Gold Fever

Synopsis:

After faking an accident with the Duke Boys, Texan millionaire H.H. Harkness and his associates wind up in Hazzard. While Cooter waits for the parts to repair his car, H.H. Harkness visits Boss Hogg to arrange secure storage of his valuable cargo in the bank vault.

Boss quickly agrees to the offer of $25,000 to store the cargo overnight, before discovering he’s given a personal guarantee to safeguard $3,000,000 in gold.

When the gold goes missing, it’s the Duke Boys who are Boss and Rosco’s #1 suspects. To try to clear themselves, Bo and Luke follow the associates out of town and watch as they bury the gold. As soon as the coast is clear, they dig up the gold and find it’s only lead.

Meanwhile, Uncle Jesse has a bad toothache, and an aversion to going to the dentist. Bo and Luke have to virtually drag him to visit the mobile dentist, Dr. Homer Willis.

Commentary:

This episode clearly shows how the thought of money overrides all of Boss’s better instincts. Rather than asking questions about why a stranger would arrive in town with a trunk full of gold bars, he lends him a car, puts him up in a suite at his hotel and closes the Boar’s Nest to lay on a private banquet.

Highlights:

Bo and Luke manage to evade Rosco and Enos by driving into an open semi trailer. It might not be as impressive as doing it with a moving semi (like Knight Rider) or a moving bus (like The Italian Job (1969)), but it’s clever enough to fool the Hazzard Police.

It’s not often that you get to see a car chase involving an RV. While Bo pilots Homer Willis’s mobile surgery, Luke turns bottles of surgical alcohol into Molotov cocktails.

Trivia:

Director Paul Baxley claims the credit for putting Daisy in the French maid’s outfit to serve at the banquet.

Bruce M. Fisher, who plays Buck, would return in Hazzard Hustle in the fifth season as Bull, Big Billie Tucker’s right-hand head crusher.

If the actor who plays Dr. Homer Willis looks pretty comfortable in that white lab coat, it might be because actor Adam Wade, before becoming a performer, was part of Dr. Jonas Salk’s research team in the late 50s while he was developing the polio vaccine.

–synopsis and vidcaps by Hoss (with info from The Dukes of Hazzard Unofficial Companion).