Throughout
the last century, the trucking industry has had a fair amount of
exposure in popular culture. The truckers and their lifestyle were
celebrated (and satirized) in various media, mainly in music and
film. The film noir's 1940 film They Drive by Night which
co-starred Humphrey Bogart,
depicted how independent truck drivers cope with the Great
Depression.
In
1963, country music singer Dave Dudley had a hit with the song “Six
Days on the Road”. It is often referred to as the song that started
the wave for songs that told stories about a trucker's life on the
road. In it, the protagonist is driving home to his lover after
being on the road for six days. The 1970s was the peak of trucking
culture. Steven Spielberg's first feature-length film, the
made-for-TV Duel, tells the
story of a motorist being stalked by an anonymous tank truck driver
on a deserted highway. Another film released during that time was the
highly successful Smokey and the Bandit,
an action comedy starring Burt Reynolds.
The
century ended with a couple of television animation series telling
stories about the truck itself --as the robot Optimus Prime in
Transformers, and
Homer as an accidental truck driver in The Simpsons.
With the the History Channel's reality television show Ice
Road Truckers, the trucking
industry seems to be carving its own niche in the 21st
century, both in network and cable television, as well as in the
public imagination.
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