knight industries two thousand (and ten!)
I watched my first-ever episode of Knight Rider last night.
Half of my friends are going to give me the “Oh my god you’re such a baby!!” speech next time I see them. In my defense, I had no control over my time of conception or date of birth – you’ll have to take that up with my parents. I was born one year after Knight Rider debuted, and it went off the air after only four. I somehow managed never to catch a syndicated episode of the show or any of the many spin-offs, re-dos, or movies that have been made since. Full disclosure: I’ve also never seen Fried Green Tomatoes, Star Wars, or any of the Godfather movies in their entirety. There’s more, but I’ll stop before your head explodes.
So, Knight Rider. The episode I was fortunate enough to happen upon was “Good Day at White Rock,” in which The Hoff saves a small town from a big bad biker gang. And let’s just get this out of the way right now: David Hasselhoff rocked that show like nobody’s business. I’m not so much a Hoff fan, but credit where it’s due, right? As bad 80′s T.V. goes, he was kind of the man.
[I wrote the preceding paragraph before I did a Google image search, in which I found a picture of The Hoff laying down, stark naked, surrounded by shar pei puppies. I'm not even going to attempt to link to it from here, lest the horror of it sucks my blog into some bizarre black hole time warp. I'll let you open that box all on your own, if you dare.]
So, right, Knight Rider. What I really found super-cool about the show was not The Hoff, or the bad acting, or the Drama of Grandeur. What I really found super-cool was K.I.T.T., the talking car. First of all, K.I.T.T. was snarky as hell, which I found totally endearing. Even more importantly, he didn’t really need The Hoff at all. He could have saved the town of White Rock all on his own, but for some reason decided he needed a mortal human to tag along. Since this is the only episode of the show that I’ve seen, I have no idea how The Hoff and K.I.T.T. got together in the first place – but they did, and here we are.
Although I was only -1 in 1982, I can imagine that the idea of a talking car was totally sci-fi crazy. I mean, it’s a car! and it’s talking! to a person! That is some wacky stuff, man. But here in 2010, talking cars are not exactly revolutionary. We’ve got GPS, and Ford Synch, and Hover Crafts, for the love of Knight. We talk to our cars, and our cars talk to us. Although I have not yet run across a technology that can handle the level of snark that K.I.T.T. doled out, I’m sure it’s not that far away. In fact, the possibilities of what our cars will do for and with us in the future seem practically Jetson-like. Want your car in your briefcase? Don’t mind if I do.
My boyfriend Jake, being the hybrid computer/car geek that he is, always finds new and exciting ways to combine the two technologies. First it was a desktop under the seat, then a 7-inch touchscreen mounted in the dash, and now a sleek and inconspicuous iPad dock nestled in the front center console. I never would have thought of having a full-on computer in the car before I met him, and now it’s as normal as <something really normal>. It doesn’t talk to us yet, but it’s only a matter of time before he finds a way to make it greet us with a 
and pour us a cup of coffee in the morning.
K.I.T.T., as strange as he seemed at the time, was really just a foreshadowing of the world to come. Of course, it’s that way with most things, isn’t it? People have ideas, other people call them crazy, and then someone actually invents something. Who would have expected that we’d be walking around with an entire library of books in a single 10-ounce device? Certainly not me, had you asked ten years ago. I am constantly amazed by where we are today when I look back at where we were not so long ago. What was once futuristic is now quite real, and the things that seem futuristic to us today don’t feel quite as impossible as they once did.
It’s not 1982 anymore, y’all. The world is our shellfish, snarky world-saving cars and all.
Posted by erin | 1 comments
