$4.5 million for 3 seconds of General Lee airtime

You're just going to go and jump out of the car tada. My dream as a child was always to see flying in

general

. No. I knew Bo Luke and Daisy weren't the people who jumped cars. I had enough knowledge to know that they were specialists and all this. It dates back to the Hollywood star cars of the 70s and 80s that were drastically more impressive than the transformers, but the

general

license became an obsession for me to not only build one and become friends with not only Bo Luke and Daisy, Kathy John and Tom, but also specialists Wyatt Jr.

Henry Kenji Corey Eubanks, all these amazing stuntmen who went from Knight Rider to Duke's Hazzard, a scapegoat for all these shows that had TV star cars, the overall lead received more fan mail than any of the actors on the show to the point that Warner Brothers started sending out little cards and instead of telling Billy, you know, you love General Lee, they had a tire brand and that was the general's autograph. They are valuable, but you can still find the small postcards in general. that Warner Brothers would launch after putting together what quickly became Dukes in 2001 and...

I did something called a fan club convention in North America and for some reason my little house in Indianapolis was a Dukes mecca of Hazzard, what he does It makes absolutely no sense, but I was chasing the stuntmen and talking to them and the special effects guys and in the later seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard they were jumping miniatures, it wasn't the best thing you've ever seen , but someone had to do it. that and Jack Sessoms was a huge miniature guy and I chased him down, I knocked on his door in Redlands California, he's like you're here for what and unlike the Dukes my goal was to fly in general and like I said, we made a condition. in 2001 2002 and I didn't fly with Bo Luke, Daisy and I, and we did it at Ben Jones, this place at Cooter's and in Summerville Virginia, but the original mechanics were Tom Cimento Rich Septon and AJ Thrasher and they built all of these General.

Lee's and they had all these amazing stories about everything that went into building cars that made them fly because Dodge never built a plane and any car like that, the General Lee, the '69 Dodge Charger in '68 and '70, really, they're all cars. unibody. so every time they are 2 or 3 feet off the ground, they disappear, that's over, so they destroyed 321 Dodge cards to play one overall for 7 seasons of Dukes of Hazzard, but you can double that number in the cars of police because when At that moment, Rosco ran and ate us, he ran again and Cletus and we were down three police cars and they were going to look for me three more.

I wanted to see the car fly. It was never my idea. It was just like that. Whatever it is, Septon so rich, one of the Dukes of Hazzard mechanics, I flew him to one of the conventions and he flew home with Corey Eubanks sitting next to him on the flight and he called me, he's like Travis, You ruined it and the rich always liked it. to tease me, I thought, man, did you have a terrible flight? I had no idea why he was so mad at me and he said you sat me next to Cory on the plane, this guy had body odor, I mean what's wrong with Cory?

Cory cool Bob Eubanks from his dad from the newlywed game said we want to jump a car we started talking about it all the way home he said if you get a car we'll jump it and I'm like where do we start? of semi-difficult vehicle fine in 1969 Dodge Charger who will let us jump a car there are two brothers in the state of Washington who donated a 68 Dodge Charger they painted it and everything every time you see a two-wheeled car it's called skiing a car He is one of the Smith brothers who they passed were obsessed with the Dukes of Hazzard also when they were children and now they themselves have become specialists or at least Jamie has donated this car, he brought it running and driving it had more bondo than his local body shop on it but we were going to destroy it anyway we cut off the 68 taillights we put 69 ID on it looked like overall we're going to destroy this car so we sent it to another mechanic in North Carolina he put in the roll cages on it, just in case, whenever there was a bad guy in Hazzard County, he always drove the Malibu for some reason.

I have no idea why all the bad guys like Ford or Malibu, so we bought a four-door Malibu. I bought two police cars with roll cages, so we had a Hazzard County police car, a Chickasaw police car, of course, a four-door Malibu, and generally we just needed a place to do all these things , so I approached the city of Covington, Georgia, they were the first. Five episodes of Dukes and Omaha were filmed. I know it's going to bring in all this money and everything I want to do, I just need a place to jump the car because that's where the original jump happened on Saturday 11 November 1978 at Oxford College, in front of Seanie Hall, it was usually jumped on the Day of Veterans because they knew the dean of students was going to be like that that day and they knew they could give, they said they told this university they were going to.

I drove around campus a little bit and all these college students woke up to a 69 charger jumping in front of the dean's office, basically, so I told the Chamber of Commerce to please let me jump a car here in Covington, Georgia, and I mean. They are filming famous for in the heat of the night a lot of other things that in Cannonball Run they landed the plane in the same square that is Hazzard Square, it is the same place where they passed me a couple of people like this crazy Yankee. is here to jump a car that can take care of it so there was a really cool guy for the parks department and they had a place called Soldier Field and Cummington Georgia this is basically softball diamonds that's what it is so They said if you get all the permits and permits and everything you need and rent the field you can jump the car and I mean it's a green light like someone gave us the green light to put a '69 Dodge Charger in the air and you know , express it.

We're going to bring in all the right specialists and this is all different and I went home thinking: how the hell are we going to do this? The most important thing you said is that you need insurance, where are you going to get insurance to jump? in the '69 Dodge Charger, so of course everyone said no, but Lloyd's of London said yes and for that day, let's move on to the General Lee and I'm flying very well, we took seven specialists, all the original mechanics who built the car they built the ramp in front of Soldier Field and everything for 24 hours I had 4.5

million

dollars in insurance to jump a car when I was doing all the press conferences for this or press releases I was doing all these press releases I was sending out releases press fax from my department that this was going to happen and we're talking about color IDs that weren't involved in the phone and he like it was like a box so I got a call in my office that day before all of this happened and it said Warner Brothers on this and I'm like, oh my God, I have all this money and all this stuff and insurance and I approved everything and they're going to shut us down because we're skipping the car note, can you?

