Coined in America in the 1950s, the term "chickie run" (alternatively called a "chickie race" or less frequently, a "chicken run") refers to an extremely dangerous and foolhardy game that combines the defining aspects of drag racing and chicken.
A drag race is an illegal, high-speed race between two cars on an ordinary road, preferably a straightaway (nowadays, there are legitimate professional drag racing events on closed courses, but the term is most often applied to the illicit, spontaneous variety). The game of chicken involves two cars that are initially parked some distance apart with their front ends facing each other. The drivers simultaneously accelerate their vehicles as fast as possible - the one who swerves first in order to avoid the impending head-on collision is the chicken.
In comparison, chickie run participants drag race stolen cars over a cliff (or the ever popular dead man's bluff). Both drivers are expected to jump out of their vehicles just before the cars fly over the edge, and the guy who bails out first is the loser. A different version of the chickie run exists in which the objective is to stop one's vehicle as close as possible to the edge without actually going over. For obvious reasons, the chickie run has some geographic limitations, becoming briefly popular in mountainous California while remaining virtually unknown on the plains of the Midwest.
Without a doubt, the most famous chickie run of all time occurs during a pivotal scene in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. Sensitive troublemaker Jim Stark (James Dean) and toughened gang leader Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen) rather reluctantly agree to compete against each other in a chickie run as "a matter of honor" (more like machismo), with predictably disastrous results. Prior to Rebel Without a Cause, the chickie run was a real but relatively rare event that almost certainly was not known by the diminutive name of "chickie" (we can thank Rebel's original screenwriter Irving Shulman for that addition to the American lexicon, inspired by a newspaper story on a similar tragedy). When the film was released in October 1955, the chickie run became a matter of life imitating art, as foolishly brazen teens attempted to duplicate the on-screen stunt.
Drag racing, in one form or another, remains popular to this day. However, chicken and the chickie run have fallen out of favor (although, honestly, both games were played much more frequently in the movies than in life anyway). The decreasing popularity of chicken can be directly correlated to the automobile's evolution from the veritable tanks of the 1940s and 1950s to the significantly smaller, lightweight, and more easily collapsible vehicles available on the market today. The reasons for the demise of the chickie run are less clear. One would hope that potential chickie run contestants simply came to their senses, but it is more likely that the chickie run started to die out with the advent of effective, sturdy guardrails in the 1960s. The terminology lives on in the area of game theory, where the chickie run is a variant of the abstract chicken game.
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