Jonah Hex, End of the Trail

It isn’t often I review individual comic books, but in the case of All Star Western #34, a comic which features one of my all time favorite DC Comics characters, Jonah Hex, I had to make an exception.

Created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga back in 1971, Jonah Hex made his first appearance in issue #10 of the original All Star Western series, which would become Weird Western Tales before Jonah Hex moved on to his own book.  Before that move, he was featured in one of my all time favorite comic book covers, that of Weird Western Tales #25.  See for yourself:

While John Albano wrote the early stories featuring Jonah Hex, it would be Michael Fleischer who would come in shortly afterwards and write the vast majority of them throughout the 1970’s and into the 1980’s.  His stories were very consistent and even today are a pleasure to read.  Perhaps one of the most intriguing stories he ever wrote featuring the western anti-hero appeared in DC Special Series #16.  In that story, a 66 year old Jonah Hex meets his fate…

This story proved alternately grim and sad, with the corpse of Jonah Hex being stuffed and put on display in a carnival show (I suspect this was the inspiration for the sequences featuring Tonto in a carnival in the Johnny Depp starring Lone Ranger film that was released last summer).

Despite this very final story, Jonah Hex would continued to appear in one form or another since that (in)famous story, including appearing in animated form in the Batman series as well as “real life” in the awful 2010 Jonah Hex film.  What a wasted opportunity that was!

In more recent times and since 2005, writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have been writing Jonah Hex stories, first in the “new” Jonah Hex series and then for 34 issues in the “new” All Star Western.

Given their nearly decade long association with the character, it is a tribute to their talents that the volume of stories they’ve presented have been so damn good.  Yes, there have been some lesser fare here and there, but their run, overall, is nothing to be ashamed of and I figured they would go on for a long, long time.

So it was something of a surprise to find that All Star Western #34 is pretty much what the title of the story says it is: “End of the Trail.”  It proved to be Mr. Gray and Palmiotti’s final Jonah Hex story and was illustrated by the terrific Darwyn Cook.  Was it good?  More than good.  I would say it is terrific…but with one rather big caveat.

What is the caveat?

To understand this particular finale story, one really should read/be familiar with the Michael Fleischer final Hex story I wrote about above.  Mr. Gray and Palmiotti’s finale plays with the Fleischer finale, offering a different take while never quite negating (entirely) what Mr. Fleischer wrote.

Now, like all things, the comic book industry operates on profits and losses and while clearly DC was finishing the Jonah Hex series with this issue of All Star Western and probably didn’t want to spend more money than they had to on it, I really wish they could have reprinted the Fleischer story with this finale.

While I think readers who aren’t familiar with the Fleischer finale will enjoy it, they will enjoy it far, far more if they are familiar with that particular tale.

In the end, I highly recommend those who have even a passing interest in Jonah Hex give All Star Western #34 a look.  And while you do, try to dig up a copy of that Michael Fleischer Jonah Hex finale.  You’ll be glad you did.

Longmire…cancelled

Count me among those who were shocked by the news yesterday that A&E was cancelling their “most-watched original drama series of all time”, this according to Deadline, after three seasons.

According to that same Deadline article, the producers of the show are shopping it elsewhere.  Normally, that wouldn’t fill me with too much optimism, but given the ratings the show had, getting picked up by another network may turn out to be more possible that for other vanquished series.

Still, what a shame!

If you haven’t seen Longmire, it is a show about the titular Sheriff, a recent widower (there’s much, much to that story!) who, along with his staff, patrols Absaroka County, Wyoming.  What I find so fascinating about the show is that almost all the main characters have interesting backstories that are slowly drawn out and sometimes intersect with the other characters in fascinating ways…all while featuring usually interesting “stand alone” mysteries per episode.

If you haven’t caught the three seasons of the show, I highly recommend you do so, though its painful to think that maybe, just maybe, that’s all we’ll get.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed it won’t be the case!

Sabotage (2014) a (mildly) belated review

When Arnold Schwarzenegger left movie making for politics and subsequently returned to the movies, I figured he’d have a relatively easy go.  He left the movies, after all, still a potent box office draw, though perhaps not quite as big a draw as he was in his prime years.

