Dueling Banjos
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Dueling Banjos was a scene from the 1972 movie Deliverance. The scene depicts Billy Redden playing the instrumental "Dueling Banjos" (a spinoff of the classic song Yankee Doodle) opposite actor Ronny Cox on guitar. Redden plays "Lonny"- a mentally retarded, inbred, extremely gifted banjo player.
The song was arranged and performed for the movie by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandel and was featured on the movie's soundtrack. It was originally composed by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith and Don Reno as Feuding Banjos in 1955[1].
[edit] References in popular culture
- The Simpsons
- The Irish sitcom Father Ted
- In the Family Guy episode The Perfect Castaway, Peter Griffin engages Michael Moore in a flatulent contest in the style of Dueling Banjos.
- "Dueling Xylophones" by the comedian Bill Bailey
- "Dueling Tubas" by Martin Mull
- "Dueling Brandos" performed by John Belushi and Peter Boyle on Saturday Night Live.
- In the computer game The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush Threepwood challenges a pirate barber into a banjo duel at the Plunder Island.
- Robin Williams does a short called "Dueling Planets" on his Reality, What a Concept album.
- A skit called Dueling Carsons/Foxworthys is used on ESPN Classic's Cheap Seats.
- Radio-host Ed Schultz uses the dueling banjos as part of a recording involving Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell over Iraq.
- In the popular internet video AMV Hell 3: The Motion Picture, which shows the bizarre seaweed eyebrows of Commander Amarao from the anime FLCL moving to the music. One eyebrow later burns and the other turns into a horse and runs away.
- In Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, Babs and Buster Bunny meet a small colony of country Opossum. Buster has a Banjo duel with one of them, shortly before the Opossum try and eat them both.
