A.I. is a bridge between art and science.
Pamela McCorduck
One of my standard complaints about remakes is that they take the original idea and totally trash it. The New Bionic Woman and Battlestar Galactica both worked on the general premise that the original shows sucked, so they were going to do them right. Which only served to piss off the people, such as myself, that pretty much liked the original shows. If you really hate the whole idea of Battlestar Galactica and the Bionic Woman, why not make up a new show, why go ahead and ruin the original?
The New Knight Rider did not, amazingly, follow this pattern. It appears to be the same silly show that the original Knight Rider was. Sure the tech is updated, but KITT is still a smart alec who cracks wise at ever opportunity. The driver is a good looking, but not too smart fellow. There was a man in bed with two women and a women who just got out of bed with a woman, so there is a small sexy factor here as well.
The mad scientist who built the car is Sci Fi veteran character actor Bruce Davidson, who has been in everything from The X-Men movies to Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital. The rest of the cast is slightly familiar, but outside of a guest shot by The Hoff, they don’t ring any of my bells.
But really, Knight Rider is about the car. KITT is the star and rightly so. The New Knight Rider car is a Ford Shelby Cobra voiced by-Val Kilmer? Well, I guess anyone with a deep voice could be KITT, but I didn’t even come close to recognizing Val Kilmer’s voice. Of course, the original KITT was voiced by William Daniels of St Elsewhere fame and gave the car just that touch of class. I guess I would have gone for an English actor to do the voice of KITT.
One of the little things that is missing from modern TV Shows that was almost always present in the old ones, is a voice over as the show starts, or even a theme song. ‘Space, the finial frontier…” “Steve Austin, a man a barely alive…” “Knight Rider, a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist….” It seems to me that the voice over was done by William Conrad, but I could be wrong. The New Knight Rider doesn’t have any cute tag lines, just a revamping of the old theme song.
There are still no super smart machines, no talking cars, no robots like the one in Lost in Space, no Bionics, but we like to pretend that there will be soon. One of the funny things in the new Knight Rider was when KITT decided to drive across the country in only three hours-barring any unusual traffic. Sure, you drive three hundred miles an hour on surface roads and never worry about cops or potholes. That was the best special effect in the show.
It was fun, and I will be watching the rest of the season. It’s close enough to my memory of the old show that I like it. KITT to the rescue.
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