Knight Rider's water obsession

[Michael Pajaro]

I recently watched "For Your Eyes Only" again, and Bond's Lotus submarine-car still holds up pretty well. The special effects are decent enough (a little dated) but there's just something inherently cool about how the whole scene is put together. For some reason, "aquatic modes" never seemed to work in Knight Rider:

Knight Rider, "Return to Cadiz". KITT goes hydroplaning. It looked silly even back then, and it suffered from the gadget-of-the-week syndrome.

Knight Rider 2000: The Knight 4000 looked OK in the water (since they used an actual car/boat when filming) but it just wasn't very exciting. They weren't being shot at, they weren't chasing anyone. They were just trying to get around traffic.

Team Knight Rider, "Legion of Doom". Dante gets blown off a dock into the ocean. Surprisingly, this may have been Knight Rider's best water scene. It looked good, had plenty of action, but there was a bit of a plot cheat with it. ("Boy, it's a good thing we ordered those new parts!")

Knight Rider '08, "Knight of the Iguana". Like TKR, KITT gets blown off a cliff into the ocean and goes into submarine mode. Even the CG effects guys admitted to us that they didn't like the way the final result looked.

Knight Rider keeps throwing cars into the water, and it never works. When the new movie comes out, I say keep KITT nice and dry. There's nothing wrong with a car being just a car.

[Knight Racer]

By the time the movie comes out kitt will most likely be a hover car.

Picture Michael Long staring at that red strope light swooshing back and forth from side to side and suddenly it floats toward his head 3 inches from his nose it stops in mid air and Devon Miles hops out onto the ground and says,"It isn't polite to sneak around uninvited".