Since his movie making return, he’s appeared in a total of six films.  The first Expendables movie hardly counts as he had a single scene.  The other two Expendables movies have featured greater amounts of screen time, but it is an ensemble work with many actors sharing screen time.  In Mr. Schwarzenegger’s other three movies he’s had the starring role.  Unfortunately, The Last Stand and Escape Plan, the later of which he co-starred in with Sylvester Stallone, haven’t exactly lit the box office on fire.  With 2014’s Sabotage, he’s an unfortunately three for three.

The biggest crime of both The Last Stand and Escape Plan, to me, were that they were both rather mediocre features that didn’t really dazzle or excite you beyond the time you were watching them.  With Sabotage, written and directed by David Ayer, whose past credits include writing such features as The Fast and the Furious, Training Day, and End of Watch (which he also directed), you at least figured you’d have an interestingly written work.

But a busy plot, as is the case with Sabotage, doesn’t equal a good film.

Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as John “Breacher” Wharton, a head of a deep undercover drug investigation unit who, at the start of the movie, is watching some gruesome footage which amounts to the last living moments of his wife.  As we soon find out, she and his son were kidnapped by some mean drug cartel types (the why’s are revealed a little later on).  She -and we assume his son- were tortured and eventually killed.

From this point we move to several months later.  Breacher and his crew are about to pull off a big bust of a drug cartel member’s mansion.  Their mission, however, has a dark side: Breacher’s crew knows there is a palette of 100 million dollars hidden in this mansion and they intend to steal a good chunk of it for themselves.

They manage to take approximately $10 million and hide it in the mansion’s sewage but when they return to pick up the money, its gone.

The DEA and the cartel the unit hit quickly figure out there is money missing (it is never really stated within the context of the film how both entities find out, but people on comment boards have noted it could involve weighing the money.  Though Breacher and company blew the remaining $90 million in bills apart, a thorough examination of the ashes and surviving bills would have revealed a weight, hence cash, discrepancy).

The DEA boys go hard after Breacher and his gang, separating and interrogating them while trying to get them to flip on each other.  No one, in the end, talks or admits to the theft.  After several months and no new evidence found, the “higher ups” give up and decide to allow Breacher and his gang to get back together again.  I found this part a little hard to swallow but, whatever.  I accepted the initial premise and figured that from there, things would get interesting.

Because of the dark nature of their work, Breacher’s crew are far from angels.  In fact, they’re only a small step away from the nasty characters they’re tasked to bust.  They’re loud, perverse, and cruel.  They’re hard drinking and hard charging, and with $10 million taken and the DEA no longer breathing down their back, it seemed to me obvious where the movie would go from here: The boys -and woman- of the group would start looking at each other, seeing which one of them took the money.  Which one of them is a bigger rat than the others.

Soon, members of this elite unit wind up dead and I figure we’re moving into Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None territory, a murder mystery as well as a crime drama.

Unfortunately, it was precisely at this point, the point where everything was well laid out and you’re eager to see how this murder mystery plays out, that things start to fizzle.

Badly.

To begin, the unit getting back together was totally mishandled.  I figured they’d all be on guard, watching their backs and not exactly “chummy” with each other.  It seemed logical that they would suspect one of their own of taking the money, yet none of them shows any outright suspicion in those early going scenes.

Yes, there is a lack of “trust” among the group, but the way its presented it seems to be more related to the fact that they’re rusty.

Anyway, when the first of their members is killed, another police officer joins the mix.  She is investigating the death and while all indications are that it was a drunken accident, the death of a second member of the squad changes things.

From there, we have Breacher and the investigator checking leads and using each other.  Frankly, credibility gets stretched waaaaay too far by this point.  Breacher should be a suspect by this point and its very hard to believe the investigator would welcome him at her side.

On the movie runs and on come the bodies.  Graphic, bloody.  The film looks to straddle the line between horror and crime drama, but as the minutes tick by you care less and less.  When the final revelation comes, the guilty party appears only too obvious.  When you find out why the money was stolen, an already heavily strained plot snaps completely.

Did the thief really need all $10 million to accomplish his/her goals?  Seems really far fetched.

In the end, I can’t recommend Sabotage despite the fact that it features a fascinating cast of characters and a, at least at the beginning, fascinating plot concept.

Too bad.

The Truth about Extraterrestrials…

…Will We Ever Discover Intelligent Life in the Universe?

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/27/the-truth-about-extraterrestrials-will-we-ever-discover-intelligent-life-in-the-universe-partner/

Fascinating article (the first of a promised two) by Caleb A. Scharf and presented on Salon.com.

