Netflix Losing The Best ’70s Car Comedy Ever, Stream Before It Escapes

Smokey and the Bandit may not have had the cultural impact of George Lucas’s little space opera, but it was arguably a more significant influence. Would-be hotrodders admiring the Millennium Falcon couldn’t exactly go out and buy their own.

Bandit’s Trans Am, on the other hand, was a vehicle that could be obtained in real life.

Kids could dream about being Luke Skywalker all they wanted, but they would never become Jedi Knights. Meanwhile, all it took to be the protagonist of Smokey and the Bandit was a fast car and a sick mustache.

You know, the kind of mustache that screams the ’70s and can only be pulled off by Burt Reynolds and Sam Elliot.

Smokey and the Bandit has a super simple premise: Burt Reynolds is bet $80,000 that he can’t smuggle 400 cases of Coors beer from Atlanta, Georgia, to Texarkana, Texas, in 28 hours.

Bandit (Reynolds) and his sidekick Snowman (Jerry Reed, who also wrote the film’s theme song) drive down to Atlanta, load up Snowman’s tractor-trailer truck with beer, and get to it. Their plan is for Bandit to act as a kind of lure for law enforcement so that Snowman can put the pedal to the floor the whole way to Texarkana.

Along the way, Bandit picks up the stowaway in the form of a runaway bride (Sally Field).

Unfortunately, the bride-to-be’s groom is the son of career Texas lawman Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason). As a result, Justice makes it his personal goal to take Bandit down.

Smokey and the Bandit is where, for a brief period, Burt Reynolds became the coolest mf-er around. All Bandit does for 96 action-packed minutes is drive a fast car, p*ss off the cops, and make out with Sally Field.

What red-blooded American good-ol’-boy wouldn’t want to be that guy?

I kid, of course. A lot of the macho posturing in this movie reads as toxic masculinity today. To be fair, though, it was the ’70s, and it was Burt Reynolds—possibly the most masculine combination in cinema history.

Cosmopolitan chose him to be their first nude male centerfold for a reason.

Smokey and the Bandit was a runaway success when it was released on May 19, 1977. Even with Star Wars for competition, Reynold’s mustache managed to Gross $127 million at the box office—not bad for a movie with a budget of $4.3 million.

The movie spawned two sequels, Smokey and the Bandit II (1980) and Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 (1983), neither of which was anywhere near as successful as the first movie. That’ll teach Universal to switch between Roman and Arabic numerals in their titles!

GFR SCORE

Just stick with the original Smokey and the Bandit, and you won’t be disappointed. However, if you try streaming it on Netflix after July 31, you will be disappointed because it’s leaving, and who knows when it will return? So don’t wait, pay Burt Reynolds and his iconic ’70s stache a visit today!