Knight Rider was my obsession as a kid. I had and loved my Knight Rider lunchbox (geez I wish I still had that), I spent my afternoons in the backyard pretending an old log was my talking Trans Am, and at night I lay awake in bed urging myself to grow older so I could turn 16 and get my first talking car best friend. As an adult, ok maybe the show doesn’t hold up so fabulously, but if you’ve taken a minute or two to revisit it recently then you know it’s not completely awful. At least not compared to some of the other really terrible stuff we all thought was worth watching back then. Whether or not the show still holds up, believe that when I finally make my first million, I’ll celebrate by running out and buying a vintage, tricked out, K.I.T.T. replica Trans-Am. Unfortunately the way things are going, I may have a long wait on my hands.
Still even I, with my raging Knight Rider fandom, never really believed they’d actually get a movie version of this thing off the ground, no matter how much I might have wanted it. David Hasselhoff, who played Michael Knight and drove K.I.T.T. (or rather let K.I.T.T. drive him) on the show has talked for years about doing a big screen Knight Rider, but the project never went anywhere. It always seemed more like wishful thinking on the part of the Hoff than anything. After all, in light of more modern technology the whole talking car thing seems kind of silly. Fun, but silly.
As it turns out, I was right. The Knight Industries Two-Thousand is never coming to theaters, instead it’s going straight back to television. No doubt the recent success of The Bionic Woman had a little something to do with that. NBC has hit the project’s turbo button, and HR says they’ve already cast Michael Knight’s successor. 28-year-old Soap star Justin Bruening is set to star in a two-hour pilot t0 air on NBC later this season. He’ll play Michael Knight’s son, which should present plenty of opportunity for Hasselhoff cameos. The more Hoff the better.
Even more important than getting David Hasselhoff involved though, is bringing back the great William Daniels to provide K.I.T.T.’s voice. They’ve tried bringing Knight Rider back before, but as a low-budget affair called Team Knight Rider which was more of an advertisement for Ford cars than an actual television program. What they didn’t have though was Daniels. If Bruening is playing Michael Knight’s son, then that implies that hopefully he’ll be driving the same, never duplicated, K.I.T.T. we know and love. That means they need Daniels. He’s nearly 80 now, but surely he’s up for a little voice work. If he is, forget everything else. Daniels is a must.
I’m still mildly bummed that we’ll never see Knight Rider in theaters, though it’s probably for the best. It never would have worked anyway. On television is where Knight Rider belongs, especially in an era where so many great, old genre shows have been faithfully resurrected and brought back to newfound glory on the boob tube. Of course Knight Rider doesn’t present the dramatic possibilities of Battlestar Galactica, but slap a leather jacket on Bruening and give us back that stylized, purply credits sequel back, and Knight Rider can be cool again.
