Goodbye, Bandit

I'm not the type of guy who gets all hung up on celebrities. They're just regular people like me. They put their pants on one leg at a time just as I do. In many cases they have more miserable lives than we common folk. They simply have more money to help them through it. Celebrity worship just isn't my style.

Burt Reynolds died yesterday. He was far from my favorite actor and I really didn't pay attention to him other than in two movies I really liked. "Smokey and the Bandit" as well as the original "The Longest Yard". Both movies are timeless classics in their own right.

I'm only making this post about Burt Reynolds because of a very vivid memory I have. I remember my parents talking us to see Smokey and the Bandit at the theater in 1977. I was 10 years old. If you are at all familiar with this movie, you know it definitely wasn't for kids. However, I don't fault my parents for taking us to see it. It had bad language, but heck, we kids heard that stuff every day. No big deal. There was one minor love scene, but everything was left to the viewer's imagination. For a 10 year old boy my knowledge of "love" was super limited so my imagination didn't go very far. Once again, no big deal. I remember the movie being highly entertaining. What 10 year old boy wouldn't enjoy what amounted to a two hour, half way across the country car chase? I remember my dad just howling with laughter, and I remember how much we all enjoyed it (even if it was a little risqué).

The apple must not fall very far from the tree. Michael loves this movie too. In fact, the movie's theme song (Eastbound and Down) is my ringtone for Michael's phone calls. What can I say? The kid has good taste in movies.

I have good memories of Smokey and the Bandit. It makes me sad to think that ol' Bandit is gone. Goodbye, Bandit. Thanks for a fun movie.