But now you’re in charge: how would YOU reboot the show? Sky’s the limit, and you have all the budget you need. It’s been done before! See Knight Rider 2000 (1991), Knight Rider 2010 (1994), Team Knight Rider (1997), and Knight Rider (2008). Where was I? Oh, right: rebooting the show. As you can easily imagine (but will see captured on video when you click here), actual Pontiac Firebirds couldn’t begin to handle jump landings onto flat ground, hence the model work and novel Bug solutions. If you’re watching the video, keep your eyes peeled for later-season jumps executed as miniature effects, and appearances of the easily-spotted rubber-body KITT atop a VW Beetle chassis. And wow, could the man sell a Turbo-Boost: Mock the Hoff all you like, but he was indelible as the leather-bejacketed Michael Knight and always played the role completely straight, no matter how absurd the action or ball-crushing the jeans. Elsewhere) to complete the show’s absolutely perfect main-characters casting. KITT was voiced by William Daniels (TV nerds will also recall him as Dr. Said car (which could talk, by the way-kind of a big miss there, Wikipedia) was “played” by the just-released third-gen Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, replete with gloss-black paint, button wheel covers, and a tan interior slathered with switches, 7-segment displays, LEDs, a CRT monitor, and a yoke replacing the steering wheel. After that second clash, Kitt remarked: “I’d rather be turned into a toaster oven than go through that again.” Not for the first time, the self-parking smartypants had a point.Knight Rider should require no introduction, but if you’re just emerging from beneath a rock you stowed yourself under back in early 1982, it’s the show where “David Hasselhoff stars as Michael Knight, a sleek and modern crime fighter assisted by KITT, an advanced, artificially intelligent, self-aware, and nearly indestructible car.” That’s in quotes because I lifted it directly from Wikipedia. Turns out there really is such a thing as too much Hoff: when Garthe and his supposedly indestructible truck Goliath turned up again toward the end of the season, it felt like a lazy, self-cannibalising move rather than a highly anticipated rematch. The opening episode of the second season introduced Garthe Knight, the estranged son of Kitt’s creator who looked suspiciously like Michael Knight with an evil moustache (likely because he was also played by Hasselhoff in full panto mode). ![]() ![]() ![]() With such a deliberately formulaic approach, and baddies-of-the-week banged up by the end of each instalment, when did it demonstrably run out of gas? Was it the season three finale where Michael and Kitt joined the circus? Or the season four episode where they were targeted by ninjas? Your mileage may vary, but it felt as if the wheels fell off when Knight Rider dabbled with serialisation. But something about the cool autonomous car, the hunky lead and – let’s admit it – the kick-ass theme tune cut across language barriers, turning Knight Rider into a tangible global hit that kept its foot to the floor for 90 episodes over four seasons. This was a slick, action-orientated series where Michael and Kitt dutifully helped the downtrodden, thwarting white-collar crooks and greedy hoodlums alike with the judicious application of turbo-boosted stunt jumps. While he never seemed to master doing up his top three shirt buttons, Hasselhoff excelled as the goofball do-gooder Knight, his brawny cheesiness a ripe counterpoint to the urbane Kitt (voiced by the St Elsewhere star William Daniels). If his Knight Rider character had a knotty backstory – a crusading cop shot in the head and left for dead, resurrected with a new face and identity by an eccentric tech billionaire – the part basically just needed someone who could look unselfconscious while constantly talking to themselves. The guy in the saddle this time was David Hasselhoff, an easygoing soap actor thrilled to have finally secured a headline gig.
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