![]() ![]() Each of the four cars was used for a different purpose in filming. They had to be extra careful not to total them whenever a car got damaged, they'd send it to a body shop for repair, slapping some Bondo on the dents and repainting them. At the time, the Trans Am was in high demand, and producers were able to acquire only four cars. Scheffe built one car, then the studio applied his designs to three other factory models. ![]() "If you can let function be your guide when you design something, and not just style," he says, "you run some chance of having something that can stand the test of time." He contrasts this design method with that used in dated, old '50s sci-fi films that just put a bunch of Christmas lights behind plexiglass. Just like the Delorean, there's a verisimilitude to the design (to the extent that a talking or time-traveling car can be believable). Scheffe chalks up the car's timelessness to making the car somewhat believable in terms of function. "So I thought why not let them meet in a kind of a point, which'll feel like the lower part of a knight's helmet." " really gifted stylists at Pontiac, but I was surprised they trimmed off the nose to square, because the lines of the car are all headed towards meeting up front," Scheffe says. He also improved upon the design of the original Trans Am. Scheffe utilized his schooling in airplane design to reference aircraft-the dash looks like something from a jet, and the steering wheel is like a plane's. ) In their meeting, he offered to not only design KITT but build it. (Scheffe later designed the Delorean from Back to the Future. As the producers put the show together, they needed an appealing design for KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), so they sought out Scheffe, who worked at a pattern-making shop and occasionally designed props for low-budget movies. Why would someone want to own a 30-plus-year-old car from a canceled TV show? Partially because nostalgia is a powerful and lucrative drug, but also because the car's design was surprisingly resilient. The original 20 or so cars disappeared-lost in a vast parking lot full of replicas, or worse, unceremoniously crushed in a studio lot. Some hit the marketplace, sold as "authentic" by either misinformed sellers or nefarious con men. Die-hard knerds (as KITT fans sometimes refer to themselves on message boards) built replicas en masse, allowing themselves to own and drive fragments of their childhood memories.Įventually, those replicas far outnumbered the cars that were used on the show. Toys flew off the shelves.Īfter the show was canceled in 1986, the car continued to rev in the popular imagination and became a collector's fetish object, the kind of thing bored celebrities and sleazy white-collar businessmen buy to show off. The car (and the show) was a hit, thanks in part to its 300 mph max speed, flamboyant attitude and about 120 assorted superpowers, including Super Pursuit Mode, missiles, a grappling hook, high tensile reflectors, a laser gun and a laser printer (maybe Knight needed to print out his résumé?). No offense to the Hoff, but KITT was clearly the star. After nearly 30 seconds of close-up shots of the car's features-essentially, a moody car commercial-it finally introduces Hasselhoff. Knight Rider's intro-a Pontiac Trans Am blazing across the desert to a strobing synth beat-somehow skirts the line between extreme camp and retro cool. Feeny from Boy Meets World, for those too young) played the car. David Hasselhoff starred as former detective Michael Knight, and an uncredited William Daniels (Benjamin Braddock's father in The Graduate, for those too old to remember the show Mr. ![]() Knight Rider (1982) was ostensibly a remake of The Lone Ranger, replacing Silver the horse with a talking car (see: '80s, cocaine). ![]() The show was created by pop-TV producer Glen Larson, who was responsible for a staggering number of hit TV shows in the '70s and '80s, including McCloud, Magnum, P.I. ![]()
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