Now on DVD is perhaps the oddest trucking movie ever made: Moonfire, the long-unseen low-budget 1972 release written, produced and directed by Overdrive founder Michael Parkhurst. Hard to follow and hard to forget, it’s about a lost space capsule, a gang of Mexican bandits and a fortune hidden inside a load of lettuce. It features former movie star Richard Egan, former heavyweight champ Sonny Liston and one-time Overdrive columnist Charles Napier, who has steadily acted ever since. The final credits thank the truckers of America for “their limitless patience.” Visit channel19.blogspot.com for a full analysis.
The freight is in the trunks
To illustrate the benefits of the ongoing I-405 project near Seattle, the Washington DOT website contrasts the “current view” (left) with an artist’s rendering of the “future view” (right) once lanes are added and the Wilburton Tunnel removed. If you count the vehicles in each, you realize that merely adding lanes apparently will take half the commuters off the road – and all the tractor-trailers. It’s an engineering miracle!
Alas, the bubble gum was long gone
In a drawer full of forgotten childhood items, we recently found six of Donruss’ CB Convoy Code stickers, published in 1978 at the height of the citizens-band craze among four-wheelers. Only one of the six, Asphalt Pilot, actually depicts a big rig.
” I would dress the women well in elegant clothes, and the men would have beautifully tailored suits, and they would be living in a nice house somewhere, and they would go out for a nice walk, and she would push him in front of a truck. There were no happy couples, except for the girl and the truck driver in the end, and something terrible would happen to them, probably. ”
– 1950s horror-comics artist Jack Kamen, quoted in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26)
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Andy Duncan, Overdrive, P.O. Box 264, Frostburg, MD 21532, or e-mail [email protected].
