Why was TKR disliked so much?

[K.I.A.N]

I just got a chance to see an episode of Team Knight Rider and I must say I really liked it. The team of A.I. cars was a cool idea but maybe not for Knight Rider spin off. I think if it hadn't been associated with Knight Rider it might have done better because I think people were expecting Kitt and Michal again.

It seriously has an old school Power Rangers feel if you ask me I hope they get this out on DVD someday so I can see the rest.

[weeezl]

In a nutshell , it was rubbish

[Sky_Blue_Civic]

I heard they have the episodes of TKR on Hulu.com, and I think iTunes has the whole season also.

[PHOENIXZERO]

I'm sure the Power Ranger's aspect was part of it but it was just badly written and had much too low a budget, even for a syndicated show. The writers didn't really care much for getting certain things right. Then there's the thing about the cars not being the least bit interesting IMO and not doing much of anything that I can remember. KRO was awesome though and probably the best thing to come from that show.

[Skav]

It seriously has an old school Power Rangers feel if you ask me

That was a big part of the problem. They went against what made TOS successful. I'm pretty sure there was a flirty thing going on between one of the cars and it's driver or the car fancied it's driver - something along them lines

It was just generally dull and I stopped watching it after a few episodes.

It's taken 3 times to get a reincarnation right and even though this current 3rd reincarnation is a bit rocky it's getting things right. 3rd time is a charm!

[HisNameisGarth]

I don't think the budget was the problem. I think its just that they tried to have too many cars/vehicles
in the show -- which spread the budget too thin.

I mean they had 4 to 6 main cars depending on how you count:
1)Mustang
2)Expedition
3)F-150
4)2 Motorcycles
5)The Combo car

Plus, they switched to 2 new motorcycles and a whole new combo car late in the show's first season.... More added expense. Then the monster plane sets and all the CGI of the plane..... They just wasted a ton of money on stuff no one liked.

Had they invested in 1 or 2 slick cars -- the show probably would have done better (and would have had much better car stunts).

But instead -- we got utter garbage. In my opinion, TKR sucked more than KR2010..... Now that is bad.

[lunchmeat]

If it wasn't Knight Rider, it might have been okay. I watched two episodes on Hulu and it's not really bad, per se....but the vehicles didn't really have much going for them and the characters weren't too memorable. I liked Trek, and his vehicle's personality, but the others were pretty forgettable; additionally, the vehicles themselves only served as talking characters instead of having true abilities. There weren't any stunts in the episodes I watched, and one of them was the KRO ep, which is saying something.

I can't really comment on whether the show was really bad or anything - but if you go in expecting something akin to '82 Knight Rider, you'd be sorely disappointed. If you didn't have that initial expectation, you'd probably find the show mediocre....but again, I haven't seen all of the episodes so I can't comment on it.

[K.I.A.N]

I must be the only person who [i]does[/i] like it.

[transam82]

I always thought Team Knight Rider was cool, but again, that huge ugly plane, those motorcycles and the mixture of SUV's, Trucks and Sports Cars, not in traditional black and missing their scanners was not helping. At the begining they would always say "Ten years ago it took only one man and one car to get the job done" this is where they should have paid homage to the Original Knight Rider show and feature the Original Knight Industries 2000, (Like in the Knight Rider 2000 TV movie) KITT driving through the desert and then show the new team of cars. Loved the two actresses the blonde haired Kathy Trageser who played Erica West and Christine Steel the brunette who played Jenny Andrews, they were hotties.

[jimknight]

I was never really a fan of TKR except the KRO episode. KRO was really good and so much better than the TKR vehicles.

[GT500KR]

back in the 90;s tkr was coool, but i'll take the kr we have now

[PHOENIXZERO]

TKR cool??? Since when? O_o It was bad then and now it's even worse.

[Showpro1]

Whether you like it or not (I didnt), however when they released TKR in was never given a timeslot
that would have given it a chance plus which when they finally had a storyline that tied into
the original it was cancelled.
So basically when I started warming up to the show it was beyond life support.
I hope that this will not happen to Knight Rider 2008-2009 , time will tell.
Ive called my local NBC affilate about it my support of the new show and let Universal know that they have turned the corner.

D. Doggett.

[Harry Singh Jr.]

Like a couple of you said, it was the power ranger stuff that killed it.

[K.A.C.I.]

