Things You Forgot Happened In Smokey And The Bandit

Despite Bandit's vanity-plate faux pas, "Smokey" is very much a reflection of the '70s dream of a refuge outside mainstream society where people of all races could come together. The movie wouldn't exist without the CB (citizen's band) radio craze. People from all walks of life discovered the radio frequencies truckers used to communicate among themselves and began conversations that could stretch all across the country. 

That's a major plot point in "Smokey and the Bandit," which takes its name from CB slang — "Smokey" being code for the police, or more broadly, The Man. A whole ensemble of CB listeners appear throughout the movie to help Bandit get his cargo to Atlanta, and it's a pretty diverse bunch — men and women, young and old, Black, white, and Asian. 

The subtext should be clear: Bandit's struggle with the law has resonated with all these other people and their own conflicts with authority, uniting them across all demographic boundaries. There's few better images of The Man than Gleason's Sheriff Buford T. Justice, loud, aggrieved, self-important, proudly racist, and deeply convinced of his own nonexistent prowess in all fields. Needham's vision of racial togetherness doesn't quite extend far enough to avoid giving the Asian trucker some embarrassingly stereotypical dialogue. But as the Fresh Prince might say, he got the spirit.