Dirt

Dirt (Parts 1 - 9) is available on YouTube and presents a classic historical of off-road motor-sports competitions in the mid-1970s shortly after the Arab Oil Embargo. There is plenty of "retro" music and arguably "Dirt" is similar to Bruce Brown's 1971 epic documentary "On Any Sunday".

Considerable time is dedicated to the 1976 SCORE Baja International (or Baja 500) and the dual between Parnelli Jones, team mate Walker Evans and dune buggy sensation and Hollywood stuntman Bobby Ferro. Roger Riddel was instrumental in placing together the funding and advertising for this feature. Our motorcycle (#449) appears at the end of the movie and I was only sixteen when racing in the '76 Baja event along with Benson Ford, Jr., Elliot Kaplan, Rod Hall and former members of Bill Stroppe & Associates.

This was such a fun film! There are plenty of TV shows today that show car chases and scenes of race car drivers crashing or doing odd things but this movie was and still is unique. It was hosted by two beer drinking fans (actors) of high speed, dirt spitting vehicles. Most of the movie was footage from different types of races and vehichles including motorcycle racing, tractor pulling, 24 hour La Mans racing sprint car racing and many more. They covered almost every different type of vehicle dirt racing you could ever think of. They even had scenes of destruction derbys where cars just crash into each other trying to disable each other. One of the nice parts about the movie was it was not just scenes of cars wrecking on after another but they would interview race stars such as Rick Mears and Parnelli Jones as well as the no-name local heros of backwoods tracks and get thier comments on why they love what they do so much. All the while the hosts kept it fun with their comments and details of what we were seeing on the screen. It is a very entertaining movie and I have never seen anything quite like it before or since that time even with all the thrills and spills shows you see nowadays. A lost gem for racing fans.

I originally saw this in a theater when it came out in 1979. It appealed to me because I was heavily into Jeeps and off-roading at the time. The film does a great job of blending a documentary on all sorts of off-road activity around the travels of the narrator all over North America in his motorhome to visit these events. I thought this was one movie that would never see the light of day on a DVD, but was surprised when it recently started showing up at on-line auctions described as a movie released on 2004. I knew it was the same one I saw in 1979 thanks to the very skimpy, but accurate information I found on the IMDb. I highly recommend this to anyone at all interested in off-roading of any kind. Lots of humor, racing, mud, spills, great photography, and 70's culture. The DVD has some special features about the making of the movie along with the original trailer.