Oddball Update

Here we go again! Knight Rider is once again back on the airwaves in the United States, this time being shown on none other than the Sci-Fi Channel. A show about a gallavanting male soap opera idol and a talking Trans Am seems somewhat out-of-place amongst reruns of Star Trek and made-for-cable movies starring actors who haven’t had careers in over a decade — well, actually, perhaps it’s not such strange company after all!

Let it be known that Knight Rider is one of my biggest guilty pleasures. And I’m really not even that guilty about it. I have been a fanatic, almost cultist follower of Knight Rider since the eighties. In a few regards such as this, it seems I never grew up — a fact which I am proud of, since I believe some amount of child-like enthusiasm for life is essential. I was first introduced to the series by my mom one day after class in third grade, when I was flipping channels on TV and came across a show in which some guy in a cool-looking car was driving around. “Oh, that’s Knight Rider,” said my mom. “I bet you would like that show.”

And the Understatement Of My Lifetime award goes to…my mom!

When I was a kid, dutifully watching Knight Rider each weekend on New York’s WWOR network (which for some reason our Detroit cable company carried), I didn’t think much about archiving episodes of the show — I mean, why would a seven-year-old worry about such things? Fast-forward to the mid-nineties, long after WWOR was dropped by our cable company, and I began to wonder if I’d ever see the show again. Surprise! One day in 1995 or thereabouts, USA Network began rerunning Knight Rider. Two episodes were shown every weekday between 5 pm and 7 pm, with an additional single episode on Saturday (IIRC). I went to the store and spent gobs of money on Scotch archival-quality VHS tapes. Time to create the ultimate collection!

Every day, my VCR recorded two hours’ worth of Knight Rider, and I ate dinner in the basement in front of the 17” Toshiba TV, watching along like a good little ‘80s child. Eventually I had every single episode taped — although oddly, on their first run-through, USA “forgot” a couple of episodes, and I had to wait for the second run-through of the series to pick them up. After that, I sat back and looked at the huge stack of videotapes on the shelf, and nodded with satisfaction. I had done it! All of Knight Rider in one videotape library.

But there was a problem. Okay, a few. USA Network stepped on the show big time. That’s television-speak for “cut off parts of the show around the commercial breaks, to make room for more ads.” I fucking hated that. Additionally, for the span of a couple weeks, something was wrong with our cable to the point where all the sound on several channels — including USA Network, of course — was crackly and clipped. Two whole tapes’ worth of episodes in my library, covering some of my favorite episodes in season three, were permanently affected by this. Lastly, I taped the show on an aging VCR, using SLP (nowadays referred to as EP) tape speed, with which you can cram 6 hours of material onto a tape only with drastically reduced picture and sound quality.

After several more runs, KITT and Michael were taken off the air while USA underwent an image change. (USA continues to be the most androgynous cable network out there IMHO; they seem to have no clue what their target market is, and everything they air these days is utterly forgettable.) After that, we were back to a long, dry spell in which no American network would show Knight Rider. And somehow, during that period, a large chunk of my self-made videotape library disappeared. Most of it was from seasons 3 and 4.

It was a couple years later that Columbia House came out with digitally remastered, uncut episodes of Knight Rider on VHS. Of course, I owned them all — but CH only produced somewhere around 14 tapes (totaling 28 episodes or so), so it’s nowhere near a complete record of the series. Later, CH got with the modern-media program and “ported” Knight Rider to DVD. I started ordering a few of those as well, but eventually gave up last year — I could no longer afford the expense, and they weren’t releasing any new episodes, just the same ones I already bought from them on VHS.

But a few months ago, suddenly, the Sci-Fi Channel — of all people! — decides they want to start airing Knight Rider. I can’t really understand how anyone at that channel arrived at that conclusion, but it may actually have been due to pleas from viewers, and if so, I applaud Sci-Fi for listening to its audience. Now I can catch Knight Rider on TV again, every weekday at 5:00 pm. And they’re not stepping on it too badly, either. The act break music isn’t cut off, and I don’t see too much footage lost when we return from commercial (and when there is some steppage, ususally it’s due to poorly-timed local spots).

So, guess what I’ve done? Started taping the damn show again. :laughs: This time, I’m attempting to correct past mistakes. I’m using a $500 JVC S-VHS VCR to record the show, and I’m using SP tape speed, which yields the highest quality possible. Additionally, the cable signal on Sci-Fi is one of the strongest on our system, which is really just luck, but good luck at that. Using SP means I can only fit two episodes on each tape, of course, so I’m buying a three-pack of videocassettes every weekend when we shop for groceries. To me, it’s worth it.

But this time, I’m already looking ahead, toward the future. Recordable DVD is here, and set-top DVD recorders are coming way down in price. You can actually bag one for around $350-$400 now (albeit a rather crappy Panasonic model that I personally wouldn’t touch). Within another year, these things will be everywhere — and I’ll say goodbye to VCR recording at last. These DVD recorders are really pretty awesome…did you know that you can use one to record a show to a disc, while simultaneously watching an earlier-recorded program on the same disc at the same time? That’s a skill I thought was reserved for PVRs that use hard-disk-based, rather than optical, storage. Amazing!

Anyway, given this, I realize that creating yet another huge library of tapes — three times as huge, in fact, given that I’m recording in SP rather than EP this time — is somewhat foolhardy. Even as I buy more tapes and record more episodes, I know that one day I’m gonna do it all again when I get a DVD-R unit. But my rationale is this: By then, Knight Rider may be off the air again. And I’d rather have a good-quality VHS copy now than no copy later.

Of course, the Knight Rider fan’s ultimate video-archival dream has yet to be realized. Knight Rider appears to be one of Universal’s bastard children, whom they want little to do with. While other staples of the eighties get ultra-cool DVD boxed set treatments (have you seen the awesome collector’s box they’re releasing for Battlestar Galatica in October? Sheer coolness!), Knight Rider gets nothing but a shitty, audio-mixed-too-high hack job from Columbia House.

But with more and more classic ‘80s shows and movies being given the DVD boxed set treatment, I think Knight Rider will eventually have its day. After all, it’s not like it was a flop — the series is one of the decade’s biggest staples. I think Universal is waiting for the big “Super Knight Rider Yada Yada 3000” movie to hit Cinemas sometime in 2004-2005. That way, they figure they can milk the most money from new fans who want to see what the classic original was like. After all, how many of the recent string of Hollywood Remake Films™ has simultaneously spawned a rampant re-release of the original source material? Most if not all. Once the new film hits, unless it bombs spectacularly on a Gigli-esque scale, I think we’ll start to see classic Knight Rider fans get the service they deserve. The complete series on DVD, in four handsome black boxes with the gold Knight chess piece symbol on the sides, all the original episode trailers remastered and included, and maybe even the recently-leaked blooper reel of legendary infamy (I’ll post more about that one another day).

Anyway, until that spectacular event occurs, I’m going to sit back and tape the show off the Sci-Fi channel every day at 5:00, continue to fast-forward through the commercials, continue to ignore the ugly Sci-Fi channel bug in the lower right corner, and continue to hope for the best.

Fans of the talking Trans Am, our day will come.

Categorized as Media/Television