Greetings from a New Guy

[Mechanicjay]

I wrote a "hello" post earlier today, which was flagged for moderation, and matthew tells me that the forum software is currently holding it hostage. So, I'll just try again:

Hello!

I'm a long-time (years and years) lurker here, but finally joined up to join the conversation.

Knight Rider was one of my favorite shows growing up and 30+ years later still resonates with me. Obviously, I'm not alone here.

I'm slowly working my way through the last handful of episodes from Season 4. These are episodes, I've NEVER seen, or at least I last saw then when I was like 6 years old and have zero recollection of....

About a year ago, I realized that I was nearing the end and decided to hold off for a while. A year later and I still have these FIVE episodes left, so I decided to jump in last night. So, last night, I watched "Knight of a Thousand Devils" and "Hills of Fire". As it turns out I'd kinda forgotten how mediorcre much of the 4th season was, so my enthusiasm is only *slightly* dampened for the remaining "I've never actually seen these" episodes:
"Knight Flight to Freedom", "Fright Knight", "Voodoo Knight".

I kinda wished I'd written my down my initial impressions of the two last night while I was watching them. I'll try to do the same to for the remaining ones and share them, if anything thinks that would be interesting.

Anyway, it's good to finally be here!

[Assasinge]

Hey, nice to meet you. I'm Assasinge.

[jup]

Welcome to the board.

Oh...oh, dear. What a collection to have held off with.

VooDoo Knight is regarded as the lowest valued episode of the whole series. A bit of a budget saver and was meant to be seen in the middle of the fourth season. As it turned out, it became the silent fade to the show's last breath of life as NBC was playing with the episodes to help rekindle life into the show. Expect to see few stunts, little action and a rather dated plot in this one.

Fright Knight...Was that the one where they sort of go with weak double mirror effects on some kind of weird goose chase during Halloween? I'm going to go reference this episode to refresh my memories...

Looks like that is a different Halloween episode that I was thinking of. This one seems to be the budget saving episode that they appear to have shot on various sets from the Universal Studios back lots from 1984. I'm scanning through from a bootleg copy on YouTube, right now. So many things had to be done to it to avoid detection that it's barely watchable. Alas, my DVD's are in storage. This one seems about an average grade for a season four episode. Which makes it stronger then I was thinking it was.

And...Knight Flight to Freedom sounds like the one where Kitt goes to a foreign country to overpower some dictator and Kitt has to drive through a live volcano flow. Checking now...

Yup. That's it. Honestly, I don't remember too much about this episode. Except for the unique volcano flow obstacle. From what I'm seeing, this should be the strongest episode and probably the one to save for last. After all, I think they just made a jump that was used in the credits...or reused...somewhere. It looks very familiar.

[Assasinge]

At least you're lucky enough to have joined while everything's working around herr, took me two months to get aboard the Knight 2000 xD

[Mechanicjay]

Jup, Thanks for the run-down, perhaps I'll do an out-of-order viewing for the last three.

Assasinge, I was using every contact form and email address I could for two weeks trying to get someone to approve my account since the verification emails are still busted

Season 4 stuff is kinda funny. I get that they were screwing with the formula, making things more gimmicky and stuff, trying to boost ratings. But they ignored the two most important things. Good writing and high production values. That said, as a kid, I totally ate up that Super Pursuit Mode stuff, and maybe the model stunts weren't as glaringly obvious when watched over the rabbit ears in grandma's kitchen.

[KITTfan]

Hi and welcome, nice to see new people coming to the forum

[jup]

I had no idea that anyone was even trying to make the old code work with frustrating results for that long, Assasinge. So very sorry to hear that. Only learned the e-mail was out of whack from that recent posting. Then, when I went to update my info and getting stuck into the abyss of malfunctions...

That is one thing Neil really needs to add to the front page. A direct link to moderator help e-mails. After all, G-Mail offers them left and right and a couple would be fantastic for dedicated emergency monitoring. I say that, because the bots are like mosquitoes on this site and everyday e-mails would be ripe for their harvesting and flooding with that pornographic crap that they endlessly flooded into the link's submission subroutine. Just gigabytes of porn and filth from them bots.

...and maybe the model stunts weren't as glaringly obvious when watched over the rabbit ears in grandma's kitchen.

How true. That was the intended viewing by the original NBC broadcasters. That hint of fuzzyness on a low def tube TV. It usually hid many of the flaws. And, that is how I often saw this show when it was run via syndication on KTTY. (The same channel I faithfully made all my VHS episodes from.) With those, I could mostly just catch that horrid model that sank into the chemical dump. And only because the camera was so zoomed in that the mini lights that didn't have enough spots to them was very obvious...right along with the plastic looking toy it was placed into. Otherwise, all those 'Thing' hand moments of closing the door and that cable assisted braking shot and a ton of other things were completely invisible. (Well...that obvious wall to crash through with the gigantic square that was used in the credits roll wasn't fooling my grainy recordings, either.)

Now, we've got what the producers could only have dreamed about with picture perfect televisions and freeze frame perfection. My favorite was from a fourth season episode. It was completely un-necessary and had to have been there to tease people with that "Nah...did I just see what I thought I did?" kind of reaction. I speak of this five second clip where KITT drives by the camera. The paint is so shiny that the whole camera crew and the rigging is reflective in the door paint. Sure. For time's sake in production, obvious errors would slip by. But, this one had no reason to be an error. They had to have edited it in as a joke.

[Assasinge]

Haha yeah jup I caught almost every model and blooper in my new monitor i bough about a month ago for my desktop. In fact in KILLER KITT when KITT shoves Michael into some shack of some sort, if you look closely you can see someone's hand turning the steering wheel away as KITT "drove away" to where Berio wanted him to go to.