The adventure began with 1973's Walking Tall, directed by Phil Carlson and starring Joe Don Baker as Sheriff Buford Pusser.

Buford Pusser was a real Tennessee sheriff, a man known for being tough on crime, for pursuing the vice peddlers.

A man who pursued the vice peddlers so hard that crime bit back.

One day when he was out for a drive

with his beloved wife, the criminals intending to shoot him shot his wife instead. And this

actually happened. Or did it. Because just this past month, the district attorney in Tennessee

noted that the real Buford Pusser's wife was recently exhumed as part of an

investigation, and Pusser has been, I guess, posthumously indicted for the suspected murder of his own

wife, which investigators now believe he did and covered up to make it look like the bad people

did it, the criminals did it. So this has thrown a bit of a wrench in Sheriff Pusser's

legacy, as you can imagine. Nevertheless, all walking tall media up to this point has followed the

official narrative. But the thing is, this very much is a franchise in the quite literal sense,

because I mean, I haven't seen the two sequels to the original, but aside from the first one,

which we discussed in an episode, I think, was called Inspired by True Events, which was the tagline

for the movie, not based on true events, inspired by True Events.

We did an episode on that, and then since then, we've become kind of hooked on these straight-to-video ones.

There was another one from the early

2000s featuring none other than Dwayne the Rock Johnson. That was the one where it took place

in the American West, like Northwest. It involved a sawmill. There was some kind of deindustrialization

subtext to it or something. A very different vibe because the other walking talls were all in the rural south,

and this is now the Pacific Northwest.

That's right.

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