Long overdue Rant, Part 1: Knight Rider

I decided to kick this off with something I’ve wanted to rant about for about two years now: the returns of Knight Rider and The X-Files, my television obsessions from the 80’s and 90’s. Both of these attempts at rebooting said franchises failed horribly, which makes this rant even LESS relevant. What can I say; I have a desire to be obscure. The news of Knight Rider’s small screen return and The X-Files big screen return broke around the same time. I remember being at first cautious, then quickly allowed nostalgia get the best of me and was REALLY excited.
I’ll critique in chronological order. February of 2008 I was glued to my television ready for Knight Rider to return! Doug Liman was producing! Will Arnett was the voice of KITT! Hasslehoff was making a cameo! There’s no way this could be bad.

Oh, wait.

Two-Hour TV Movie
KITT was now a Mustang. I found out much later that this was GM’s fault, and not Ford’s. NBC approached GM first and they did not want to try and replace a true classic. Ford jumped at the chance. Now there is no Pontiac. Hmmmm….

The guy who wrote the pilot was pretty much completely green to the franchise (and, judging by the witty dialogue and heart-stopping pace, he was also green to screenwriting in general).
Hasslehoff had all of three lines, and they were silly. His stellar delivery gave the impression that someone was wrangling him just off-camera with a cheeseburger. And then there was the voice of KITT who was now Val Kilmer because Will Arnett apparently had a gig with GM and pretending to be the voice of an autonomous Mustang violated his contract (I’d be really interested to read that contract). Not sure what Will would have been like, but Val was certainly no William Daniels. So I suffered through the pilot, which had the son of Michael Knight (named Mike Traceur or Mike Tracer, depending on how French you wanted to be) eventually driving the new KITT. So who’s the Mom? It’s a woman who lives in a shack on a compound owned by the guy who invented KITT. A scientist we’ve never heard of in the franchise, of course. Who the woman was is never explained, but judging by the age of the new lead character, his birth would probably have taken place during the original show. There was so much potential for at least some continuity that was completely lost.

It had a huge viewership, mainly because people were curious, but critics rightfully destroyed it. The Executive at NBC, whose idea it was to restart the franchise, was so eager that he went ahead and green lit a series under a different show runner. Gary Scott Thompson was someone who actually has written some screenplays in his life. The screenplay under his belt however was the first The Fast and The Furious movie. And was it ever apparent.

The "Series"
Suddenly the show was mindless action. Mindless CGI action. Mindless BAD CGI action. It was painful to watch, but I watched it. I literally watched week to week hoping that SOMETHING relating back to the original show would pop up. Then it did. Someone mentioned KARR and I got all giddy. KARR was the Evil KITT in the original series, and they set it up the same way here. What we find out is that new KITT was the second iteration of the Mustang Robot, just like the original KITT was the second iteration of the Trans Am Robot. Of course the first KARR in both scenarios was corrupted and sorta evil and killed people and stuff. If I were the scientist who invented these cars I’d probably avoid naming ANYTHING KARR.

Then it turned out that the ratings pretty much showed that I was the only person watching this show, and so the thought was “reboot it again!” One of these days I’ll probably have a ranting blog all about how “reboots”, once a creative way to introduce an old story or a fun way to be nostalgic about an old property is now a lazy way of making money for a movie or television study by marketing with name recognition instead of interesting characters or stories. And Fanboys are to blame, but that’s another rant.

So the KARR story was apparently supposed to be a season long arc, and they got it all out of the way in one unusual episode. Unusual because I enjoyed it and did not, in fact, want to punch a wall. They even managed to get Peter Cullen to be the New KARR, which was a nice nod to the original series. The two episodes before this one weren’t bad either. This three episode arc was setup to kill off the most expensive actors on the show, and of course people actually dying made it interesting.

Then there was the “new” format. The “old” format was the Knight Rider team worked for a government agency and basically thwarted terrorists from week to week. The “new” format is the Knight Rider team works in secret for F.L.A.G. and is a private sector group. Basically, new Knight Rider was now old Knight Rider.

Old Knight Rider worked because of the car, the Hoff, and William Daniels. Otherwise it was poorly written, sometimes poorly executed, and formulaic. But so was EVERYTHING at that time. So now I can watch it again for what it was and appreciate it for that. Television today is a lot more intelligent (for the most part). Action TV shows today don’t last because they don’t have the budget to be Big Dumb Action movies. In the end, Knight Rider was an Action TV Show, which is why it was cut two months before it was supposed to end its first season, and was silently not renewed.

The real reason this show was rebooted? Glen A. Larson (creator of the original) wanted to reboot this as a movie a few years ago but had trouble getting funding. He had rights to make a movie, but NBC still had rights to make this another TV show, so they did. So now we probably get neither. After seeing what a reboot would look like, though, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I once was the guy who LOVED to see his favorite franchises be “rebooted” and “modernized.” Now I appreciate that they were unique in their times, and should probably stay there. More on that in Part 2.