Yup. TKR was too much Power Rangers, not enough Knight Rider. Though it never got as abysmally bad as Power Rangers could, it was, all in all, not good enough to succeed as a KR Production.
And KR2010 was KR-INO(In Name Only). There were zero similarities past the title and the fact that the dude had a car.
(Saw a good part of TKR, though not all of it. Saw 5min of KR2010 and I had to turn it off. It was that bad, IMO)

[Victor Kros]

What was wrong with TKR hmm?

Well here's a list in no particular order

1. Too much like an adult version of Power Rangers. They even wore suits like they were a knock off team of Voltron, they reminded me of a show called VR-Troopers. Their suits weren't color coded but for the most part the vehicles were. The cars/trucks/bikes themselves also had unique abilities instead of consistant ones like the Knight 2000, obviously no scanners and no turbo boost but they did have Domino use a SKI MODE.

2. Really bad visual effects -- Even on a cheaper budget, the effects were so rediculously bad they made Power Rangers look state of the art for its time. Not to mention that unlike the original series where recycled footage wasn't so obvious, this show recycled shots more than once per episode like when KRO fired his missiles in the K.R.O. episode and driving scenes. Some of the energy weapons and whatnot were nothing more than lens flares and off the shelf particle effect plugins. I'll say that SkyOne was decent enough to pass as believable at first, although it also was recycled footage that grew redundant as the series carried on.

3. Glen said it best -- What the hell kind of sense does it make to have 5 talking vechicles with 5 drivers who all talk at once? Everyone was competing for so much screen time that the central villains were actually put on the backburner while the over the top comedic antics of the TKR team was placed in the spotlight. The comedy was so rediculously over the top in this series that when things were supposed to be "serious" they felt in your face campy and unbelievable, especially with the delivery of punchline dialogue that made you want to groan every time you heard a pop culture reference. You were very much aware you were watching a television show instead of getting absorbed into the story.

4. Sterotypical characters. - The women have to be viewed as "hot" and not much else, the villains have to be evil for the sake of being evil, the tech geek is geeky, the leader is fearless yet also wreckless and to be a leader, you always have to have some sort of military background because that implies responsibility and toughness. It's just characters as hollow as the Power Rangers themselves. They all got placed into a mold none of them break out of. Perhaps Jennifer looking for the mystery of Michael Knight may be an exception towards "development". Let's take Duke Depalma? What do you make a black man who has muscle and an attiude? Well typically you either go with ex-boxer or ex-milary. What did they go with? Why ex-boxer and where else do we see this trend? How about Balrog from Street Fighter? Mobius on the other hand we never really knew much about but I'd like to say as far as caring about any character devlopment for a villain goes, they at least tried to create some suspense there that kept you guessing.

5. Music - awkward and uninspiring. At least the theme song tries to be somewhat dramatic but it doesn't fit the kind of energy you would expect Knight Rider to have.

6. Those damn cheesy combining bikes (Kat/Plato) that made absolutely no logical sense whatsoever, not to mention their flat red and gray color scheme. I kept thinking "Wonder bike powers activate" when they would link up just like the Wonder Twins.

7. No direction --- By the end of the first season, you see the writers are clearly run out of solid ideas so they turn to whatever they can to try and save a sinking ship --- getting Michael Knight and KITT back into the picture.

Now I'm all for bringing Michael and KITT back into a newer series but in this case they were written back in so weakly that you find out KITT has been some magical hologram (aka Shadow) the entire time and has had his CPU put into what looks like a tupperware container with lights and a very generic (yet bold) K.I.T.T. label on it.

This is what our beloved KITT has been reduced to? Uh yeah --- think I'll pass. I thought seeing the Trans Am in a dumpster was bad enough in Knight Rider 2000 and this newer explaination really didn't redeem those feelings.

Then there is Michael Knight, the big WTF? moment that ended the season. You know it would have helped if they had put FLAG correct on Michael's tombstone - Foundation of Law and Government? What the hell is that -- some sort of foreign branch of FLAG - The Foundation FOR Law and Government?

8. Poor production design - Honestly I will give them enough credit for the main "briefing room" for TKR and I don't mind the TKR emblem much either. I think those are the strengths of design but the rest just falls apart from the garage to the visual monitors and decor inside the vehicles themselves. Also you may notice those primary color buttons on some of the vehicle controls looking quite familar - Remember how I mentioned Street Fighter earlier? That's right those high-tech state of the art buttons are nothing more than arcade controls. It's very clear this show cut a lot of corners on creating a believable look but at least they had things blowing up right?

