"Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" was a summer hit on the big screen ... but does it rank among the all-time great racing flicks?

Good, Bad and Ugly: NASCAR in Hollywood

It's a long, long way from Fireball 500 to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, in both time and content.

Although NASCAR has only recently taken an active role in promoting itself on the big screen, stock-car racing is nothing new to Hollywood. Many of the movies have been silly, a few serious and some downright awful.

Leading up to Tuesday's release of Talladega Nights on DVD, NASCAR.COM will take a look at the stock car racing-themed movies currently available on DVD.

In the menatime, let's review movies released in the 1960s and '70s:

Title: Fireball 500
Starring: Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Fabian, Chill Wills, Harvey Lembeck
Studio: MGM
Year of Release: 1966
Rating: Unrated
Lug Nut Rating (Out of Five): Two

Only Hollywood could make this stuff up.

After winning at Riverside in the opening sequence of Fireball 500, Dave Owens (Avalon) goes for a roll in the hay -- literally -- with the daughter of a local farmer. When they get caught by Daddy, Dave jumps into his car and starts singing the movie's theme song.

Look out world, here I come
I'm a racin' son of a gun
I'm the fastest under the sun
Fireball 500 ...

Good Lord.

Less than 10 minutes later, Jane It-Doesn't-Matter-What-Her-Last-Name-Is-Because-She-Doesn't-Have-One (Funicello), is singing on stage at a carnival. That settles it. I'm not getting paid nearly enough for this assignment.

Any-hoo ... despite his success on the race track, Dave gets hooked into running moonshine (of course, he does) through the feminine wiles of Martha, played by Julie Parrish. He gets into trouble with the law (again, of course), but continues running moonshine anyway. Why? Who knows.

Leander Fox (Fabian) serves as Dave's rival for most of the movie. They eventually make nice, and Dave goes on to win the Daytona 500. Of course.

Fireball 500 is a lot darker than what you might expect from a Frankie-Annette-Fabian flick. A shirtless Dave hugged and gets a two-handed grope on the rump from Martha. Joey, fellow moonshine runner, dies while trying to make a delivery. Fairly graphic scenes, for the time at least, show both Leander and his car on fire at Daytona.

One final note ... at one point in the climactic Daytona race, the announcer says they're on lap 239, and there are still several laps left. That would make the Daytona 500, on a track 2.5 miles long, last more than 600 miles.

Cameos: That's legendary baseball broadcaster Vin Scully doing the narration at the beginning of the movie. Sandy Reed, who served as the track announcer at Riverside International Speedway, plays a similar role at every single track in this movie. He's also featured in the announcer's booth in Thunder Alley and Elvis Presley's 1968 Speedway.

Racing Footage: The opening montage features several NASCAR wrecks, as well as gorgeous footage of Richard Petty's No. 43 Plymouth at Riverside. The movie is concluded with clips from Daytona.

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Title: Thunder Alley
Starring: Annette Funicello, Fabian
Studio: MGM
Year of Release: 1967
Rating: Unrated
Lug Nut Rating (Out of Five): Two

Tommy Callahan (Fabian) has a problem with blacking out on the race track.

There are more than a few points in Thunder Alley when you wish you could pass out as well. Take for instance when Francie Madsen (Funicello) goes on a drunken rampage on a race track, or the attempt at slapstick humor when she falls face first in a puddle of mud shortly thereafter. Then, there's Tommy's -- what's the best way to describe this? -- "ambitious" girlfriend, Annie, hearing the sound of an engine and yelling, "Roar, baby, roar."

Ouch.

When Tommy gets that look in his eyes, somebody's in trouble. It only happens when he gets blocked in, and in the movie's opening, it happens at Daytona. A fellow driver winds up dead, and Tommy is suspended right there on pit road, during the race. He spends the rest of the movie trying to find his way back into the big race at Darlington.

He lands in a thrill show owned by Francie's dad. After a few shows, Tommy gets his big chance by winning a dirt track race. Wonder of wonders, he fights through numerous flashbacks and goes on to win the Southern 500.

Racing Footage: Like Fireball 500, vintage footage from Daytona is incorporated into the film. There's also great stuff from Darlington.

