Framed Picture, Shirts, 45 Record

More Dukes of Hazzard items to add to the collection!  I love writing these blogs.  I have as much fun sharing my stuff as I do getting it.

First up is a 45 record by the band The Untamed Youth.  The song is called My General Lee.  The artwork is taken directly from the the Dukes album released in 1981.

I really didn't know what to expect with this single.  I've seen it on ebay a few times and never paid much attention to it,  But when I find something for a good price, I buy it.  The record is in perfect condition.  Wikipedia tells me The Untamed You was a popular garage rock and surf rock band that was around from the mid '80s to the late '90s.  I wasn't sure if the song would be vulgar or disrespectful to the Dukes.  I listened to it on youtube and was pleasantly surprised.

I've embedded the song above.  Give it a listen.  It has a real '60s Beach Boys vibe to it.  You can tell the band really loved the Dukes and the Gen'ral.  The synthesized Dixie Horn kind of hurts my ears, but other than that, it is a fun song and I'm glad I have it on vinyl.

The flip side of the record has a song called Tidewater Jack by Southern Culture on the Skids.  They seem to be a similar surf rock band.  I don't think either side of this record was ever played.

Next, I got a couple of shirts from our pals at 80stees.com.  If they get new Dukes shirts, I buy them immediately.

The first one also has the artwork from the original album on it.  This shirt is very similar to one released two years ago.  It has the same artwork, but the other one is a lighter blue.  Both of these shirts are produced by Ripple Junction.

These shirts have very nice tags on them.

The other shirt is the same color blue and has a familiar picture of our favorite flying orange clunker car.

This image was used on a gray shirt that was released by Target that had the movie logo behind it.  This one obviously has the show logo.  This image was also used on many promotional shots for the movie.  In fact, it is the image I use for my phone background, and have for quite some time.   The image has been made to look vintage.  One thing I noticed is whoever made this shirt pays attention to detail and knows their Dukes.  The tires on this picture have been edited.  We all know that they didn't change the General Lee much for the movie, but one thing that differentiates the show and movie car is the white lettering on the tires.  Last time we saw this image used, and every time before that, it had the white letters.  This shirt is clearly a show shirt, like all the items released in the last nine years, and it was edited to represent the show General Lee.  Great job Ripple Junction.  I appreciate your eye for detail.  

This shirt has the same tags.

Inside, the shirts have a printed Dukes logo as well as Ripple Junction.  I really love seeing products with the 2015 copyright year on them.  Let's hope we get several this year.

My last addition today is a gem.  This is a 12" by 15" picture of the cast in the original frame behind glass.  This is a rare piece and I was super excited to find it.

I expected the back to have the National Picture and Frame sticker on it like a few other Dukes pictures have, but this one is blank.

This is a big picture.  Here is a standard CD (that happens to be the movie soundtrack) compared to the picture.

The bottom of the picture has a Dukes logo as well as Warner Bros. Inc. 1981 and the rebel flag.  I also included a good shot of ol' Flash in the picture.  He doesn't look too happy, but he never really did.

This is my favorite group shot of the cast.  They look like they are genuinely laughing at something.  Especially Daisy and Rosco.  There are a few different shots from this photo shoot on other products.  This is the best one.  I really love this picture and I'm very happy to add it to the collection.  It will be hung in a prominent place.  

Hallmark Keepsake 2014 Dukes of Hazzard Jumpin' General Lee Christmas Ornament

I just got back from the beach, and it's already time to talk about Christmas.  I've been dreaming about this product for years.  Hallmark has finally released an ornament dedicated to the most popular star car in the world.  This is the 2014 Hallmark Keepsake Dukes of Hazzard Jumpin' General Lee Christmas tree ornament.

Hallmark released several Batmobiles, Ecto-1, Back to the Future's Time Machine, and last year even released KITT.  I just knew the General was on the way.  The box is designed like other current Hallmark ornaments.