I found the two answers to the above (and below) question are incredibly insightful even as they are brief and cut to the core:

Do you think we’re alone in the universe?

Answer A) :  No, absolutely not. It’s a huge universe, we’re not at the center or central in any way and it would be the height of vanity to think humans or Earth are in any way special or significant.

Answer B): We might be. There’s never been any firm evidence of extraterrestrial life, and our galaxy is old enough that intelligent civilizations should have spread everywhere by now.

If you find that interesting, read the rest of the article.  Fascinating stuff!

7 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Edgar Allan Poe…

…at least according to Paul S. Collins for Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-s-collins/edgar-allan-poe-facts_b_5698360.html

Edgar Allan Poe is one of my favorite all time authors.  He had an ability to create works of horror that crept under your skin like no other.  Though I’m not the biggest fan of poetry, his poems really get to me.

So naturally, any list regarding Mr. Poe is something I’ll gravitate to.  What I found most intriguing about the list is the fact that many of the items in some way or another relate to the fact that this was a person who was in financial difficulties and had to find creative (!!!) ways to lose his creditors.

As good an author as Mr. Poe is/was, he fell into that unfortunate group of authors whose works weren’t really appreciated until after they passed on.  Sadly, he like H. P. Lovecraft or Joseph Conrad or Robert E. Howard never really enjoyed the fruits of their labors.  Certainly not in the way they should have.

10 Most Gruesome Torture Techniques…

…From Medieval Europe:

http://io9.com/the-10-most-gruesome-torture-techniques-from-medieval-e-1626942115

I’ve seen bits and pieces of information regarding the “creative” torture techniques from the Middle Ages and before.  While we live in far more enlightened times today, it is truly scary to see how incredibly sadistic humans can be.

Today, the death penalty is a controversial subject, no more so than most recently when the so called “execution” drugs have been harder and harder to find and some prison officials seem to be perfectly fine with the idea of experimenting with unknown medications to kill someone.

Yet looking over the above website, the word “gruesome” comes again and again and I certainly couldn’t help but feel for the many people who fell into these torture devices, some of which kept their victims alive but in extreme agony for days.

Hopefully, we’ll never return to anything resembling this…

Let’s hope, anyway.

Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guides ending…

The 2015 edition of the book will be the final one:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-leonard-maltin-is-ending-his-movie-guides/

I used to really love Leonard Maltin’s movie guide.  So much so that there were several years in a row that I would buy each new edition and hungrily look through it to see what was new and what were the opinions of recent movie releases.

I used to also love seeing the lists presented in the back of the book of directors and actors (an incomplete list, granted, with a focus on bigger names in the industry) and seeing the works they were involved in, particularly earlier in their career.

Of course, this was all before the internet came and, like so many other things, rendered the Movie Guide pointless.

For lists of actors, writers, directors, etc. etc., one has to go to IMDB.com, click on the “search” function, and type in the person you’re looking for.  In a second you’ll have a pretty complete list of all the works said actor/writer/producer/etc/etc. was involved in with links to said movies/tv shows/etc.

The reviews in the Leonard Maltin Guide were sharp, to the point (they tended to be a few sentences long each), and in the case of really bad films, often quite hilarious.  However, what you had was only one review, a review by one “individual”.  Not to sound too snarky, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the reviews were actually penned entirely by Mr. Maltin versus those that came from his staff of writers.  Still, I could ignore this and had fun reading these concise opinions.

Now, you have rotttentomatoes.com with its list of critics (and links to their reviews) along with a statistical analysis of the overall critical opinion and the overall audience opinion.

The bottom line is that, for me, two websites rendered the Leonard Maltin Movie Guide obsolete.

The last Leonard Maltin Movie Guide I bought was the 2009 edition.

Until I saw the above article, and much to my surprise considering how much I liked the Guide, I hadn’t given it much thought.

The moral?  If there is such a thing for this, I suppose its the validity of the old adage regarding the “better mousetrap”.  The internet, in this case, left poor Leonard Maltin and his Movie Guide in the dust.  Perhaps he should have invested in this technology and made a website that would have combined the IMDB.com and rottentomatoes.com concepts.

Too late now.

And time marches on.

Under the Skin (2013) a (mildly) belated review

I first heard about Under the Skin shortly before its release.  I became really interested in seeing it when the theatrical trailer/teaser was shown.

