K.I.T.T.'s Knightmare

Knight Rider is racing on to the big screen and there is good news and bad news. The good news is aging lothario David Hasselhoff may be left in the dust. The bad news is Knight Rider is being made into a movie.

I was a huge Knight Rider fan when I was a kid. My family had been living in Papua New Guinea in the early ‘80s and where we were living there was no TV. We flew to Hawaii for Christmas in 1982 to meet the rest of the fam, where I promptly indulged a couple of years of TV withdrawal and saw Knight Rider for the first time. I was hooked.

Back in PNG, a friend had an early VCR (it may even have been a Beta!) and had some tapes of Knight Rider episodes – piracy going hand-in-hand with technology from the get-go. We would watch them over and over than then go outside and reenact the show, as kids tend to do. It was a good thing as I was running out of CHiPs scenarios.

On our return to Canada we stopped off in Los Angeles and visited Universal Studios and I got to sit in Knight Industries Two Thousand and have K.I.T.T. talk to me. It was very cool.

I bring all this up to prove my fandom is legitimate and to lend weight to my plea: please don’t make a Knight Rider film. It was a piece of ‘80s fluff, perfect for a kid but hardly cinema worthy. Even without Hasselhoff (he’s huge in Germany!) it is likely to be campier than the Brady Bunch and any attempt to add gravitas will likely sink like the upcoming Miami Vice film treatment.

I ask again, is Hollywood completely out of ideas that they need to mine cheesy TV series. Even worse, it is former Miramax founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein doing the mining. Have they truly fallen that far?