Former Actor: Avoid Exposure to 'Sleazed Up' Film Version of Dukes
by Jim Brown
July 18, 2005
(AgapePress) - A former star of The Dukes of Hazzard TV show is urging families to skip the upcoming movie version unless Warner Brothers cleans it up.Ben Jones, who played the mechanic "Cooter" on the popular television series, says profanity and sexual content in the PG-13 film are a "sleazy insult," akin to taking I Love Lucy and "making her a crackhead."
"Other than Daisy's shorts, our show did not have any of that [suggestive content]," Jones says. "[O]n our show, nobody got hurt, nobody cussed, nobody bled, the good guys won, and the Duke boys were heroes because they always made the right moral choice."
He says the reason The Dukes of Hazzard is still a hit today on Country Music Television is that "American families are crying out for old-fashioned, clean entertainment." But according to Jones, Warner Brothers has taken a family show and turned it into something "rough, foul, and raunchy."
"It's filled with profanity and sexual situations and sexual innuendo -- and to us, it's like they didn't honor our show as a great family show," he says. "They kind of sleazed it. They trashed it."
Jones, a former Georgia congressman, says Dukes fans should boycott the film unless producer Warner Brothers removes the foul content before the movie is released on August 5. "Unless they clean it up, I'm just saying to Dukes fans that I know: don't go to see this one. Especially, don't take your kids to see it thinking you're going to see a reflection of our show."
"I sent a five-page e-mail to one of the producers, explaining why I thought the show worked and why it's become a classic and how important it was to America's families -- and they never answered my e-mail," he explains. "So, that's sort of the way they treated the original cast."
He contends that since R-rated movies are not making money anymore, Hollywood has put as much of that R-rated material as it can into PG-13 movies.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