Heady looking stuff, right?

The movie came and went, scoring a super strong 86% positive among critics but a far less impressive 56% positive rating among audiences from Rotten Tomatoes.  Essentially, almost all critics liked it but only half the audiences cared for what they saw.  Looking at some commentary from audiences, it is clear the film has strongly divided viewers and, as the saying goes, they either loved or hated it.  Now, having finally seen the film, which side of the fence am I on?

It’s a harder question to answer than you might think.

On the plus side, Under the Skin is an intriguing, visually striking film that drew my attention while playing out slowly, almost naturally.  The dialogue, what there is of it, is conversational and often (ahem) skin deep.  We are taken through a series of scenarios which in turn form a story about an otherworldly alien predator (Scarlet Johansson) who, like the black widow spider, draws in and then kills men.

Almost from the beginning its clear director Jonathan Glazer is emulating the works of some very well known filmmakers.  In Under the Skin, viewers familiar with the style of directors Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky will see stuff that looks an awful lot like their work.  Likewise, the film’s plot bears some resemblance to the classic Nicholas Roeg/David Bowie The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Unfortunately, when one sees so many familiar echoes to the brilliant works of other artists, one can’t help but compare them to Under the Skin.  Doing so, even more unfortunately, reveals that this film doesn’t quite live up to what came before.  To begin, Under the Skin’s plot is far, far simpler than the works listed above.  In fact, one might well argue this movie’s plot is almost too simple:  An alien predator picks up a series of male victims and eventually (though never clearly stated why) feels empathy for them, then tries to “join” them but cannot.  Tragedy ensues.  The end.

The simplicity of the plot leads me, in turn, to another problem I had: There are story irregularities that are bothersome.

To get into these problems however, I’m going to have to get into SPOILERS, so before I move on let me give you the bottom line:  Under the Skin is a decent, slow moving film that at times will really creep you out (there are, to my count, three absolutely knock out scenes).  Unfortunately, character inconsistencies and a very simple plot may take away from one’s enjoyment.

Now then, what were the problems I had?  I’ll get into them after this warning…

SPOILERS WARNING!!!!!

Still here?  Ok, don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

When we meet her, Ms. Johansson’s alien is presented as an emotionless, cold and calculating predator whose eyes are always looking, looking, looking for their next victim.  Once spotted and when confronting said potential victim, she turns on the charm, speaking perfectly well while luring said victim.  Eventually, she gets them into her car and, eventually, her lair.  We also find she has an assistant, a mysterious man (perhaps even more than one!) who rides around on a motorcycle and cleans up after her.

Given the fact that these aliens know how to use vehicles and are smart enough to know how to blend in with society and, even more importantly, clean up any potential messes after themselves, one can reasonably assume they have a decent, if not great, understanding of how people “tick”.

And yet the seductive predator appears at times confused and/or oblivious to what happens around her.  In one of the film’s most effectively terrifying moments, she meets up with a swimmer in a very remote location and witnesses a double drowning.  She gets her victim in the end but leaves behind the drowning victims’ crying infant, oblivious to the fact that by doing so the child will likely die.

As effectively creepy as this scene was (this would be my favorite scene of the film, by the way), I was left with questions.  If our aliens “feed” of men/people, why leave behind a potential source of nourishment in this infant?  Secondly, after she’s gone her motorcycle assistant goes to the beach to “clean up” the scene and take away any evidence they were there.  It is now dark and the poor child is still there, crying.  The assistant ignores the infant yet takes away towels and any other evidence of our victim’s presence.  Once again: Why leave the infant behind?  Isn’t that something that one would want to clean up as well?

Later still, the seductive predator meets a deformed man and attempts to seduce him.  This scene, another of my favorites though I will freely admit the coincidence of finding a deformed man is somewhat hard to swallow, nonetheless plays out well because our alien seductress is unaware the man’s severe facial deformities make him a pariah to society.  Despite my problems with the scenario, it was a fascinating scene but unfortunately it leads to the movie’s concluding act: By being near this deformed man our alien seductress comes to some mysterious resolution.  She ultimately, allows him to get away while deciding she no longer wants to be this black widow.  She wants to join humanity.

Does she feel sorry for this man?  If so, why exactly?  When she meets him she doesn’t see him as anything more than another victim yet in their very brief time together she decides to renounce her entire being and decides she wants to be human.  Again, why?

