I don't know why, but Richard Basehart's breathlessly intoning "Knight Rider! A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man...who does not exist" at the start of every episode is still somehow incredibly cool to me.
Its just an incredible way to set the stage in less than 20 words, you have the premise and oh there's a talking car that is a kompletely automated roving robot... no wait that's k.a.r.r. :) but you get my point.
Stam Fine, a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of man who does not exist. Stam Fine, a gen X RU-vid loner on a crusade to champion the cause of nostalgia, entertainment, and dry comedy in a world of content creators who operate above the copyright law.
Hasselhoff was so revered in Germany in the 80s that he was allowed to "perform" at the Berlin Wall after the iron curtain fell. Check out his signature song, "Looking For Freedom".
William Daniels was the perfect choice as KITT's voice. He's a veteran actor with a great talent for snark. It was played as a partnership than a man/machine thing so it worked.
Yeah definitely, and also, of course there really was the incredible, friggin un-forgettable theme music! - Here's all the versions of *Night Rider* (from seasons 1 --> 4) 🤩_👍 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uO8yFLF9uhM.html
Yh he was perfect, that’s what made me angry when they decided for val Kilmer on the continuation series from 2008. As bad as knight rider 2000 was, at least they put the real kitt (with some detours) in the new knight industries four thousand. In the 2008 series it’s like they just killed off the original kitt for a new AI. Since the original show made it seem that kitt had actuall feelings Yh it pissed me off they did that. I’m sure daniels would have been glad to reprise the role but he wasn’t even asked.
A big problem w when KITT got Super Pursuit Mode(other than the ridiculous panels that arent visible when in normal mode... which is best for aesthetics but stretchs the believabilty a bit beyond disbelied)... is that his molecular bonded shell was rendered inert prior to his destruction. And incapable of being duplicated. So he was now vulnerable and just super fast. So ya never got gunfire at him.. or other means of attacks that KITT would be used as a defensive device. Imo it was a horribly missed opportunity to have GARTH find the remains of KARR, and either rebuild him or rebuild GOLIATH w KARR as its new AI. Easily retconned where KARRs remains had a homing beacon that Garth was able to hone in and recover... unite the 2 dopplegangers to fight the heros.
So I was once on holiday as a kid in Greece when my family and I saw a large group of locals dressed in their best clothes walking to the town square, thinking a wedding was going to happen we followed to see it. As we got to the square there were rows of chairs and a huge tv screen set up in front, everyone took their seats and proceeded to watch the latest episode of Knight rider, after the episode ended they stood and applauded and went home lol.
I was 8 years old when this series began. To me Michael Knight and KITT were the coolest crime fighting duo ever. They just don’t make programmes like this anymore. Great video Stam fine as always 😊👍🏻
Closest thing I could find to knight rider was a tv series called Time Trax where a police officer from the future is sent back in time to the year 2193 and paired with an artificial intelligence hologram called Selma who was a credit card computer.
Yeah! There really was something about the 80s and incredible, friggin un-forgettable theme music! - Here's all the versions of the Night Rider theme music (from seasons 1 --> 4) 🤩_👍 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uO8yFLF9uhM.html
Most of the people said that it’s a shame for the kids right now that they don’t see this 80’s Shows, but even if I wasn’t born at the 80’s, Knight Rider, Airwolf, A-Team, Street Hawk, The Dukes of Hazzard,… are the shows that I grew up with it. So technically I did grew up and lived my childhood like a Kid who was born at the 80’s.
Michael, after first getting into the car and seeing all the tech, “What is this, Darth Vader’s bathroom?” Also, I love how the tech secret stealing villains in the first episode are hiding out, “in some place called Silicon Valley”
Can guarantee a Devon Miles prequel series is not far over the horizon. We are hilariously reminded he dislikes driving and has a robot fetish. His butler is Metal Mickey's dad Moog, half vacuum-cleaner half wurlitzer.
A 1982 5.0l Pontiac Trans Am had 150bhp and would hit 125 mph. My current 1.0l Fiesta has 125bhp and will hit about the same top speed. Cars have progressed so far from the emission strangled V8s of the late 70s and 80s.
I never missed an episode of KNIGHT RIDER back in the day! Although, even then, in my early teens, I couldn't figure out how the heck they had a mobile office in the back of a semi without ever needing seatbelts, cupholders, or chairs that aren't on casters.
You are underrated. I predect one day the lucky dice of th algorythm is gonna take you from 16k subscribers to 500k in a month. Thanks buddy, I like your smell of humour.
