Oddball Update

Some very exciting news for Knight Rider fans was posted over at the Knight Registries message board this morning. It’s merely an unsubstantiated rumor at this point, but here was the text of the message:

Knight Rider will be available on DVD sometime in 2004. Some of the “top dogs” and reps from Universal Studios were in Las Vegas at my company’s meetings on Tuesday. They didn’t give any details like what month it will be released or season 1 or anything. I figured everyone here would be thrilled to hear that. I’ll be on the lookout for more info.

If this is true…at last! It means that Universal has finally decided to put the series on DVD! Up to this point, uncut episodes of Knight Rider have only been available from the Columbia House video library, which requires a subscription and forces you to receive each DVD in order. The worst part about the Columbia House DVDs (besides the horrible sound mixing and stupid scene selection that only has four scenes to choose from) is that a LOT of episodes are missing. There are basically only 20 DVDs in the collection, which gives you 40 episodes (some are two-parters). That’s less than 50% of the series.

But with Universal themselves releasing the series, I’m praying that they do it right. Meaning: Complete, uncut versions of every episode. One boxed set for each of the series’ four seasons. Digitally remastered picture and sound. And the inclusion of the 30-second teaser trailers for each episode. In a perfect world, Universal would make use of the DVD format’s parallel audio channels and give us a “music only” soundtrack channel we could toggle on and off, but I know that will never happen. The remixing would take way too long.

What makes me more apt to believe this rumor is the fact that I already had a sense that Universal was on the verge of doing this. In case you hadn’t noticed, there seems to be more attention paid to Knight Rider lately. What with that potentially ridiculous new KR movie coming out in the next couple of years, it seems that all kinds of stuff from the old series has been surfacing, including the much-sought-after blooper reel, a DVD of which I purchased last month. Theatrical remakes of old TV shows or movies—a la Charlie’s Angels—invariably spark renewed interest in the original material. How many times did you see ads for “classic” Titanic films after Cameron’s big production came out in the nineties?

More than that, it seems the eighties as a decade are making a return, or at least the entertainment culture from said decade. Cyndi Lauper is recording a new album. The Transformers are now available on DVD, of all things. I suppose next we’ll see people with a million Swatches all up their forearms. (God, I hope not.) But all of this data converges on the inevitable fact that the time is now ripe for Knight Rider to make its first appearance, in full, on home video.

I own the entire Columbia House Knight Rider library on VHS. Over the course of three years, it cost me $475 to acquire. As soon as I received the last volume, they started re-releasing them on DVD. RAGE! Last year I signed up to receive those too, and got the first five…but then I cancelled my subscription. Something told me I was wasting my money. The DVDs had nothing new to offer, and I had a sneaking suspicion that one day, and possibly one day soon, I was going to see Universal themselves release Knight Rider…and do it right. Then, this month, Glen A. Larson’s previous production, Battlestar Galactica, was released in a DVD boxed set, the packaging of which resembles a Cylon’s head. As soon as I saw it, I knew that Knight Rider wouldn’t be far behind.

So, if today’s rumor holds, it seems likely that 2004 will really be the year of the Knight Rider. I’ll have my project car, the series will come out on DVD…what more can we ask for?

More news on this as I get it.

Categorized as Media/Television