First Rocky did it, then Rambo. Indiana Jones is about to do it, and even Dirty Harry is rumored to be thinking about it. So if all of these movie geezers can come out of retirement for one more adventure, why can’t the Bandit? Of course I refer to Bo “Bandit” Darville, the iconic Burt Reynolds rogue who drove circles around Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit movies. While a big-screen re-launch of the franchise may currently exist only in the sickest corner of my diseased brain, Burt Reynolds has recently reunited with the black TransAm he made famous. Sort of.

In Celebrity Rides: Burt Builds a Bandit, a 5-part series that aired on something called the DIY Network but is now available on DVD, Reynolds teams with car restoration company YearOne to design and build a new custom version of the car using the original 1977-78 model. Actually, saying Reynolds “teams” with the restoration group is a bit generous; he shows up at the shop a couple of times to reminisce and grunt a few suggestions, footage of which is scattered throughout the episodes to make him seem like a consistent presence. In fact, there’s probably less than an hour of actual content in the whole two-and-a-half hour series; the footage is all chopped and shuffled and re-used over and over, following the time-honored TV dictum: tell people what they’re going to see, let them see it, and then tell them what they just saw.

Still, if you’re a know-nothing gearhead like me, it’s fun to see an old-school TransAm pulled out of a field, completely stripped down and rebuilt to modern specifications, even if replacing the CB radio with an Alpine navigation system does seem like sacrilege. Clips from the original Smokey are scattered throughout, and they mostly serve to highlight how shockingly frail Reynolds looks these days. He’s making another big screen comeback attempt with Deal, in theaters tomorrow, but it’s a safe bet that his years of going eastbound and down are long behind him, good buddy.