29:09 On a business trip once in my rental, I took a back road like this and played the intro theme. For those moments on that deserted road in California, I was a lone crusader also standing up for those who couldn’t.
Great review! My friends and I used to get together to watch the show every week in our teenage years. I'm a little surprised you didn't mention that KARR was voiced by Peter Cullen, later known as Optimus Prime. I can remember Jay Leno saying something to the effect that the "evil twin" stories need to stop. He made the remark about the Goliath storyline (which was heavily promoted at the time): "He must be his evil twin: this guy can't act either!" I didn't agree but thought that line was hilarious.
"T-Top" refers to the roof of KITT. The windows are removable. When you remove the windows the roof creates a ""T" shape (like the Smokey and the Bandit Trans-Am). All Trans-Ams/Firebirds/Camaros of that era had roofs like that. That's why in America it's common to refer to those types of cars as "T-Tops."
I know you briefly commented on the other variants of Knight Rider, but I'd love to see a dedicated video about them. Specifically the 2008 variant, which I quite enjoyed. One of my favorite things about the 2008 variant is that it's not a reboot or a "re-imagining", it's a straight up sequel, just some years down the road. I love that - nobody has the stones anymore to continue the storyline, everyone wants to reset everything. That's why I loved that version of Knight Rider.
@@davidwestreynolds They did the same thing with the TNT version of Dallas. It ignored the continuity in the two reunion movies, and just made it a straight up sequel 25 years later from the original TV series.
I watched them film Knight Rider, A-Team and Dukes of Hazzard as a kid in Southern California. This show was super popular. The lady down the street bought a brand new white Trans-Am and got custom plates that read WHT-RDR. They also had KITT at Universal Studios Theme Park. You could sit in it and "talk" to it. That was a highlight. I remember being disappointed that I couldnt find the turbo boost button.
Some great information about a programme that fed the minds of an excited young generation who were looking forward to what the future may hold for them when they got old enough to drive a smart car like Michael. ( unfortunately they are still waiting). Entertaining non the less, thank you for sharing 😊
Super. As I recall, I think I also tuned out after the Gerth... Garthe, episodes... I think I was traumatised. I can't wait for AirWolf... you're going to do AirWolf, aren't you?... I mean YOU *ARE* GOING TO DO AIRWOLF. AREN'T YOU. I'd also like Whiz Kids to be taken into consideration, but I fear I'm the only person that watched that. :)
Car culture was at one of its heights in the early 80's. Burt Reynolds, the highest paid actor of the time, was hip deep in his Smokey & The Bandit/Cannonball Run phase, although by the time Knight Rider came out, he'd already made the best films in those series. At the same time, CBS was running The Dukes of Hazzard on the same night as Knight Rider
Yeah man, someone really oughta have a go at doing a new "It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world" (1963) / "Cannonball Run" (1981) / "Smokey & The Bandit" (1977) - (Even the fantastic crazy "Deathrace 2000" (1975) - With a suuuper-young Sly Stallone as the schlock-tastic 'Machine-Gun Joe' 🤣) type ensemble road-comedy again, at the very least they're always FUN! 😸_👍 (I think my all-time favourites though have to be "The Blues Brothers" and "Planes, trains and Automobiles" - Just movie perfection! ....I _still_ wonder what Ghostbusters woulda been like, with John Belushi in it...)
It seemed like every other week the US were exporting an automotive action show, CHiPs, Knight Rider, Hardcastle and McCormick, The Dukes of Hazzard, Automan and if not vehicle-centric then the vehicle was made much of, like B.A.'s van in The A Team, the fake Ferraris of Miami Vice, the real Ferrari of Magnum P.I. It was almost like there was some kind of government subsidy.
In the 80s, there was a plethora of super vehicle based action TV shows. My favorite was Rip Tide which featured a So Cal Bo and Luke who lived on a boat with a robot and flew a dilapidated pink helicopter!
We had a “Cars Of The Stars” museum in town that was owned by a local classic car collector. He travelled the world sourcing actual vehicles from tv shows. The KITT car was on display and I recall thinking how cheap and plastic the interior looked. Also you could see a gap between the hood and the light red scanning light. It just looked a bit ropey.
something else you gotta remember, the cars got beat to crap, its been 30 years since they were on the show, and they used many in and out cars, so that car might have just had the bare basics just to look good in passing but not close up as what they have is a car called the hero car that looks good in close up, the rest if its a 5 footer its good enough.
