In Popular Culture
See also: Trucking industry in popular culture (United States)Truck drivers have been the subject of many films, such as They Drive by Night (1940), but they became an especially popular topic in popular culture in the mid-1970s, following the release of White Line Fever, and the hit song "Convoy" by C. W. McCall, both in 1975. The main character of "Convoy" was a truck driver known only by his CB handle (C.B. name), "Rubber Duck". Three years later, in 1978, a film was released with the same name. In 1977, another film Smokey and the Bandit, was released, which revolves around the escapades of a truck driver and his friend as they transport a load of beer across state lines. Smokey and the Bandit spawned two sequels. The 1978 film F.I.S.T. was a fictionalized account of the unionization of the trucking industry in the earlier 20th century, while the future of truck driving was speculated on in the 1996 film Space Truckers in which trucking has gone beyond planetary loads to interplanetary ones. One episode of Cowboy Bebop, "Heavy Metal Queen", also features spacefaring "truck" drivers.
Truck drivers have also been villainously portrayed in such films as Duel, Joy Ride, Breakdown, The Hitcher, Thelma & Louise and Supergirl.
B. J. and the Bear was a television series depicting the exploits of a truck driver and his chimpanzee companion. Another was Movin' On, starring Claude Akins and Frank Converse. On 17 June 2007, the History Channel began to air Ice Road Truckers, a documentary-style reality television series following truck drivers as they drive across the ice roads in the Northwest Territories in Canada, as they transport equipment to the oil and natural gas mines in that area.
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