Put Up Yer Dukes - There's Only One Daisy in this County, Darlin'

I was strangely (or sadly) optimistic upon learning that a big screen translation of hillbilly hellions, The Dukes of Hazzard, was to cousin kiss its way into theaters and back into trailer park hearts the world over. I’m in the vast minority of coherent persons who categorically loved most everything about Super Troopers and even Club Dread had moments of bastard brilliance in there somewhere, so when I learned that the director of said flicks (Jay Chandrasekhar) was set to helm the white trash revival, I broke out the moonshine martinis and cocktail weenies! YeeHAW! The redneck renegade in all of us would have a new shade of hick-stick to add to our color palette. The Good ol’ Boys, sneaky Uncle Jesse, backwoods bad ass Boss Hog and the prized piece de resistance; the Hemi-Orange ’69 Dodge Charger, - The General Lee. Now, who would squeeze into the trade mark Daisy Duke shorts like a second skin and adopt the Dixie dame persona of their namesake? Jessica Simpson!? The broad-cast “bimbo” who cleverly turned being a bubble headed blonde into a marketable commodity?

No doubt about it, Simpson is a fox, and the denim derrier she carries around with her ain’t so bad either, but what of the original gal from Hazzard County, Catherine Bach? Bach played Daisy from 1979-85 and my young prepubescent friends and I were utterly in love with her (I had a poster of her tacked up behind my bedroom door – with her lil’ white jeep). With her southern accent ablazin’, Bach was the cousin we all wanted to play perverted possum with, long before we knew how utterly creepy that is. There’s no way that you can convince me that on at least one hot Hazzard night after too much homebrew, Bo and Luke didn’t try to get frisky with their slinky cousin. It had to have happened, most likely in the back of the soggy seat General Lee. Daisy was the real reason why Enus, Roscoe P. Coltrane and Boss Hog were trying to run the boys out of town, they wanted her to themselves and Bach knew this. Bach played her as the ultimate girl next door (to the trailer park) and if it wasn’t for her character (and the vehicular mayhem) the show would’ve been emptier than a gun rack at New Years Eve.

Does songbird Simpson achieve this? I guess we’ll know when Hazzard hits theaters this weekend but in the meantime, catch a re-run of the Dukes on TV sometime and reaffirm why there’ll only ever be one true Daisy Duke. The slut shall rise again!

iPod played “Bob Denver - Thank God I'm A Country Boy” while posting