There was also an “insert dashboard” created for a couple of the first cars used in Season 1 and carried over through the series when they didn’t need a fully integrated dash (mostly exterior shots of the car or quick getaways with Hasselhoff jumping in. The Cars of the Stars version could’ve been one of those Firebirds. “Knight Rider Historians” covers the different KITT cars in detail.
@@chrisbullard5901 knight rider historians cheat and lie a bit too much. Like in a video they found the "original semi from the show" yeah but in the wrong color and wrong type of truck. Always the same pattern : they take a item you see in the show, and say "this is the part we got, but after the show got canceled it was used for other things and got changed" and work on this item to make it look again as "original". They copy this in front of your eyes and hope the viewers dont notice. Critical comments get deleted or users banned . This cheeky clip where they "bring the orgininal 1982 KITT car to live again." But you see rims from a later 1989 Firebird there, ouch busted. Tampering with the engine so that it doesn't start and run properly is easy.
I loved this show as a kid. For me, One thing that always annoyed the hell out of me was when Patricia Mcpherson had to leave the show due to a dispute over something. And then they brought in Rebecca Holden. While Patricia was a far better actor and all that. I understand that. I always had a crush for Rebbecca. And then of course Patricia comes back in season 3. I always thought that was a mistake of letting Rebecca go.
@@mrmeerkat1096 Patricia was the good looking down to earth girl you might have a chance with, while Rebecca was hot girl that you had almost no chance with!
@@shallendor true i see what you mean. I think it would have been a better dynamic for the show having both of them. But the producers are probably thinking of having to pay extra salaries. I liked the bad woman in the pilot episode. I forget her name but she was once married to Dean martin or his girlfriend.
Great video as always! I really enjoyed the special villain shows : Garthe (with an 'E' ) and Goliath and Karr. Like you I don't think I watched the later seasons - I don't recall the new guy at all. Thanks for this, if nothing else it was great listening to Richard Basehart's voice-over and the theme song again.
I recall liking the pilot as a kid and then just dipping in and out. As with the A-Team, kid-me was able to see right through the very formula plotting.
Stam: He’s very tall looking like a giraffe with a perm 🤣🤣 omg Stam too funny I would totally love it for you to continue on the other 80s show also like the A-Team anddddd Murder She Wrote with its high body count 😁
I still remember when they had KITT on display at Universal Studios, and they had an event where they would let guests sit in the car for a minute and talk with KITT himself, using what I assume was a sound-alike voice actor. The line for that stretched around the park all for no more than a minute or so of interaction, but I still remember it fondly. While I'm on a nostalgia trip, it occurs to me that if Universal tried rebooting Knight Rider yet again today, modern KITT's on board AI would probably be made to look like a vtuber.
This is a very in depth review of my favorite series as a kid and growing into a young adult. Thank you for putting together something i could use to show my friends what made this series so great. Some really interesting trivia facts you've collected too.
It's really too bad this show didn't continue, I would've liked to see a proper ending, the last episode just didn't do it. I hope maybe they can bring it back, with the remaining cast, or even make a movie.
My favourite show as a kid, this, auto man, and a team and to a lesser extent dukes of hazard, also fall guy was pretty sweet (edit) very incoherent comment I made, but I’m not changing anything about it.
I think it's funny that in the pilot, Michael is rescued by Admiral Nelson from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and given his face by Oscar Goldman from the Six Million Dollar Man.
I love KR, too. When i rewatched it a couple of years ago i was really struck by how messed up it was that some billionairre basically kidnaps a dying cop and changes his face to both look like a younger version of himself, but also look like his estranged son, who then forces him into indentured servitude as he has no choice because he has no old life to return to as everyone thinks he's dead.
I watched a rerun when I was 12 or 14. In the first 30 seconds of the intro I got a strange feeling for a bit like I was 8 again and watching this. Remarkable like our brain can recreate these emotions.
33:12 Nice inclusion of Jessica! "Tonight on Knight Rider: Michael delivers a roundhouse kick, KITT calculates the odds, and Devon pays the insurance premium."
When I was a kid, I had a pipe frame pedal go-kart. The pipe frame was black with some red highlights. The brand‘s name was „Kettcar“. You can imagine.
Don Peakes music was great. I think in the middle of the 2nd season onwards. A little bit 80s and a little bit science fiction. Not as great as Jan Hammer in Miami Vice but still.
Even as a kid in the 80s I thought the turbo boost jumps were too much to swallow. The rest was cool though. In Columbus Ohio I worked with a dude who had a Trans Am all modified took and sound like KITT. He even had a bunch of recordings of KITTS voice that would play randomly. He took it to car shows and got a lot of attention. One Friday afternoon he drove it to work and we went to Wendy's for lunch. We were the coolest kids on the playground...
