Flipping through the channels in a half-awake haze last night, I stopped on The Dukes of Hazzard. Caught the last 15 minutes of an episode that I'll guess originally aired in 1980. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I don't know how many years it had been since I'd seen an episode of the Dukes. Many.

Isn't it strange when you see something like this for the first time in a long, long time...? That flood of memories and associations. Old friends come to mind, whose names I haven't thought of in twenty years. I recalled a kid named John Tehan, whose family moved in to the D'Antonio's house in the eleven o'clock position on our cul-de-sac. Yea. John and I loved watching the Dukes. And eating graham crackers. His mother would only allow us to eat graham crackers and milk. That's it. Ever. John moved to England in 82. Think it was 82. Doesn't matter.

I'll guess this episode was called "The Legend of Daisy's Song", going by the ever-present narration throughout the Dukes stories. When I first landed on this channel (CMT, whatever that stands for) the Dukes were being chased (of course) but they weren't in the General Lee. They were driving some yellow muscle car with a big black stripe. I vaguely remember this car as being "pre General Lee", but I was probably twelve the last time a Dukes concept occupied my mind, so I don't trust that memory.

Anyway, I was struck by the strangeness of the action. Rosco P. Coltrane and his likable simpleton sidekick Enos pull over the Duke boys. This happened in Every. Single. Episode. This time, as Rosco accuses them of this or that with his twitchy nose and double-takes, Bo Duke casually reaches under his seat, picks up a stick of dynamite, lights it, and hands it to officer Coltrane. Rosco does his Dup! DyaDya Dup!, and hands the bomb to Enos, who in turn tosses it under their police car.

BOOM!

The Dukes burn rubber outa there and yell YeeeeeeeeHaaa!, leaving Rosco to say Dup! DyaDya Dup! Enos! in a cloud of dust. Foiled again, those modern day keystone cops of the country. But it hit me: To so nonchalantly solve your problems with the police by handing them a live stick of dynamite, is...well, it's hilarious.

Then there's the follow-up action, the plot culmination (if you will.) The story involved some sort of a cabal of black market record makers, or some weird backwoods shit like that. It didn't really matter in the end, because minutes later Bo and Luke were in the same room as Rosco and Enos and the dynamite incident wasn't even brought up, let alone cause to put them in jail for attempted murder, aggravated assault, destruction of police property, etc. Rosco was too busy barking about the temporary antagonists of the story and their twisted plot, which was foiled by a Winnebago full of screaming girls wearing those 1980 rounded shorts with the stripes up the side. I guess they made all the bad guys sexually curious so they'd come out of hiding. They fell for it, mumbling, and were quickly busted by the FBI, who timed their arrival in their blue sedan just perfectly. Without context it was good and confusing, which is the best way to serve the Dukes. None of it mattered anyway. Every Dukes episode was about the YeeeeeeeeeHA! and the cloud of dust and the Boss Hogg gluttony/avarice thing and the Dup! DyaDya Dup! Enos!

Oh, the chuckling. A shake-the-bed, 5-minute chuckle. In the end, the narrator reveals that this whole deal was about fifty bucks that Daisy had lost. I couldn't keep my stomach still. There was the FBI, in the middle of Booneville, chasing down a bunch of criminal dolts, unwittingly receiving the unintended help of the Dukes, who had their own agenda...which I suppose was to get Daisy her fifty bucks back. And blow up a police car.

But that's not all. While the FBI is cuffing the bad guys and the Hazzard sheriffs are doing their end-of-episode bumbling and the Winnebago chicks are yammering, Bo Duke pulls a compound bow from his car, lights a stick of dynamite taped to an arrow, and fires it at a nearby barn.

BOOM!

Why? To close out the show with a gratuitous explosion, of course. He even fired two of them. He blew up the blown up barn. It was brilliant. Now I remember why I had a General Lee and a Bo Duke action figure.