The Johnstown Jets were a minor league hockey team who were coached for the 1974-1975 season by a man named Dick Roberge. At some point write Nancy Dowd thought it would be a great idea to do a documentary on the Jets and show what life was like for a real minor league hockey team that played the game for the love of it and not the money. But then George Roy Hill entered her life and he had a great idea. Instead of making a documentary on minor league hockey that would probably wind up thrown on the pile with the other hockey documentaries that are made every year, why not try for a full length feature comedy about a struggling minor league hockey team that decides to turn to brawling to become champions. What wound up coming from all of that was the comedy classic Slap Shot that was released in 1977 and did extremely well at the box office. The Charlestown Chiefs in the movie were based directly on the Johnstown Jets and many of the people that were featured in the movie were real pro and semi-pro hockey players including the guys that played the Hanson Brothers. Coach Dick Roberge even makes it into the movie as the referee that takes the abuse from the Chiefs for most of the movie.

Slap Shot is a hard movie for people familiar with, and still tied to, the National Hockey League from the 1970's. The NHL in the 1970's was becoming known for its extreme violence. The Philadelphia Flyers were winning Stanley Cups by usually beating the other team into submission and it was not unusual to see someone taken from the ice bleeding profusely in a Flyers' game. When the Russians came to play the Flyers in the 1970's they stormed off the ice in protest and refused to finish the game when the Flyers resorted to goon tactics and cut up a Russian player pretty badly. So when Slap Shot came out in 1977 the NHL instantly denounced it as a slander against good hockey and not something that the NHL stood for. As the years went by Slap Shot became a staple movie in any hockey player's movie collection just like Spinal Tap became a staple in the movie collection of every rock musician in the world. While it can be painful to watch if you are a hockey purist and want fighting out of the game, Slap Shot can be a lot of fun if you just let go for a little while and have some fun with it. The antics of the Hanson Brothers alone make the movie worth the price of admission.

Paul Newman said that Slap Shot was the most fun he ever had making a movie and to think that his role was originally offered to Al Pacino. When Pacino felt insulted when director George Roy Hill asked him if he could skate, Pacino turned the role down and to this day he says it is a decision he greatly regrets. As for the Johnstown Jets, the year after Slap Shot came out the ice making machine in their rink stopped working and they couldn't play that season. Undeterred they fixed their ice making machine and got back to playing in the 1979 season but this time they called themselves the Johnstown Chiefs. You can still see the Hanson Brothers today as the actors that play the Hanson Brothers now make their living doing public appearances at hockey rinks all over the world.