I truly don’t know and the film frustratingly doesn’t offer viewers a clear answer as to why.

What follows is the film’s climax, wherein the motorcycle assistant tries to find his now missing mistress while she walks the lonely countryside alone, first trying to eat human food (she cannot), then trying to find actual love (she cannot love because, she finds, she has no vagina.  Not to sound like a smart-ass or anything, but didn’t she notice this before?), then becoming the victim of a human predator.  This resolution, unfortunately, proved as difficult for me to swallow as the coincidence of her finding an incredibly deformed man.  An alien predator becomes victim to a human predator?  Oh the irony!

It was following the movie’s conclusion that I really began wondered what Under the Skin would have been like had Stanley Kubrick made it rather than Mr. Glazer.  Mr. Glazer has made good films in the past and while Under the Skin is not a bust by any means, I can’t help but think that in other hands -or perhaps with a little bit more time to develop the story- this pretty good film might have been absolutely great.

Take of that what you will.

Perry Mason

There are several “old time” TV shows I really like.  The original Star Trek series.  Mission Impossible.  The Wild, Wild, West.  Mannix.  The Twilight Zone.  The Outer Limits.

I could go on, but let me get to the heart of the matter:  This week Amazon is offering deep discounts on the DVD releases of another all time favorite TV show of mine, Perry Mason.  Unfortunately, and like far too many other series, this one was released in “half season” versions.  If you wanted all nine seasons of the show, therefore, you would have to buy 18 DVD sets.

And brother, they ain’t cheap.

The original price per half season was something like $50, which meant that to get the full series at the original prices cost you a whopping $900 for the entire run.  The prices have since gone down, varying between $30 and $45.  With Amazon’s current sale, you can buy each half season for between $10.99 to $19.99 (Sorry, the sale is now over!).

Over the years I have purchased roughly half the series and, with this sale, was certainly interested in buying the rest at more “reasonable” prices.  The first thing I ordered were seasons 8 and 9.  I was very curious about season nine, especially the second half of it, as from my understanding the folks in front of and behind the cameras knew by that point that the show was ending and decided to go out with a bang.

But before the second half of the ninth series was in the can, there was, at least for a little while, some hope for a 10th season of the series.  Given the year it was filmed -1966- and the fact that pretty much all TV shows by that time were moving toward color, the episode The Case of the Twice Told Twist proved to be a singular curiosity in the series’ 9 year run: It was the only episode filmed in color.

When I received my copies of the series, that was the one I had to see once again.  I had seen the episode a while back and remembered very little of it, other than the fact that the characters I knew so well looked so…odd…in color.  When one gets used to seeing people a certain way, to change their “look” so radically practically invites comparison.

The other thing that I realized was just how much they had all aged.  The Perry Mason TV series began in 1957 and while the main cast were already adults (some older than others) when the show began, the aging process had clearly taken much of the youth that one found in the cast in the early going (in the case of actor Ray Collins, who played the often times deliciously devious Lt. Tragg, he was 68 years old when the show began and passed away in 1965, thus not being around for the final couple of seasons).

Getting back to the color episode itself, The Case of the Twice Told Twist is essentially a riff on Oliver Twist (the episode’s title, suddenly, makes some sense, no?).  It involves an underage gang of car strippers who, natch, strip vehicles down and sell their parts.  Their leader is played by the great Victor Buono, an actor who appeared in many TV series during his lifetime, often portraying the same type of character…a well spoken bon vivant who usually had something devious going on.

While Perry gets a chance to grill Mr. Buono on the stand later in the episode, it is their individual, outside the courtroom meeting roughly half-way through the show that really zings, with Perry and Buono’s characters feeling each other out and offering double edged banter.

As I said, I recalled very little of the episode and, seeing it again, it struck me pretty obvious why: Apart from Mr. Buono and the novelty of color, the episode is pretty dull.  The other guest actors/suspects, while competent, rarely rise to the level of Mr. Buono’s and he’s a relatively small part of the story.  To add insult to injury, the murder mystery itself is curiously lacking.  Most often the show’s fun lies in how many people, including the one Perry Mason is defending, could have been involved in the murder.  In the best of the Perry Mason episodes it is a hoot seeing Mr. Mason whittle through the suspects on the stand or in private, often employing shady legal tactics.  In this case, though, the murderer and the motivation behind it appeared to come out of left field.