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Title: Speedway
Starring: Elvis Presley, Nancy Sinatra, Bill Bixby
Studio: Warner Brothers
Year of Release: 1968
Rating: G
Lug Nut Rating (Out of Five): Two

If you've seen an Elvis movie -- any Elvis movie -- you've seen Speedway.

How many times did he make the same flick? In the Army, in Las Vegas, in Hawaii, in Acapulco, as a boxer, carnival worker or cowboy, the story was always pretty much the same. Elvis meets girl. Elvis sings six or seven songs. Elvis gets girl. The only difference is that in Speedway, Elvis works his magic at the race track.

Then again, Elvis had just made Spinout a couple of years before. Sorry.

Elvis' character in Speedway, Steve Grayson, finds himself in hot water with the IRS and he's forced to turn over his race winnings to pay the $145,000 in taxes he owes. This time, Nancy Sinatra -- Frank's daughter -- plays opposite Elvis. When she sings and stumbles through Your Groovy Self, it's all pretty much downhill from there.

Here's exactly how goofy the movie really is. Steve is leading the big race at Charlotte when he wrecks coming off turns four on the final lap. He flips upside down and catches on fire, but it's OK. He crawls out unscathed and immediately makes plans with the gang to head over to the Hangout club.

Once there, he immediately breaks into song.

A couple pieces of trivia from the Internet Movie Database ... Elvis and his wife, Priscilla, discovered that she was expecting during the filming of Speedway and Sinatra threw the mother-to-be a baby shower. Lisa Marie Presley was born Feb. 1, 1968, just a few months before the movie's theatrical release on June 12.

Also, in another tidbit from the IMDb, the script for Speedway originally was offered to Sonny and Cher. Really.

Cameos: Richard Petty, Buddy Baker, Cale Yarborough, Dick Hutcherson, Tiny Lund, G.C. Spencer and Roy Mayne are all shown in the opening credits

Racing Footage: By far the best part of Speedway is the vintage footage shot on location, mostly at Charlotte. Cars and crews have not looked like that in a very, very long time.

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Title: The Last American Hero
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Lane Smith, Gary Busey
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Year of Release: 1973
Rating: PG
Lug Nut Rating (Out of Five): Three

The Last American Hero is loosely based on Tom Wolfe's famous 1965 Esquire essay about Junior Johnson.

Very loosely based.

Junior Jackson does indeed run moonshine produced by the family still, and he eventually becomes a race car driver. That's just about where the similarities to Johnson end.

The most obvious difference is that the film takes place within a relatively short time span in the early 1970s, while Johnson was running 'shine and entering races at least 25 years earlier. Then, the one time Jackson is caught with moonshine, he receives only a ticket. Let's just say Johnson wasn't quite that lucky in real life.

That Hero makes a variety of departures from Johnson's life story isn't really the problem, though. Overall, it's a good movie. It's a great portrayal of a moonshiner who makes good on the track. But once Jackson starts pining over Marge (Perrine), the ultimate pit lizard, the storyline trails off dramatically. You know she's a tramp. Every other character in the movie knows she's a tramp. Even ol' Marge knows she's a tramp, and she seems to be fairly proud of it.

But Jackson ... he's oblivious.

Cameos: Ned Jarrett is shown as a track announcer at Hickory. One of Busch Series legend Sam Ard's actual Thomas Bros. Country Ham-sponsored No. 00 cars doubles as Jackson's ride as he rises through the ranks. In the movie's climactic race, Jackson is pitted by several members of Junior Johnson's Winston Cup team, including Herb Nab and Henry Benfield.

Racing Footage: One of the highlights of Hero is its vintage racing clips. Ard's car is shown on the track at Hickory, more than a decade before the formation of the Busch Series. Also recognizable from the Hickory footage is an orange No. 77 Chevy that was driven by Harry Gant long before his "Skoal Bandit" days.

Martinsville serves as the setting for the big finale, and Jackson is behind the wheel of what was actually Bobby Allison's No. 12 Coca-Cola-sponsored Chevrolet owned by Johnson. Again, the actual racing footage from Martinsville is incredible. It's interesting to note that the "bad guys" in Thunder Alley, Speedway and Hero are represented by Richard Petty's No. 43 car in actual racing clips.

