Milk, Eggs & Moonshine
Yesterday I made a trip up to the supermarket for a few things, and what should I see in the supermarket parking lot but the General Lee! It had a rust spot here or there, but that didn’t detract from the overall coolness factor. Sadly, when I came out of the supermarket the General was gone. Still, it’s not every day you get to see a replica General Lee in person! That, coupled with the fact some other dude in my neighborhood has been driving around his pea-soup green ‘69 Charger lately, means my neighborhood is now officially 1000 times cooler than it was a few months ago.
It’s just a shame that I didn’t have my camera with me; not even my cell phone, which I inadvertently left in the car. Bah.
Also, I happened to catch the trailer for (yeech) Jamie Kennedy’s new movie, Kicking It Old School, and it appears both David Hasselhoff and KITT make cameo apperances in it. I’m still not going to see it, but I figured Chief Oddball would like to know (if he didn’t already).
Categorized as Cars
Sweet, now that’s something I’ve never seen in person — a General Lee replica. Closest I’ve come is an actual ‘69 Charger, which in and of itself isn’t exactly common anymore. Heh, pea-soup green…that’s the same color of the 1969 Dodge dealer scale model my dad had in his collection.
Another movie with a KITT cameo? And Hasselhoff this time? Christ. It’d be worth a giggle, sure, but I’ll wait for somebody to post that clip up on YouTube or something. I managed to get by without seeing The Benchwarmers either, after all.
(And according to IMDB, I don’t see William Daniels credited anywhere, so one can only imagine who they’ll get to voice KITT…while Hassel the Hoff staggers around drunk.)
I was really surprised - after all, the shopping market parking lot is about the last place I’d expect to see the General Lee. It seemed to be a pretty faithful replica too - the windows were down all the way, but I didn’t go and check to see if the doors were welded shut.
The other dude - with the green Charger - I’ve seen a handful of times over the past few weeks, so he must live in the neighborhood somewhere. Now that one seems spotless - it’s always gleaming, and doesn’t have any imperfections (that I can see). I think it also has the black stripe along the tail-end of the car.
Yeah, I was flipping channels this morning and saw The Hoff™ (with his classic slicked-back perm) in a leather jacket, then a quick cut to KITT driving (in what looked to be a driveway), its scanner going back-and-forth. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised, because that Kicking It Old School movie just seems like an excuse to haul out a bunch of ’80s nostalgia (the plotline is about a guy who fell into a coma at the age of 12 and wakes up 20 years later, or something stupid, so of course he’s stuck in the ’80s mentally).
Maybe this is KITT’s way of keeping working while the forever-in-development-hell Knight Rider movie never gets made.
Yeah, totally agree about the supermarket being the last place you’d expect to find a General Lee replica. Or a KITT replica. Or anything special, really! The dude in your neighborhood with the vintage Charger sounds like he keeps it maintained really well. Much better than the dude with the 10th Anniversary Trans Am I saw down here, with the sun-baked paint, hamburgers on the dash and missing shaker. (Of course I thought of Reaper…”Take the shaker off!”)
As for Kickin’ It Old Skool (the actual spelling of the insipid film’s title), I’ve just seen a clip of the Knight Rider homage scene. And it’s…ugh. Horrible. They got some guy’s KITT replica for the film, and didn’t even dub in the scanner sound…instead, they used the awful, tinny scanner sound being emitted by a cheapo speaker shoved somewhere under the hood. It sounded like a Speak-n-Spell. Worse, KITT’s voice was like a developmentally challenged guy with a lisp. Actually, it sounded like Jamie Kennedy’s character. And probably was.
And Hasselhoff…jeebus. He’s disintegrated into merely a caricature of himself. It’s like he’s borrowing from the Bill Shatner school of hamminess, except where Shatner can be genuinely funny, Hasselhoff’s just…weird.
The rest of the movie looks unbearably awful. I had to laugh, because you were exactly right when you said it was an excuse to haul out a bunch of ’80s crap. According to reviews, that’s all it does. At one point, they show a Smurf toy onscreen — and that’s the whole joke. No one says anything or does anything. The mere existence of obsolete pop culture is supposed to pass for comedy now.