I'm of a certain age, so was OBSESSED with knight rider. But now, I REALLY want to either see a modern Dan Harmon treatment of My Mother The Car, or I might just make it myself. It honestly sounds like peak television!
I had the Knight Rider toy set that included Michael Knight and KITT with various sound files. Between this and The A-Team the early to mid 1980s were great.
Thank you for this good introduction to Knight Rider. I was an 80s kid whose dad actually drove Trans Ams, but oddly I never watched KR back in the day. I have only discovered the series through a nifty Xmas 2022 Scalextric 1/32 slot car KITT replica (with the back-and-forth red eye light no less!), so your overview was very helpful orienting me to Knight Rider and helping me understand the basis of the series’ appeal to its audience. I appreciate your even-handed review attitude. A show that merely aimed to be pleasant entertainment should not be judged against harsher standards, and your treatment here seems on the whole fair-minded and appropriately upbeat. Did the show succeed at what it set out to do? Did it live up to its own standards, and how much merit was in those standards? You gave me a good sense of how to come to this series with the right expectations and frame of mind to get the most out of it rather than being disappointed at its shortcomings. Your preview of the development arcs, thin as they may be, makes the series of more interest to me than it would have been otherwise. Now I know to tune in mainly for genuinely impressive stunt action, moderately silly stylish fun, growing participation by the co-stars, and the elan of David Hasselhoff. He wasn’t working for me at first, but he does definitely have movie star charisma and I admit that after half a dozen episodes he is growing on me. I found the stunt action of Knight Rider curiously engaging, and realized it comes from the total lack of CG BS. It’s usually a real car going through those outrageous hijinks, with a real stuntman at the wheel, and that makes this crazy stuff so compelling that I don’t care how KITT is supposed to have launched itself into the air without a ramp. It doesn’t matter a bit. When it’s not a real car on the screen, it’s a real model, and I like seeing when they actually manage to fool me. Model effects are entertaining to me even when they are not perfect because I find they have a charm of their own-unlike weak CG which is dead boring. So I don’t much care whether the Knight Rider VFX totally fool me, I get a smile out of them either way. What a pleasure to see no CG, I didn’t realize how appealing that aspect alone would be in watching this old series. Having been something of a fan of Knight Rider creator Glen A. Larson’s earlier series Battlestar Galactica, I was certainly struck by elements that Larson borrowed from his space series to add color to Knight Rider. It might have been worth mentioning that the KITT dynamic with Michael echoes the relationship that Viper pilot Starbuck had with his vehicle’s CORA, just as KITT’s red wavering eye was first developed for Larson’s ominous Cylon robot warriors. I think a version of the Cylon audio effect even carries over when we see a CU of KITT’s eye, a fun touch. Thanks for a nice job on this video, you were a good guide into unfamiliar territory. I enjoyed your balance of informative reporting and editorial evaluation with a not intrusive sense of humor, and I was interested to hear your personal thoughts about where the show worked and where it didn’t. I will look forward to seeing your other work on RU-vid. Cheers, DWR
At the time, I remember it reported that Bonnie's replacement with April was for the most obvious reason. The network wanted someone sexier. Fans thought it was pretty stupid. Rebecca Holden wasn't bad; it just wasn't right to replace someone who'd been good at her job for such a lame reason.
I was years old when the show came out. But I love oved the show and I still to this day I'll look up some episode's and go back to when I was a kid. . eye balls velcrowed to the t. V. And I used to buy the little hott wheels of kitt I had like . 10 of those little cares of kitt but I whosh I still had them. . The best show in the 80s. I think. Turbo boost kitt .. lol
What a fun review! You nailed it! Almost as good as Jay Leon’s early takedown of the schticky ‘evil twin’ episode: You can tell they’re twins; that other guy can’t act either!
Oh my days Stam. That's exactly the description of The Hoff. A Giraffe with a perm.😁😁 One more thing the actor that plays Devon Myles is from city of Cork in Ireland.
Great review! Spot on. I watched the entire series as a kid on its original run. Watched the enture series again 20 years later as a 29 year old. And now have just ordered the box set to watch it again through the tired eyes of cynical mid 40 year old. This is going to be interesting, fun and emotional haha🤓😂🫠
FYI Intro: I am the voice of Knight Industries Two Thousand's Central Microprocessing Unit, KITT for easier reference Kitt if you prefer. The talking was not the car but the Computerised Central Processing Unit in and that controlled the car.