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Title: 43: The Petty Story
Starring: Richard Petty, Darren McGavin
Studio: Victory Lane Productions
Year of Release: 1974
Rating: G
Lug Nut Rating (Out of Five): Three

As an actor, Richard Petty was a great race car driver.

Petty ran into walls during his racing career that weren't any stiffer than his performance in 43: The Petty Story. Then again, he's not alone. Not in this flick. Some who managed to get themselves in front of the camera would've flunked out of a junior high school drama class.

There are other problems with the movie. Although it's a little closer to Petty's story than The Last American Hero is to Junior Johnson's, 43 plays loose with the facts. For instance:

• Rather than name one of his contemporaries as an enemy, the fictional Ed Colter serves as Petty's rival.

• 43's account of Richard and Lynda Petty's wedding is fictionalized, played for humor, rather than the way it actually happened.

• Lee Petty is said to have never driven another race after his near-fatal crash at Daytona in 1961, when, in fact, he did make a total of six more starts during the next three years.

• One plotline focuses on Lee's steadfast refusal to attend an upcoming race at Charlotte. It's assumed that he hadn't been to a race since his accident when that just wasn't the case.

Regardless of 43's flaws, however, it is interesting to see Petty at the very pinnacle of his career. When the movie was released in June 1974, Petty was in the middle of a season that would see him win 10 races and collect an amazing 22 top-five finishes in 30 starts. He won the Winston Cup championship that season, one of four he would post during a five-year span that began in 1971.

Cameos: Dale Inman, Maurice Petty and Buddy Baker show up as extras in the film.

Racing Footage: The film's plot is actually centered around flashbacks that follow Petty's infamous 1970 wreck at Darlington, footage of which is included several times. 43 also makes ample use of other footage, including Charlotte, Riverside, a few victory lane ceremonies and Lee Petty's Daytona crash.

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Title: Greased Lightning
Starring: Richard Pryor, Beau Bridges, Pam Grier, Cleavon Little, Vincent Gardenia
Studio: Warner Brothers
Year of Release: 1977
Rating: PG
Lug Nut Rating (Out of Five): Three

That's legendary comedian Richard Pryor playing Wendell Scott, but Greased Lightning is no comedy.

Because of its focus on Scott's struggle for racial equality, Lightning is perhaps the grittiest of all racing movies right up until its contrived ending. No less than 25 times, the "n" word is used, sometimes flying almost too fast to count. That's just one of several derogatory terms used. This isn't a movie to be watched with young children around.

Pryor gives one of the best performances of his career in Lightning. He plays Scott seriously, rather than clowning his way through the part as he had in so many of his other works. It isn't exactly Academy Award-winning stuff, but it's no The Toy or Brewster's Millions, either.

As much of a tribute as Lightning is to Scott, its ending does a disservice to his memory. Scott was seriously injured in a May 1973 accident at Talladega, and drove only one other race in his career, five months later in Charlotte. Scott finished 12th in that final race -- but he didn't win, as depicted in Lightning.

That wasn't the only discrepancy in Lightning. He met his wife, Mary, before World War II, not afterward. The lone win of Scott's career came in Jacksonville, Fla., not a generic Virginia Speedway. But a conjured victory at the "International Speedway" is by far the biggest change, and while it makes for a heart-warming story, it just didn't happen that way.

That he won at the end of the movie seemed to somehow make up for the wrongs he endured. There was no such fairy-tale ending in real life for Scott. Sure, this was Hollywood's take on the subject, but it's just wrong to trivialize such an important chapter in NASCAR's history.

By the way, that's Earl Hindman -- Wilson, the wise, never-fully-seen neighbor in Home Improvement -- playing Beau Welles, Scott's fictional nemesis throughout the film.

Cameos: Longtime racing announcer Bill Connell is featured in the booth during the film's final race.

Racing Footage: Clips from a number of different tracks are briefly used to illustrate the passing of time in Scott's career.

• NASCAR in Hollywood -- 1980s to today