Knight Rider (Knight Rider)

Member Name: sharktrager

Product:	Knight Rider
Date:	20/06/05 (239 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: KITT - the wonder-car

Disadvantages: It is what it is - a cheesy 80s action show

Last night I watched the first ever episode of Knight Rider. I'd not seen the series for many years despite having watched it every week when it was first shown. However I've got quite into the habit of late of watching cheesy 1980s American adventure shows as they are becoming more and more available on DVD. My girlfriend previously watched all the episodes when they were shown on satellite and recommended it to me as good 'brain-in-neutral' kind of TV so I thought I'd give it a go.

The DVD box set of season 1 is put together quite strangely. There are eight discs, but the first episode doesn't actually appear on disc 1, instead it's found on disc 7. Then as an 'extra' on disc 8 is Knight Rider 2000 which was a 'reunion movie' made a number of years after the final season of the original show. Quite why the DVD producers didn't decide to wait and add this as an extra on the final season DVD release I don't know, but it's good to have it.

Also included are all of the other episodes of Season 1, although I haven't yet watched them - only the very first episode, entitled 'Knight Of The Phoenix'. I may update this review at a later date when I've watched more.

So what are my thoughts on the first episode? Well first off it's of a good length - it's a feature-length pilot and so has enough time to develop the story. Strangely David Hasselhoff doesn't actually appear in the episode as Michael Knight until 15 minutes into the story. This is because Michael's real name is Michael Long and he was a police officer who was shot point blank to the head in the line of duty. However it seems that he had a plate in his head which deflected the bullet out through his face and meant that he lived through the experience. However he needed plastic surgery, hence the change of actor.

Michael is then recruited by Wilson Knight (who soon passes away) and Devon Miles to work for their company, the Knight Foundation, as a lone crusader fighting injustice, with the help of an upgraded Trans-Am, which is a car with a brain, called KITT (short for Knight Industries Two Thousand). The car was of course always the thrill of the show and I, like every young lad, always wanted to own one myself. The problem is that even thought it is 20 years later, I still want one!

Well, the storyline and the acting were cheesy as anything, which is to be expected of a Glen A Larson show from this period - he also created Battlestar Galactica and the Gil Gerard version of Buck Rogers. But it was fun, and my girlfriend was right - fun in a 'brain-in-neutral' kind of way. Think too hard about it and you'll pick it to pieces, but it was worth an hour and a half of my evening, and if you like this sort of thing, would be worth the same of yours.

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