Knight Rider To Ride Again 243
Penguinsh*t writes "Though the movie version of Knight Rider has remained 'up on chocks' for the better part of the last decade, Knight Rider, the TV show is revving into high gear. 'The premise of the show will essentially remain the same as the original, which centered on a mulleted man righting wrongs with the help of a particularly chatty and souped-up automobile. No word yet on who will play the hero this time around, but the Peacock is looking for some new blood.' Besides which, 'the Hoff' is busy."
NBC in trouble (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Errr . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
They were also, for the most part, great fun, and high quality entertainment as a result. This point seems to have escaped you.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:NBC in trouble (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You fucking child (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is still wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
We're too cynical and messed up for KITT (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think robo-cars are really all that interesting now. With stuff like Battlestar Galactica, and Heroes and Dr. Who on the air, and with the whole Star Trek franchise come and gone since Knight Rider, people have a somewhat higher expectation of quality from their sci-fi adventure. Knight Rider is a relic from the hair spray decade, when culture rarely elevated above space invaders and bimbos. I mean, we were listening to "Thriller" and "Devo". --Which yes, I realize aren't much more advanced than the latest. . , what the heck are kids listening to now? But still. There was a highly plasticized happy-happy fakeness to everything. A bullet-proof talking car which could jump over trucks? That could work in such an environment. But now? No chance.
I'm not claiming that people today are any smarter than they were in the 80's. --We've got legions of cynical, drooling game-box junkies who are plenty dull, but that kind of stupid is incompatible with the stupid of the 80's. Our culture is too firmly tuned to violence to give a hoot about such a childish formula as a talking car. --Remember, fun in the 80's involved little multi-coloured cube puzzles and video games where you shot alien space ships, jumped over barrels and ate dots. Today we gun down simulated fellow humans for fun and pretend it hasn't changed us. We've become a race of fat, dull-witted warriors who barely blink when civilians are murdered by our troops. Our reaction to the present events going on in the world would have been very, very different in the 80's.
-FL
Re:We're too cynical and messed up for KITT (Score:5, Insightful)
Other remake idea from me, free of charge for anyone to use: blue thunder! But that one was actually about a guy who was disobedient to his boss, not the kind of story that is popular in this patriotic day and age. So was the A-team BTW, didn't they quit the army? Maybe the 80s did have a good thing to it, it just got obfuscated by the giant haircuts.
Re:We're too cynical and messed up for KITT (Score:1, Insightful)
There was a highly plasticized happy-happy fakeness to everything. A bullet-proof talking car which could jump over trucks? That could work in such an environment. But now? No chance.
That's my gut reaction as well, but on the other hand, Superman, Spiderman etc did well, and they are subject to the same problem.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a chance that someone like that would be a hero. Besides, the days of the hero being smart are over. The 90s already paved the way, with Home Improvement and first and foremost Married with Children, the hero of today is the idiot. If there may be a geek and brainy guy, he must be the comic relief akin to Steve "Did I do that?" Urkel.
Re:Is still wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We're too cynical and messed up for KITT (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it really has. We've always been violent monkeys, interested in violent entertainment. Before CounterStrike and Halo 3, kids pretended their sticks were guns or swords. Adults blasted the shit out of some deer, watched the hockey game, or watched Hamlet. Even by modern movie standards, Shakespeare closes the curtain on a decent pile of corpses. And hell, there was a time when public executions used to be a spectator sport, and let's not forget that before the movie "Gladiator", there were the real gladiatorial games, where people watched real human beings kill each other. And because they couldn't rent "Predator" on DVD, the Vikings sat around, got pissed on mead, and listened to "Beowulf". "Whoa, totally awesome! Grendel like ripped fifty guys to shreds, but then Beowulf comes in and like rips his whole freakin' arm off, and there's blood everywhere!"
As for nobody caring about the death of civilians in Iraq, go back to World War II, when strategic bombing campaigns deliberately started firestorms in Dresden and Tokyo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I could be wrong, but I don't think there was a massive public outcry over it. It was war, and they were on the other side, so who gave a shit? I think we've come a long way, that people even stop to think about the Iraqi dead and what we've done to their country, not that it's much consolation for the Iraqis.
Re:We're too cynical and messed up for KITT (Score:1, Insightful)
As for nobody caring about the death of civilians in Iraq, go back to World War II, when strategic bombing campaigns deliberately started firestorms in Dresden and Tokyo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I could be wrong, but I don't think there was a massive public outcry over it. It was war, and they were on the other side, so who gave a shit? I think we've come a long way, that people even stop to think about the Iraqi dead and what we've done to their country, not that it's much consolation for the Iraqis.
The difference is that the Allies in WWII weren't the aggressors and weren't calling themselves the saviours of the Germans. One of the many purported reasons for invading Iraq was to make life better for the Iraqis. Killing lots of Iraqis, therefore, is a major fuckup. But we didn't go into Dresden to help out the Germans, did we?
If Iraq had started a war of aggression, conquered a bunch of countries and posed a serious threat to an entire continent, then I'm sure there'd be a lot less people concerned about Iraqi deaths.
Re:It's in post-production (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We're too cynical and messed up for KITT (Score:5, Insightful)
25 year old show was good at it's time (Score:3, Insightful)
We've moved past an age where computers were mysterious, dangerous, and somehow held the key to the salvation or the damnation of the human race. Now we accept them as what they are, another tool that people use or misuse. They are not mysterious and no one imagines that they are going to start talking to you. They'd have to do some serious revamping to make me suspend belief enough to get into this show or to not hate it for making my precious childhood memories seem ridiculous.