Those are just a few things that stick out to me about how bad TKR was and keep in mind this wasn't a one episode ordeal, this is visually noticed through the entire series run. (save for Michael/KITT)

These are my opinions however and are of course open to indvidual preference. You like what you like and you dislike what you choose. I choose to dislike this series based on my above observations.

=VK=

[Glissard]

It was bad back then, and it's bad now.

It would've been nice if the car's al least had scanners on them. Plus the AI in each car was too human and not enough computing.

Example. If anyone remembers. the red Mustang's female AI just wanted to flirt and possibly f@¢* any good looking male character that came into rang.

... That's messed up.

[Knightfan82]

[quote="Glissard"]It was bad back then, and it's bad now.

It would've been nice if the car's al least had scanners on them.[quote]

Thats the problem I had with the series too. The thing I thought was the coolest on KITT was the scanner. How come they didn't have them in TKR? Also the Dashboards in the cars/truck werent all that impressive either. I think they could have come up with something better than a computer screen with a computer diagram of the vehical spinning around. Not that many impressive stunts either( Turboboost,etc).

[lunchmeat]

5. Music - awkward and uninspiring. At least the theme song tries to be somewhat dramatic but it doesn't fit the kind of energy you would expect Knight Rider to have.

I actually really liked the theme song....I can understand why others didn't, as it didn't fit Knight Rider, but I really enjoy it. So heroic! It always makes me want to jump out of my seat and save the world. If anything, I don't think that the show itself fit the energy of the theme.

Thinking about the show a little more....I realize that it isn't really bad...but it shouldn't have been Knight Rider, and it should have aired with Saturday morning programming. It would have been great as a kid's show; from the little that I've seen, the characters and the effects scream Saturday morning kid's show. I can see how this was a letdown for classic KR fans.

[Stealthwalker]

I think the reason why the series was disliked so much was because of the fact that it was just simply not the original series.

[knightdogg]

What was wrong with TKR Lets see... (in no particular order)

1) 0 stunts
2) 5 talking super vehicles with different personalities and 5 drivers (WTF)
3) The complete abandonment of "One Man Can Make a Difference"
4) KITT being reduced a ball with a scanner on it and a "Shadow"
5) No Turbo Boost
6) The return of Michael Knight turned out to be a scene where we saw the back of his head and he said "I am Michael Knight or at least I was"
7) Very Power Ranger like (5 vehicles, lame plots, stupid uniforms, lame special effects)

[Michael Pajaro]

I don't accept the idea that TKR was bad because it had too many characters. The Brady Bunch juggled 9 main characters in a half-hour sitcom; good writers could have handled 5 people and 5 cars.

And I disagree that TKR had too low a budget and no stunts. They loved blowing things up and flipping real cars all over the place. There were a few times when TKR's stunts far surpassed similar scenes in the original series.

I also think there was more character development in TKR than the original, but that is just typical of a 90s show vs. an 80s show.

But none of that really mattered. For me, I think the reason why TKR failed is that the writers didn't care that half of their cast was made up of cars. They wanted to do a James Bond-style spy show, but seemed forced to do it with talking cars. The vehicles were almost treated like afterthoughts. Call it charm, call it heart - whatever you like - but TKR had none of that. TOS was packed with it.

[Faithful Car KRO]

TKR is enjoyable to watch as long as you dont want too much from it, if you can turn your head off.... It wasnt trying to be the old KR and it knew it. My problem with it is the fact that it couldnt take itself seriously, and when they tried, it failed.
But there are some good parts to it. Kyle and Date breaking into the that mansion in Brazil was a great scene (Out Of The Past)... all the cars exploding in Oil and Water, and really...Angel in Chains was a great episode.

But yeah, no where near the standards of KR:TOS and KR08.

[NeoRanger]

It was just a pretty bad show, hammered largely by '90s TV norms.

In retrospect, it's one of those "corny '90s shows that are so bad they're good", so I can't say I wouldn't sort of enjoy it, should I ran across it again.

[Lexicon]

I enjoy the show for what it is (too good of a wreck not to watch) rather than what it isn't (a decent continuation of Knight Rider) but they actually did have a lot of stories planned to tie the original series in with the TKR continuation despite the overwhelming lack of....sensibility. The show was subjected to intense executive interference which only aggravated the problems they had from the get-go.