It was also the first of nine collaborations with his good friend Burt Reynolds, with diminishing degrees of success. Smokey and the Bandit was the directorial debut for former stuntman Needham. Needham also made a series of TV movies in 1994 with Brian Bloom as Bandit.

The movie also gave rise to the popular TV action-comedy series The Dukes of Hazard (1979-1985).

Sam Peckinpah did a more dramatic, violent variation on the CB scene in his trucker movie Convoy (1978), and Jonathan Demme gentle, appealing comedy about the CB craze, Handle with Care (1977, aka Citizen's Band), followed this picture by about four months. The success of the film spawned two hit sequels in 19 and a number of similar movies, including Hooper (1978), The Cannonball Run (1981), Stroker Ace (1983), and Cannonball Run II (1984), all starring Reynolds and directed by Smokey and the Bandit director Hal Needham. Justice, so father and son set out on a high-speed pursuit across the Southeast to catch Bandit and company. It turns out Junior is the son of Portague County Sheriff Buford T. The pair gets the beer, but on the way back, they pick up a hitchhiker, Carrie, who just left her groom, Junior, at the altar. Two truckers, Bandit (Reynolds) and Cledus (Jerry Reed), accept a dare to retrieve a truckload of beer from Texas and return it within a specified amount of time. The plot of Smokey and the Bandit is simple enough and really just an excuse for fast-paced comic action and a crowd-pleasing flouting of the law. The success of the film catapulted Reynolds to the number one box office spot and inspired a string of similar movies and TV shows (not to mention igniting a short-lived CB trend among non-truckers). But it was actually only 25 years ago when Smokey and the Bandit was a runaway favorite at the drive-in and the second highest grossing film of the year after Star Wars (1977). It seems like a hundred years ago when redneck bad boys were all the rage, Burt Reynolds was a top star, CB radios were the hot technology with phrases like '10-4' and 'good buddy' as familiar parlance, and movie action sequences were achieved by daring stunt men in souped-up cars without benefit of digital enhancement.

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