All my friends know that besides being crazy about redhead girls dressed in cheerleader uniforms and liking red lolipops I am also a huge fan of movies and TV shows from the 80's. My favorite movies are those that take place in high schools (Ferris Bueller's Day Off - a classic!) and where the nerds get even at the end (like Revenge of The Nerds) - maybe that's something from my nerd teenage years, where I wasn't able to score no girl at all.
These kind of movies are available on DVD for some time now, but the great news is that TV shows are being released as well. So far I've bought Magnum, A-Team and Knight Rider and I am anxiously waiting for CHiP's (I hope they release it)! But Knight Rider is really a must.
The show was about a black Pontiac Trans Am, called K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Two Thousand), which had several red lights on its front, making K.I.T.T.'s typical noise (K.I.T.T.'s noise has the same importance to Knight Rider as the noise of the light sabers has to Star Wars).
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What Knight Rider has to do with computers? Everything. K.I.T.T. was a talking computer, capable of doing anything you can imagine, bringing features that would reach the market only today, like GPS and voice recognition. Today, almost 25 years after the show was first aired, K.I.T.T.'s dashboard still awesome.
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Wow! It looks like Darth Vader's bathroom!
Knight Rider is the story of Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff -- yes, the very same actor from Baywatch), an ex-cop sweared to death and supposedly killed by some criminals that defends the weaks and the oppressed ones with his super car. The first thing Michael Knight said when he entered the car for the first time was "Wow! It looks like Darth Vader's bathroom!". It makes sense.
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David Hasselfhoff before chasing silicone breasts on Malibu beach.
The series go really hot when K.A.R.R. appeared - a car exactly equal to K.I.T.T., but from "the evil side". It had green lights instead of red ones. These episodes were the best!
Re-watching Knight Rider I stepped into several "special defects". I don't know if we at the time didn't pay attention or if it was because the TV sets were smaller at the time, but the errors are there. See below a scene were a burglar stels K.I.T.T. and the car starts to spin. Pay attention on the steering wheel. You can see that the car used was another one, since K.I.T.T.'s steering wheel wasn't rounded.
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And when the car was driven by itself? On the pilot episode you can clearly see how this trick was done: there was a dude behind the driver's seat. The hole of the head rest was a window that allowed this guy to see where he was going to with the car (compare the left head rest, normal, with the right head rest, that has the window). The guy drove the car using gloves made of the same material as the car seats in order to dissimulate his presence.
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On the following episodes the producers must have noticed this defect and they started shooting K.I.T.T. driving by its own from another angle. But you can clearly see the window on the driver's seat on almost all episodes.
The "special defects" don't cut the fun of watching Knight Rider. Afterall, these were the resources people had at the time to imagine a "dream machine", a fully computadorized car. The theme from the episodes may sound silly and even naïve compared to what we have on TV today. But maybe that's why Knight Rider is so much fun.I think we miss TV shows like this.
