The General Knight Rider thread.
- Thread starter Skipper
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KITT got angry. He gave Michael the silent treatment in one episode.
There was one episode I always found quite silly, where KITT's CPU was stolen and Michael found it through some kind of psychic bond between partners. I felt it was just a writers' cheat to write themselves out of a plot hole when they couldn't think of a better way for Michael to find it, but it's there, and it certainly seemed to imply that KITT had some kind of "soul" that Michael could connect with like human loved ones and family are often supposed to be able to do.
Did you watch the Knight Rider 2008 series?
Val Kilmer did a great job as KITT (he lent warmth and good humor to the part).
I found him a bit bland. Moreover, I felt the 2008 KITT came off as a cruder, less sentient AI than the original, basically just an expert system with a voice. It was incongruous that AI technology seemed to have gone backward in a generation.
It makes you wonder what made an '80s vehicle show successful. Knight Rider and Airwolf lasted four seasons (even though the last one was just filler). But others barely made it through one. Where did Streek Hawk, Blue Thunder, and The Highwayman go wrong?
Certainly not because of the complexity of the plots, which I think were completely interchangeable (how many illegal arms smugglers were there in the US in the '80s?!?). Not the tone of the series. KR was quite "lighthearted," but AW was decidedly gloomier. Perhaps the charisma of the actors. David Hasselhoff and Jan-Michael Vincent did their jobs well. But no one ever accused Viper's protagonist of excessive charisma, and yet they also managed to make it through four seasons.
Your opinion?
Street Hawk was an interesting show. It doesn't take long to binge watch it. It wasn't all that good, but it's a fun watch.
It really leaned into its kid demographic over time, and KITT even made an appearance on Different Strokes. And you also saw this with A-Team and Rip Tide. A certain portion of the cop show like drama leaned into family entertainment. Of course, then you had as consequence shows leaning more adult later such as the Shield.
In my case, other than KR, I barely recall even fragments of those other shows. That could very well mean I simply wasn't exposed to them and would have liked them if I had been. But again, at the age I was at the time, I would have been watching them for the cool vehicles, not the complexity of the plots or even the likeability of the actors (probably).
It's like why I became a huge Transformers nerd, and to a lesser extent G.I. Joe. With the latter I was less interested in the fighting and (god forbid) any pro-America nonsense than I was in the really cool gadgets. If anything, COBRA was more interesting to me because they were the ones who tended to have the fun stuff.
Even Star Trek...well, if you disregard the fact that the first thing that caught my attention was a shirtless oiled-up guy running around with a sword (spoiler alert for my latent homosexuality!), I was into it for the cool ship and gizmos well before I was into it for any other reason.
No, Viper got cancelled after one season on NBC, but was then revived two years later in syndication, with a mostly new cast. As I've mentioned before, I think what enabled the show to stay on the air was that it was basically an ongoing commercial for Dodge Vipers, so the car company was willing to bankroll it even if the ratings weren't great. Sometimes companies are willing to take a loss on a show with mediocre ratings because it profits them in other ways, like the way NBC kept Star Trek on the air because it encouraged the purchase of color televisions, whose patent was owned by NBC's parent company RCA.
Airwolf, similarly, only lasted three seasons on CBS, then had one more season on USA with a whole new cast and a lower budget. Really, the only reason season 4 got made was to meet the quota for rerun syndication in hopes of making up the expense of the show in the long run. That's the same reason poorly rated shows like Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda were dragged out to five seasons with progressively worse writing. No show ever makes a profit in first run; the aim is to reach a high enough episode count to make the show profitable in future syndicated reruns or home video sales. So sometimes, especially in syndication or cable, a show that would be cancelled based on ratings alone is kept on life support until it crosses that finish line.
As for the others, there are a lot of factors that affect a show's success or failure, and many of them have nothing to do with the show itself. A lot of shows have failed because they were scheduled opposite bigger hits, or in the wrong time slot to attract their preferred demographic. And it does often come down to the charisma and chemistry of the actors. Plus, networks often make knockoffs of successful shows in hopes of drawing their audience, but I think people may be less interested in a knockoff of something when they already have the original.
A quick look at the 1984-85 tv schedule tells me that Street Hawk was going up against Magnum P.I., Thursday on CBS, before being moved to Friday, where it went up against Dallas on CBS, and Knight Rider on NBC.
Pretty much got lost against a couple of ratings juggernauts.
A car with different abilities is great, but it is only one half of what the show was. If you can't get the character of KITT to be likeable then you are just left with a disposable car. In episodes where KITT was "car-napped" or nearly destroyed there was an emotional attachment to the character. If the character were just a car then you'd have Blue Thunder where the car is just a tool and nothing more.
How do you make that appeal to people who might think like your suggesting? That would be an issue that the makers of the show would have to understand and address in the writer's room.
It could be interesting. Kitt has to convince people he is really sentient and not a ChatGPT clone installed on a car
That show really leaned into the TNA and cop show elements. But it was all over the place with its writing.
Pretty sure Highwaymen got canceled during the writers strike. I enjoyed that show as a kid too. It had the guy from the battery commercials.
Right, that's the kind of thing I'm referring to.
There could be humor in his interactions with other software as well.
Yeah, if anything I found Val Kilmer's version of KITT to be more mechnanical sounding, and it did feel like a step back. And IMHO, it came across as cold compared to Daniel's version.
Oh man, speaking of The Highwayman, I barely remember that show. I do mostly remember the title sequence and how cool it looked. But I don't think I ever saw much of it.
And it seems you weren't the only one
Blue Thunder was a helicopter. I always felt that Airwolf was a knockoff of the 1983 Blue Thunder movie. The 1984 Blue Thunder TV series debuted just two weeks before Airwolf, but ironically didn't last a fraction as long. The knockoff outcompeted the original.
Blue Thunder TV series had a fun cast. I really need to rewatch it. It's been a long time.
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