I’m pretty late to the party on this, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway before I move on to bigger and more awesome posts later on.

Many years ago there was a wondrous show on television called Knight Rider. I oughtn’t have to explain to anyone here how completely awesome that show and its star – the super car called KITT – were.

Recently, a vain attempt to resurrect the show was made and I unfortunately watched the first episode. They do have a talking car, but that is about it. The entire first episode was 50% propaganda for social liberalism and 50% commercial (not counting the actual commercials).

When we first meet (the guy who will become) the new Michael Knight, red flags go up immediately. Far from the suave character of the original – whom you might have believed gave a crap about something besides not shaving – this Michael is a scruffy, long-haired, sarcastic punk. This is, of course, merely following the trend that seems to be dominating TV lately. There is only one other kind of young male lead character in rotation today, and all you have to do is replace the sarcasm of the former boilerplate with a healthy dose of being moody and looking like you want to cry all the time. I digress.

We first meet him in bed with a girl. That is fine – then his dopey friend comes in, Michael says something ‘clever’, and then his other girl joins him in bed. Nice – the nicest thing we might be able to call him at this point is a frat-boy.

We are also introduced to a female FBI agent who lives in a house by the beach. She has been out for a swim, showers off, and returns to her room to be greeted by the girl she slept with the night before. She has a couple throwaway lines, including one to make sure the audience realizes that they don’t know each other. It is important, you see, for your talking car action show to take a stand on homosexuality (twice) and promote anonymous sex.

Fast-forward, and our female lead is now riding around in KITT with Michael. Michael makes a snide comment about how romantic relationships don’t last. KITT backs him up stating that it is true relationships don’t last and that 53% of marriages fail. He even has a nifty graph. Thank God we got that information out..

The action finally picks up, and we discover that Michael was part of a special forces team in Iraq. This comes out as part of a discussion about all the fighting he has done and how fighting never makes any difference. He WILL be doing some fighting though, because an evil security contracting company called Blackwater.. er.. BlackRIVER is after KITT.

KITT, this time around, is a Ford. I think it is a Ford Mustang – a Mustang Cobra to be exact. I’m not sure, but that is what I am guessing based on the CONSTANT CLOSEUPS of the Cobra emblem that are liberally interspersed throughout every scene that the car is in. There was probably some sweet action going on, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you about it. I can tell you; however, that it was probably a Mustang.
It is not just any Mustang, though! It is later discovered that since alternative fuels are too rare for a super car that needs to fight crime all over the country, KITT still runs on gas. Al Gore would NOT like this, but what are you going to do? According to the show, KITT can do around 200mph – covering about 600 miles in about 3 hours. Thankfully, KITT is super-efficient and mainly solar-powered and therefore gets about 161 miles to the gallon – at 200 mph.

There are 128 fluid ounces in a gallon. At this rate (going top speed at 200mph mind you), approximately .795 ounces of gas is being used per mile. That means that just over 1.5 TABLESPOONS of gasoline is all that is required to propel a Mustang 5,280 feet at a rate of 200 mph. It isn’t mainly solar-powered. It’s completely solar-powered, and that opens a whole new book of stupid.

It’s the same book of stupid that allows KITT to be hacked later on. The bad men start hacking into KITT’s firewall. This access must be wireless, because I didn’t see any biodegradable CAT5 trailing behind him. Apparently, this top secret super car does not have a switch that allows the driver to simply turn off the WiFi access. The only option is to take the entire computer down.

Of course, with the computer down, you lose all the nifty benefits provided by all the nanomachines  that coat the entire car. You see, you can’t even scratch the body or even windows of this car because of the nanomachines. They will resist your ballistic advances and immedialy repair the car, keeping the inhabitants feeling safe and stylish. You need go really fast, but KITT doesn’t have a spoiler? That is no sweat, because he can just grow one – out of the nanomachines.

That is a lot of complaining about one TV show, I know. But much like the new Dukes of Hazzard movie, nothing about Knight Rider was made for fans of the show. It was made to get a laugh out of the MTV kids by defiling everything that made the series good in the first place.