Weak sauce indeed.

However, in spite of it all, it is interesting to see an original run episode of Perry Mason in color.  Yeah, the principles might look a lot older and the case itself may not be as compelling as some of the best of them, but it is a curio nonetheless.

Below is that episode’s opening crawl if full color.  Unfortunately, the copy here is pretty bad.  What you get on the DVD is far, far better:

8 Things You Learned From Movies…

…That Are Actually Lies, according to Todd Van Luling for The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/11/8-lies-from-movies_n_5666578.html

All are true, all are interesting, but I would like to add a couple of “lies” that I see over and over again:

First up, the human fall.

Seems simple enough, right?  In real life if you fall over a story in distance and onto hard ground, odds are you will hurt -if not kill- yourself.  Yet its something movies like to use nowadays, the hero leaping/jumping long distances, hitting the ground and either rolling or shaking off the fall and getting on with their superheroic business.

The movie Fast and Furious 6, a franchise that, granted, doesn’t always deal with “real world” physics, was spoiled, to me, in large part because of this.  In the movie’s early going, Dwayne Johnson’s character leaps from a very fast moving car, falls some three or so stories straight down and into a vehicle he and his partner were pursing.  Johnson’s character is uninjured from that fall and tries to stop the car’s driver, then falls off said vehicle (which, let me reiterate, is moving really fast) after a scuffle, and absolutely nothing happens to him.

Later, toward the film’s climax, we have Vin Diesel’s character leaping from his car, flying through the air like Superman, grabbing Michelle Rodriguez’s character while she’s leaping in the opposite direction for a hundred feet or so, then the two of them smash into another car and this somehow lessens the impact of their fall.

They too suffer no serious injuries, though I believe Vin Diesel did frown a little.

I guess my main gripe is that action movies of late (and perhaps not so late, see the 1985 movie Commando and Arnold Schwarzenneger’s escape from an airplane!) push the limits of what a falling human body can withstand.  Someone I casually knew, for example, was on a ladder working on a ceiling light or fan in his house (I’ve been to the house, the ceiling was not terribly high).  He was perhaps on the second or third step of the ladder and somehow lost his balance and fell, landing very awkwardly on his right arm.

The result?

He broke multiple bones in that arm and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent extensive surgery.

The breaks to his arm were so extensive that doctors later told him they almost had to amputate his arm above the elbow.  After considerable physical therapy and recovery, the arm remained very fragile and, according to him, could not withstand any other injury.  He lamented the fact that he couldn’t use it to lift anything heavy nor could it deal with any great amount of force.

This is the reality of what can happen to a human body after a fall, even from relatively small distances.

Another gripe, though one I didn’t find all that bothersome in my youth -and at least tangentially related to Fast and Furious– is what a car is capable of withstanding after it makes a long jump.

Back in the 1970’s and 80’s and shortly after the success of Bullitt (with its magnificent single car chase sequence), there came a whole host of movies featuring progressively greater amounts of car stunt work.  The floodgates really opened after the 1977 success of Smokey and The Bandit, which featured some very impressive stunt work for that time.  Ron Howard’s directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto, released only a month afterwards, was little more than a movie featuring one car crunching bit of stunt work after the other.  As a kid, I loved the hell out of that film…

But one thing I realized was that whenever a car went airborne in a jump, it always landed…badly.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I was a child savant.

Seriously though, every time you were shown one of those stunts, the camera would often follow the car through the air and, when it landed (and depending on how well covered the landing was), you couldn’t help but see a frame or two of the car hitting the ground and almost always noticed the car suffered -sometimes mightily!- from that landing.

The tires might be twisted, the front end might stick up, the body would warp, and pieces -sometimes whole chunks!- might fall off.  Yet if the stunt involved the “good guy’s” car, you could always rely on a cinematic quick cut, usually showing our heroes hootin’ and hollering at the sheer fun or outrageousness of their stunt, and the next shot would reveal that their vehicle -presto!- was completely intact.  Sometimes better than new.

The below compilation of stunts for the Dukes of Hazzard TV show provides plenty of such examples.  See how many times the General Lee looks absolutely totaled after she lands…

Anyway, it is fantasy and perhaps, like the list of 8 Things You Learned From Movies That Are Actually Lies, this sort of stunt work should be taken for what it is, fantasy.