News Justin lin doing knight Rider

[Christopher]

Sounds about right. I'd also add James Bond to that. Casino Royale gave us a brand new James Bond but we still had Dame Judi as M, continuing on from her appearances in the Pierce Brosnan movies. Then we first get Moneypenny and Q in Skyfall. Wait, what?

No, that's totally different. That's just one reboot, and it starts over completely rather than presenting itself as a sequel to some earlier installment. I'm talking about multiple parallel revival continuities that all purport to be direct sequels to the same original, but disregard each other.

Yeah, the 2005 theatrical movie that came before it, the one with Willie Nelson as Uncle Jessie and Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke was OK for what it was, I guess, especially when you consider what would happen next. Willie Nelson was its best part, but the followup which you speak of was so far off the mark it was head-scratching. It was a disgusting disrespect for the source material, so much that none of the original people involved in the series wanted anything to do with it.

Huh? I'm not sure, but I think I was talking about the first movie, or both of them together.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Huh? I'm not sure, but I think I was talking about the first movie, or both of them together.

Yep, they were two separate movies. The first one, the Johnny Knoxville movie, was made for theaters and more or less followed the formula although it did sex it up a bit, and the other one (Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning) was straight-to-video kind of deal. They were both rubbish though, but the prequel really did a number on things (like a raunchy sex-fueled teen comedy) and made the first one seem tame in comparison. Felt totally out of place in Hazzard County.

 

[Christopher]

The first one, the Johnny Knoxville movie, was made for theaters and more or less followed the formula although it did sex it up a bit, and the other one (Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning) was straight-to-video kind of deal.

I looked them up, and it was definitely the first movie I was thinking of, the one with Jessica Simpson. The one that was rated PG-13 for "crude and drug-related humor," which is the sort of thing I was talking about. I don't know why you'd think I wasn't talking about that one. I said the reboot, not the prequel.

 

[Phoenix219]

Thinking on it, I'm of the opinion that it would be pretty epic if it was the original KITT, complete with its 'advanced' 80s technology and classic TransAm body.

It would add a great level of camp to a show that honestly should be campy. And there'd be a lot of potential fun as KITT struggles to keep up with all the advances that have occurred since he was mothballed, but still managing to triumph despite it all. Perhaps even competing against some new prototype developed from KARR's wreckage or something who does have all the advantages of modern technology.

I think that might actually be a lot of fun.

Thats pretty much what Knight Rider 2000 was - its "the future"; KITT has been mothballed forever, and ends up inside a vintage 50s Chevy, being overshadowed by a modern red sports car, and being missing various compenents, trying to keep up with 21st century technology. It was made in 1990. Great camp, and a hilarious scene with James Doohan in it. Serious moments, too, with shades of Robocop and Demolition Man mied in.

Or the last four reboots -- Knight Rider 2000, Knight Rider 2010, Team Knight Rider, and the 2008 series. It's amazing how many times people have tried to revive the show. It's not like it was all that good to begin with.

I have always had a soft spot for Knight Rider 2000. It might seem derivitive now, but at the time, for a tv movie, it was fantastic. It acknowledged all of the KR history and had Hasselhoff AND Daniels. It predated most of the stuff it could now be seen as cheap knockoffs of, and was satisfying both as a TV sequel to the classic show, with the classic cast, and as a pilot to launch a new team. To this day it ranks up there, to me, as a good bookend for the original series.

As an alternate timeline, the original 2008 pilot movie was pretty good, but the show quickly went off the rails, changing the nanotech completely, adding an entirely useless tech team, and later even worse with a strange transformer-like robot form of KARR (no connection to the original KARR, although the same voice, and in a continuity where the OS was supposed to have occurred.) The pilot movie implied a presence by Hasselhoff that was never picked up on by the show itself, and by the time it retooled itself, reintroduced FLAG, dumped the team, and got back to the basics of "one man (and his car) CAN make a difference," it was too late, and it got cancelled.

Kilmer definitely was one of the worst parts. If they had just cast Daniels again as the voice of KITT, I don't think anyone would have cared about what car it was in, or who was driving... :P

 

[Owain Taggart]

I looked them up, and it was definitely the first movie I was thinking of, the one with Jessica Simpson. The one that was rated PG-13 for "crude and drug-related humor," which is the sort of thing I was talking about. I don't know why you'd think I wasn't talking about that one. I said the reboot, not the prequel.

Yeah, my bad. I saw "reboot", and saw it in the sense that they went were going back to the beginning, as I never really thought of that particular movie as being much of a reboot. Anyhow, you'd definitely want to avoid the second one In truth, I don't really remember the first one very much. It's the second one that stayed in my mind because of how truly awful it was. Go figure. I'd actually forgotten how crass the first one was because of it.

Kilmer definitely was one of the worst parts. If they had just cast Daniels again as the voice of KITT, I don't think anyone would have cared about what car it was in, or who was driving... :P

Made this for one of the avatar contests back in the day...

