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KITT Mustang Gets a Supercomputer Upgrade
 With help from Microsoft, NBC has re-engineered the tricked-out car once again for it's new full TV run coming this autumn. The result, unveiled at Comic-Con, appears to be part-Shelby Mustang, part-Smart Car, and part HAL9000.
Fans of the original cult hit TV series still needed to be sold on the concept car after objecting to February's two-hour TV movie/backdoor pilot, which moved on from the Knight Industries Two Thousand (1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am) and relaunched with the Knight Industries Three Thousand - a 2008 Shelby Mustang GT500. The new car overlooked many of the famously gadget loaded car's key features - most importantly it's trademark car-jumping device. "Turbo boost just didn't fit in the two-hour," says executive producer Dave Bartis, "but we've found a way to do it in the first act of the first episode back." Amongt other changes from the pilot, Knight Rider is now showrun by Gary Scott Thompson, the creator of Las Vegas whom NBC brought on in April to build a full-blown weekly action series from the one-off TV movie.
To demonstrate the new tricks that KITT would be up to, the panel screened a showreel including stunt driving and a CG shapeshifting effects.The new shape-shifting trick is apparently very impressive and takes the show nearer to movie-quality special effects. Thompson spoke the session about his view that KITT should demonstrate cutting-edge, real-world technology. This means they are thinking about KITT more like a supercomputer and are trying to incorporate the latest in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence - informed by field trips to Microsoft's headquarters, where Thompson and his team were briefed on technological advances still a few years off.
The result is more than just a talking car (still to be voiced by Val Kilmer in the series). This Mustang is going to constantly learn and evolve from one episode to the next. "Every week, we get the script and see what the car can do," says Justin Bruening (who plays KITT's human partner Michael Tracer. "You can upgrade it the way you can do a normal computer."
One assumes this also makes KITT susceptible to the Blue Screen of Death. Source: Popular Mechanics |