You can't protect a name unless it's your name, you can't protect a flag, you can't protect a number and Dodge owns the rights to the Charger, so the Charger is the flag and the General Lee are someone else's things, so that I. I'm sitting there, well, Warner Brothers can't say anything about this, so I answer the phone, the gentleman says Travis Bell and I said yes, he said Greg Silverman's office and I said yes, he said wait for Mr. Silverman and I were like, "Oh man, I'm good," I said Mr. Bell, well you know my name is Greg Silverman, he said your event was coming up and I said yeah, in about three weeks, like there wasn't any. way we could close this, what are you waiting for?

And I said, I don't know, I'm expecting between 200 and 5,000 people. I don't know how many people are going to show up. I'm faxing press releases from my apartment and this is a pre-Facebook thing, like this is a website and message boards. He said well, I'm kicking around an idea for Dukes of Hazzard. movie but I can go there or send some people there but they won't know I'm there and I said okay so I woke up that morning and I had been there for a week and I was following the plan and putting up all these t-shirt barriers and all of that so that if the car decided to spin, it didn't kill everyone in the field that day and it was raining sideways that morning and I'm talking about heavy Georgia rain.

I have four point five

million

. dollars and this car has to fly today, but we got to Soldier Field and it was soaking wet, there was a line of people ready to get in. I had to hire some local police officers, super cool people who came in and of course were used. In South Hollywood, they're used to everything that comes there and one of them noticed that the police officer I was like Payson and he said, "give it a second." It probably stopped raining around 12:00 and what time do you jump into this. car I told the man to go 12 laps, sunny, beautiful outside, he dries with one of the police cars, one of the most veteran specialists, his name is Y Jr. and he's a blonde guy, he would double Bo Duke John Schneider, Travis said, I'm in a barrel, this police car before they jump out and they built a pipe ramp and a whole rope cage, he's there so you know they had this bunch of chasing the little bad boy and whatever else and of course Rosco's car goes this direction and the Chickasaw car, the green and white car that launches, lands on all four wheels and of course everyone The specialists run and give him the go-ahead and he is fine, they shoot.

They took him out and let him fall on the ground and you know, because they're the fraternity of lunatics and they themselves came up and said Travis, that's the last time I'm doing that. I don't really know if it was a clean bill of health or not, but he wanted to do it one more time, so the final stunt of his long career was running over a car for an Indianapolis disc jockey in Covington, Georgia, with a group of his friends in front. to 5000 of those closest to him. Friends, you've just met card barrels and it's starting to dry out and now it's time to jump.

In general, everything that I have hoped for since January 26, 1979 is about to happen. I borrowed a microphone and speaker so I could talk to these people. So some idiot didn't run out of the car and they had generally backed up to this side street and they didn't have keys to the door that they brought in with the currents, they cut it with bolt cutters to open the door. and they put the ramp about 80 feet away from the door and we parked the bad guy's car there and then the other Roscoe police car because if they usually landed and got out of control they were going to hit it with one of the cars.

We were jumping on the same police car that usually jumped first. We put the police car into position, which was Rosco's first police car here, so this is a Dukes of Hazzard relic that I'm about to jump into a car that's full of bondo on a softball diamond with 5,000 people on both sides and it's wet and it's not good, so they back the car all the way up, let it rip, the car comes down the street, enters the field and backs up pretty hard because I came off the street pretty hard, but it backed up when I hit the ramp and the back came up and Cory was coming hot and he went flying 181 feet later he landed on his nose because we didn't put any weight in the trunk because we were going to go Burton jump the car tada you know we jumped over the original police car of Priceless Roscoe is a Dukes of Hazzard relic for everyone but here and Cory Elaine's nose first and then he goes to the end of Dover and now he's facing in the air in the wrong direction and both cars come out to hit him because we don't know where is it, if there is a fence approaching and we are on wet grass with a car sliding out of control, it landed on all four of us. the wheels slid back they stopped and he got out and there's a video of me like running after him with my hands in the air because I'm doing oh what did I just see and from my position he goes towards the crowd, he gets out and he says, I wiped out the police car and said, yeah, you did all these Dukes festivals and all these people who are now jumping cars and all these other people who risk their lives and then do some cool things.

That car started, it had not been in the air since 1984 and that day in 2003 we made history with a flight for the 25th anniversary of the General Lee. Needless to say, the car was in pieces and there was a puncture in the gas tank of the better course of fire. out there putting it out or spraying it and it seems to me that I made this like a mess, like it was as big as a razor when we were done, it was bad, bad, but of course we didn't expect it to survive. I just didn't expect it to be that bad, there were probably about a hundred General Lees there to see this at a big festival and they went to Covington Square.

I took the car to the police station, what was left of the car on the back of a platform because people were removing parts of it because it's the day25 and that's the story of Jukes of Hazzard and I came back and it was just me and this Soldier Field and it was quiet and that was it and my daughter was very young at the time and my mom and dad gave her a choice and said: you want to go to Disneyland with grandma and grandpa or you want to go see dad jump on the General Lee and my daughter had lived with the General Lee her whole life.

It was just a family member, so of course she didn't choose the general, she chose to go to Disney World, so I called my mom and sat there saying we did it, you know, we did it. she It's like what I'm going, we jumped the car and she was oh yeah and I was like yeah, yeah and then I started crying like a baby and I couldn't stop, it was police they stopped the road and then it was over and everything and It was silent and everything this job we went back and that car was sold, we sold it to a collector, but everything beyond that is now done, you know, so I appreciate that they're still jumping cars and they're still interested in the Dukes of Hazzard and Now they're jumping Trans Am for smoking the Bandit front folks and stuff like that, but we were the first ones to do it.

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