You’re probably thinking that Steve’s gone bonkers but please bear with me on this one.
Sci-Fi are running the new series of Knight Rider. Now we all remember the original which starred The Hoff which aired back in the early 1980s and was, along with Air Wolf one of those rather silly programs which sort of pushed the technology a bit but not to silly extremes, talking cars with computers that could do clever stunts, supersonic helicopters and so on. You get the picture.
So along comes the new series (not the 1997 spin off) and the first episode sets all the background up, or starts to and there is KITT – the talking car.
He’s come on a lot in some ways, he can do more, he’s much more intelligent and of course can tap into spy satellites and zoom in on people driving at high speed in cars and point microphones at them so they can hear what is being said. But on the down side he’s still slightly whiny and condescending and more than a touch annoying.
But KITT can do so much more than that. He can change the colour of the paint job and change the tint level of the glass. So thats sort of bordering on what we can do nowadays so that’s all right.
Wait, wait, there’s more. He can Morph.. no he doesn’t turn into a small clay person a la Aardman Animations. No he can morph into other vehicles. He can morph into a different body shape and grow large air rams and side skirts which just seem to pop out of the vehicle when no-one is looking. But better than that, he can, at speed morph into a completely different vehicle. So he changes from a muscle car into a huge big 4×4 open top truck with huge great wheels, bigger wheels than he has normally, and all at 100+mph,
Just a tad silly really, and the computer generated animation looked naff.
Having said that the stunt at the end of the first episode when a big Jeep style vehicle rammed into the side of KITT at high speed was pretty impressive.
I’m still trying to work out how the tyres were smoking when he was spinning them in a room with no oxygen in it, mind you how did they get the engine to run in the first place.
I think I need to suspend my reality checks a little more in future.
As for what followed it… Joss Whedon’s “Doll House”, that’s seriously odd