 

[tharpdevenport]

Or the last four reboots -- Knight Rider 2000, Knight Rider 2010, Team Knight Rider, and the 2008 series. It's amazing how many times people have tried to revive the show. It's not like it was all that good to begin with.

Three. 2010 wasn't related, just badly named.


Justin Lin is the kiss of death for it as far as I am concerned.

 

[Phoenix219]

Three. 2010 wasn't related, just badly named.


Justin Lin is the kiss of death for it as far as I am concerned.

Two. Knight Rider 2000 was an absolute sequel not a reboot. TKR may have been a reboot, but I think was leading itself slowly into the direction of alternate sequel #2. 2008 started as alternate sequel #3, but ended up as a complete reboot.

KR2000 was a backdoor pilot, yes, but in no terms was it rebooting *anything*.

 

[Christopher]

Two. Knight Rider 2000 was an absolute sequel not a reboot. TKR may have been a reboot, but I think was leading itself slowly into the direction of alternate sequel #2. 2008 started as alternate sequel #3, but ended up as a complete reboot.

KR2000 was a backdoor pilot, yes, but in no terms was it rebooting *anything*.

Well, except in the original industry-insider sense of the term "reboot," which meant any revival of a dormant property, regardless of continuity. The fan perception that "reboot" refers exclusively to a continuity restart probably arises from from the fact that it was the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot that popularized the term with general audiences, leading them to assume it referred specifically to complete reinventions like BSG. But in its earlier industry use, it wasn't about continuity per se, just about restarting a franchise that had been inactive, like rebooting a computer. Really, fans are oddly exacting and inflexible about the term's definition, given that it's a slang term with three or four levels of figurativeness underneath it. (I.e. rebooting a franchise by analogy with rebooting a computer, with "boot" in that sense being short for "bootstrap," as in the expression "to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps," a humorous description of a physically impossible feat.)

But yes, the point is that each subsequent revival has ignored the previous revivals. TKR was always a sequel to the original show, with references to Michael Knight as early as episode 1. The '08 series was also a sequel, with its lead character being Michael Knight's son. Although I think both series retconned elements of the original series. The problem with getting too hung up on "reboot vs. continuation" as if it were a binary choice is that many sequels and revivals are in between those extremes, presenting themselves as continuations while changing details of past continuity as needed.

 

[JD]

If someone wanted to do a car show with Justin Lin, I'm kind of surprised they didn't just do a TV spin-off of the FandF movies. The movies are still pretty popular, so it is kind surprising that they wouldn't expand it onto TV.

 

[Phoenix219]

I don't believe the term was ever used before the computer age; there may have been remakes, and re-imaginings, and continuations, but I really doubt the term existed as "reboot" in a pre-computerized age, and from what i can tell, has always meant to restart from the beginning. It seems to be a very modern term.

https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/remakes-reboots-and-reimaginings/

 

[JD]

Yeah, I've never heard it used in any other context when referring to movies, TV shows, ect.

 

[Christopher]

I don't believe the term was ever used before the computer age; there may have been remakes, and re-imaginings, and continuations, but I really doubt the term existed as "reboot" in a pre-computerized age, and from what i can tell, has always meant to restart from the beginning. It seems to be a very modern term.

https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/remakes-reboots-and-reimaginings/

Of course it was never used before the computer age -- nobody suggested it was. As I said, the Hollywood industry insider use of "reboot" to mean a relaunch of a dormant property was based on the use of the term in computers.

And yes, as I said, it did mean a restart, but a different kind of restart, or rather, a less narrowly defined one. The industry use was for any restart of a moribund franchise, regardless of whether it was a continuation or a reimagining. The narrowing of the term to mean exclusively a reimagining, as far as I can tell, pretty much dates from 2004 or so, when the Galactica revival popularized the term beyond industry insiders. They did have computers before 2004, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, I've never heard it used in any other context when referring to movies, TV shows, ect.

Well, yeah, that's my point -- that it was a bit of insider jargon that wasn't widely known among the general public. When it did become known to the general public, they saw it in a different context and so got a different sense of what it meant. Fans look at a story and care most about story content and continuity, so they defined a reboot based on continuity. But industry insiders, businesspeople and executives, see a franchise as a piece of intellectual property that generates revenue. Whether it's in the same continuity or a different one is unimportant when you're in a business meeting talking about reviving and updating a dormant property to make it profitable again.

 

[davejames]

I loved the 2008 reboot though. Every so often I just want a fun show that you can just watch to enjoy the ride. Knight Rider did that for me, particularly after they made it more about "one man and his car" late on in the series. I think Justin Lin could be the right man to do a new Knight Rider and I can't wait!

Yeah I thought it actually developed into a pretty fun guilty pleasure towards the end, after they retooled it to be more like the original. And it was fun seeing just an old fashioned 80s-style action show on TV again (even if it unfortunately relied much more on special effects this time than real stunt work).

I'm not sure there's really enough of an audience for another full TV series anymore, since the concept of a guy solving crimes with his talking car probably does sound pretty dated and silly to most people by this point, but I do like the idea of seeing KR done in a thrilling, fast-paced Fast and Furious kind of style, so we'll see.