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Rating: He just turned forty and doesn’t show it at all. It's impossible to consider it a classic car, because myths belong to no era. "Supercar" (original title "Knight Rider"), or more confidentially KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) has always been part of our childhood and adulthood dreams, inadvertently initiating us into a love for cars, technology, and science fiction.
The seasons of this TV series were only four and lacked a true finale, as a drop in viewership cut short the production (with very high costs) and forced an immediate shutdown. But those ninety episodes rightly belong to the history of the small screen and the cathode ray tube.
The red LED scanner embedded in the hood is still today the number one nerd obsession for fans of the series and generally for those who lived the era in its full boil. To conceive and create it, producer Glen A. Larson was inspired by the eye scanner of the Cylon Centurions from the series "Battlestar Galactica", also created by him four years earlier, in 1978. And since, aside from the eye, the ear wants its part too, an immortal soundtrack couldn't be missed. The Supercar theme, composed by Stu Phillips and Glen Larson himself, was inspired by a classical piece from French composer Léo Delibes, the third act of "Marche et Cortège De Bacchus". With its synthesizer sounds, it reflects the era in which it was conceived and was taken up by contemporary artists like Busta Rhymes, who in his "Turn it up/Fire it up", uses the main theme of the soundtrack.
How can we forget Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff), who was behind the wheel of KITT (when it wasn't getting around on its own) and was its inseparable colleague and friend (yes, indeed). We all know the story more or less. Michael Arthur Long, an honest and combative police officer, deceived by a woman he trusted, is disfigured by a bullet fired by her, nearly losing his life. If it wasn't for the intervention of an elderly man in frail health, Sir Wilton Knight, who decides to save the young Long's life by giving him a new face (blatantly copying that of his wicked and disowned son Garth), a new first and last name (Michael Knight, that is), and a new car. Which isn't that new since under the bulletproof shiny black shell lies Long's old Pontiac Trans Am, which was outfitted with futuristic enhancements. And since it's known, nobody does anything for nothing, all this in exchange for the new Michael's profitable full-time collaboration with Wilton's founded organization, the Knight Industries, which takes care of law enforcement and the fight against evil. After some initial friction and overcoming the refusal phase, Michael embraces the idea of a new life and new job and starts to familiarize himself with KITT, his new sentient (and talking) car. He is joined by the elegant English executive Devon Miles (Edward Mulhare), educated and capable, and a charming and not very expansive (but very skilled) scientist, Bonnie Barstow (Patricia McPherson), replaced only for the second season by the friendly and much more expansive April Curtis (Rebecca Holden). Joining them (in the fourth and final season) will be RC3, aka Reginald Cornelius III (Peter Parros). The trio (then quartet) will encounter dozens of thorny and high-risk cases, and KITT will be the true protagonist of each episode. Michael will risk his life multiple times and will come face to face with the past and its characters. KITT will be destroyed and rebuilt and will have to repeatedly battle with the evil twin KARR, a sort of older two-tone sister who held a grudge (or rather, a wheel) when Wilton Knight didn't trust her. Bonnie will have to work a lot of overtime, and Devon will have to perform acrobatics to avoid trouble for the Foundation and its members. Always in the name and memory of its founder and his dream, even when it will be necessary to fight against the outcast son Garth, a perfect copy of Michael, with the addition of a cane, a beard, and Goliath, the armoured truck that the wicked Garth uses as a courtesy vehicle. Goliath, designed in collaboration with Garth's equally wicked mother, is equipped with the same molecular coating as KITT and is not just colossal, but indestructible. In two episodes, it will bring devastation and problems on a tsunami level but will not destroy the Knight Industries Two Thousand.
A horrible spin-off was made in 1991 (Supercar 2000 – High Speed Investigation), which not only bored us but also took away the good Devon Miles. First, a clumsy hybrid attempt to revive the original content was made with "Team Knight Rider" in 1997, then a film of the same name and a TV series, both released in 2008, and finally, even an unofficial film, "Knight Rider 2010", which had nothing to do with the original narrative but shared only the name. In short, all efforts were made to echo the myth but with no results and many mishaps.
Year 2023. Cars talk, park themselves, wake us up when we fall asleep, interact with us, avoid obstacles, and give us advice. They may not shoot us ten meters away, propelling our seat strongly, they may not maneuver through traffic on two wheels (after pressing the "Sky Mode" button), they may not make kilometer jumps or avoid fines by quickly changing license plates. But in general, almost everything has come true. It's thanks to progress that we haven't forgotten our childhood myths, especially because those myths tried to foresee the future and speak about it so concretely, making us live it in advance.
Like when watching the trilogy of "Back to the Future" we remember having already lived the years that Doc reached with the DeLorean to go around with Marty and Einsten, departing from their present, which today is a distant and still fascinating past. There's no need to dress up as nostalgics and get lost in considerations that, if spoken aloud, make us feel somewhat trite to realize that that time shone with its own light.
Supercar was a major production for its time, but it's not without obvious flaws, aside from the aesthetic judgment we can make forty years later. Multiple times we noticed that "the seat man" was moving, that KITT's jumps or the super speed trigger (season 4) came from a single copy-paste scene proposed on every occasion. Legend has it that several replicas of the Pontiac TransAm were destroyed, especially during the use of the "Turbo Boost", because after every takeoff, there's a landing and KITT's landings were always disastrous. Even a less attentive eye can notice (during the most daring scenes) the presence in the cabin of a stuntman with a crude wig loaded with curls on his head. We of the new millennium would call them "bugs," many small errors that a director today would not tolerate. But it's known, in the early Eighties, everything was different, advanced technology was just fantasy, and this must be accepted.
Knight Rider has thousands, if not millions, of followers scattered around the world and we're not just talking about nostalgic forty-year-olds but also young people inspired by their fathers. Even Italy has its say, but the largest fanbase in Europe is located in Germany, where David Hasselhoff's vocal qualities are also highly appreciated (besides acting, he has always sung). In Germany, a commemorative box set for the fortieth anniversary of the series was even created (exclusively for the German market), containing all sorts of memorabilia, in addition to the blu rays with the four complete seasons and some unknown gems. The credit for the project goes to Andreas Winkler, born in 1978, a fan of the series since childhood. Andreas began to materialize his love for the Black Knight when he was a boy, creating KITT's dashboard inside his car at the time, eventually creating a perfect replica of the 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am from scratch. From there, and with the serious advent of the internet, a domain and a (very nice) website with thousands of photos and dozens of videos (link below) arrived; then many affiliates and even several contacts with David Hasselhoff, whom Andreas also had the chance to meet.
In the summer of 2020, it was announced that James Wan's Atomic Monster will produce the cinematic reboot of Knight Rider, for which David Hasselhoff was also consulted (apparently only for consultancy), as communicated by the actor during an interview in 2021. This time, it appears to be a serious project that meets the expectations of the nostalgic, requiring time and attention to achieve a good final result.
Universal had to destroy all KITT replicas surviving the filming, as per a specific agreement signed at the time with Pontiac (one official replica is on display at the Keswick Cars of the Stars museum in England).
Meanwhile, the good David Hasselhoff put up for auction (and sold for about five hundred thousand dollars) one of his two personal replicas and some scene memorabilia, all for charity.
I'm satisfied with my scale replica, with its always beautiful red LED in the scanner, which will continue to chase itself for a long time. As if it were the representation of a modern hourglass, marking a time that seems not to want to pass.
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