1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am From “Smokey and the Bandit”
Smokey and the Bandit is another classic road movie. It’s about Bo Darville (played by Burt Reynolds), an American bandit bootlegging beer from Texas to Georgia while running from “Smokey” (a.k.a. state troopers). It became the second highest grossing film in 1977 (behind Star Wars, of course), and made a huge impact on both Pontiac’s sales and Reynold’s career in the 70s. Of course, with as many chase and stunt scenes as the movie had, they totaled three cars on set. They also had to use a different stunt car for some of the final scenes because their fourth eventually wouldn’t start after the beatings it took while filming. Most of the T/As were actually 1976 models with the ’77 front ends to encourage sales. Pontiac was able to top their projected sales by over 25,000 customers that year.