THE OPENING LINE

Monday, July 16, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

Who started boogity, boogity, boogity?

It's amazing what you can learn by watching B movies late at night.

Since Fox began televising NASCAR races in 2001, color analyst Darrell Waltrip has taken credit for his "Boogity, boogity, boogity" call as the green flag drops to start each of that network's races.

Waltrip also has turned the phrase into something of a cottage industry, selling everything from T-shirts and hats to credential holders emblazoned with the nonsensical expression at his Internet store.

"I heard the word boogity a lot as a kid growing up in Kentucky but, a combination of three of them together, I don't think I'd heard that before," Waltrip told the Associated Press in 2005. "That 'Green, green, green. Go, go, go,' (that some announcers used) didn't do it for me."

This is where the late-night B movie comes in. A recent telecast of the 1977 Burt Reynolds movie "Smokey and the Bandit" provided one of those "A-ha!" moments. At one point late in the film, the character Cledus "Snowman" Snow, portrayed by actor/singer Jerry Reed, utters the phrase "Boogity, boogity, boogity, boogity" as he prepares to get all Eastbound and Down on Sheriff Buford T. Justice (portrayed by the scene-stealing Jackie Gleason).

After further - but hardly exhaustive - research, the phrase "Boogity, boogity, boogity" or some variation thereof turns up in the 1974 Ray Stevens novelty song "The Streak" and in a 1960 doo-wop parody by Barry Mann called "Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp.)." Whatever the inspiration - subconscious or otherwise - for Waltrip's signature catchphrase, let's just be thankful he didn't borrow one of the more colorful lines from Gleason's Sheriff Justice. Then again...

THIS WEEK'S BEST BET

SCORE Las Vegas Terrible's Cup III, 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Las Vegas Motor Speedway's dirt track

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ALSO WORTH A LOOK

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