Toledo pride! Catch it!
Reason No. 2,381: We boast a Duke brother. Yee haw.
A Bo Duke, specifically. Sort of.
This week brings the made-for-DVD release of the harmless but ominously titled The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning (Warner Bros., $27.95). I assure you, any similarity to a horror movie is purely unintentional. This thing s broad, sunny, doe-eyed, weirdly sentimental. As direct-to-video prequels go, you might even say Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning is a well-meaning act of misplaced ambition.
Picture Batman Begins, with Duke boys.
What s that Who cares?
Come on, folks! Civic pride!
Bo Duke is played by Jonathan Bennett, right, who grew up in Rossford, who graduated from Rossford High School in
1999, who Lindsay Lohan slobbered over in Mean Girls who seems to take the collective cast of Hee Haw as his inspiration for playing Bo Duke. Tirelessly bug-eyed, Bennett gives a performance that s missing but a single strand of straw dangling from his mouth.
In other words, he s perfect.
For a direct-to-store-shelves Dukes of Hazzard flick, anyway.
During the past couple of years, as you wandered the aisles of your local big-box electronics emporium, the made-for-DVD addendum quietly became the calorie-free, artificial sweetener of the home-video industry insanely successful, cheap to produce, cheaper to market, and superficially true to the real thing.
The success of straight-to-video continuations of American Pie and Bring It On cemented it. American Pie Presents Band Camp sold 1 million copies its first week; then Bring It On: All or Nothing sold nearly that last summer. If these had been released to theaters, the opening weekend box office would have been $15 million.
Not bad.
Universal (which made both) didn t pay star salaries because there were no name stars; and the studio didn t spend the tens of millions of dollars it costs to market a wide theatrical release. Not to mention, the average moviegoer doesn t keep up with the flood of new films every week, and may not even realize that a given movie never opened in the multiplex. As long as a DVD box carries the franchise title in the same type font as the movie poster did, the studio is looking at pure profit.
Which is why studios including Warner Bros. created direct-to-DVD divisions like Warner Premieres. If a film did well primarily on video, why not skip the theatrical step? Hence, you have (take a deep breath) prequels and sequels to Carlito s Way (a million seller) and The Sandlot (another million seller) and Cinderella and The Lion King (many millions sold). Hence, Marvel Comics tests the feature-film potential of lesser-known superhero titles like The Avengers with made-for-DVD animated films.
Hence, you have prequels and sequels already made for DVD or on their way of Walking Tall, Open Water, Behind Enemy Lines, Half Past Dead, Lake Placid, Air Bud, Starship Troopers, Hollow Man, Wrong Turn, Bachelor Party, Daddy Day Care ...
I could go on (and on).
Is this a good thing?
Generally, of course not. It s a cynical thing, though as with early television and the dawn of music video, genius develops where no one is paying attention. At the moment, however, the production quality of your standard made-for-video movie is made-for-TV acceptable, the stories less than overwhelming.
That includes Dukes.
But give The Beginning points for its attention to the zeitgeist: If Batman and James Bond and Hannibal Lecter have an origin story, surely you care to know where the Dukes found their General Lee, how they ran afoul of Boss Hogg. Wait you don t? Some pop icons (most, actually) are spun from pure plastic and are meant to stay that way. April Scott (a former Deal or No Deal girl) is so zombie-eyed as Daisy Duke, the implication (I shudder to imagine) is that only until she developed into Jessica Simpson did she grow into a personality.
What the burgeoning made-for-DVD sequel/prequel genre actually contributes to pop culture is far simpler than a complicated back story. It teaches the true meaning of branding to those who have never taken a marketing seminar. When the average 15-to-25-year-old male moviegoer refers to his favorite series as his favorite franchise (and I hear this all the time), the cynical has become indistinguishable from the savvy. And what s wrong with being savvy?
First Published March 14, 2007, 5:37 a.m.