The back has a nice paragraph about the Dukes and the General.  It is refreshing to see a different line of copy than the same old paragraph we get on nearly every JL and AW release.  It is also noted that this piece is crafted by Hallmark artist Steve Goslin.  This is a nice feature.  We're barely ever told who is directly responsible to creating pieces like this.  Great job Steve, welcome to Hazzard County.

The other sides of the box are Christmas themed and the top has 2014 on it.  There are very dedicated Hallmark ornament collectors out there.  I'm happy that our hobbies have intersected.

The bottom of the box has WB's shield and logo as well as Dodge's copyright info.

The ornament itself is very nice.  The other cars released by Hallmark as ornaments aren't in action poses.  It seems to me the Hallmark was ordered by WB to creatively hide a major part of the General Lee.   They used a barn-bustin' scene to incorporate the show logo and hide the flag.  They achieved the WB directive nicely.

Because the car is meant to hang from the branches of your Christmas tree, it wasn't designed to stand on all fours.  When placed on a flat surface, the "barn door" prohibits the back wheels from touching the ground.

The Dukes logo looks nice against the faux wood.  From this angle it looks like we have a "bald General Lee" situation.

But upon further review, the flag is there, it's just hard to see because it is not properly lined in white.  Nice to see a little of it.

The license plate says 2014.  That is a creative way to date the ornament.  Very nice touch by artist Steve Goslin.

The car is very attractive, and with a tiny but of help, it displays very nice on a flat surface.

There is a lot of detail in the car.

The back of the door does not have anything on it.  The General Lee text is a little big as it goes the length of the roof, but if it were kept to scale, it would be entirely covered up by the barn door.  Steve Goslin made the right choice in enlarging it.

The bottom of the car has the year, WB, Chrysler, and Hallmark on it.

The size of the car falls roughly between a standard 1/64 diecast and the Rough Rider General Lee.  Luckily I have the loose Rough Rider General Lee around because I recently bought it.  Funny how that works out.

The ornament is slightly longer than the 1/64.  It's hard to tell exactly the difference because of the angles.

When the ornament is not propped up, you can see the difference better.  

The Rough Rider is just a tad longer.

From above you can see the size difference better.

I would say the car is roughly 1/52.  That's a number I totally just made up.

The car is very detailed.  The best detail has to be the vector wheels.  This is the best rendition of the Gen'ral's wheels on nearly any model car.  I would put these wheel replicas up against the Auto World 1/18 and 1/43 models.  They look great.  Why can't there be a just slightly smaller version of this wheel on a 1/64?

The push bar on the car also looks very good.  Steve Goslin did his homework.  I love seeing a new product that is not based on any other previously released item.

The 01 isn't perfect.  It looks very good, but the angles are a little off.

My only criticism is the shape of the Charger body.  It looks a little compressed.  But only if you look at directly at the profile of the car.  From all other angles, it looks great.

Last year Hallmark released KITT in Keepsake Ornament form.  You knew I was going to compare the two.

The biggest difference between them is the General Lee's lack of lights and sound.  KITT's scanner lights up and he talks.  The General has no electronics.  It could be due to KITT relying on technology to become a supercar where the Gen'ral uses raw horse power.  Or not.  Waylon's iconic theme song, the Dixie horn, or even a yee-haw would have been a welcome addition to the Dukes ornament, but I'm not complaining.

KITT isn't turbo boosting.  He isn't performing an action shot like the General is.

Knight Industries Two Thousand is slightly larger.  They look to be about the same size, but in reality a Charger is larger than a Trans Am so the General should be slightly bigger if they were the same scale.

The General Lee rests nicely when propped up on KITT.  It almost looks like the KITT ornament was designed to be the base for the General Lee Ornament.  This is exactly how everyone should display the two ornaments.

The General Lee will always be a better car than KITT, and Hallmark knows it.  These two car ornaments look great showing it as well.