Poor KITT missed his calling back in the day. He had all the personality of a human, but confined to the body of a car. Granted, it was a super car, with turbo boosts and various special powers. But oh, to be an Autobot, capable of actually transforming into a humanoid form! All these decades later, the dream is real for the famous Knight Rider car.
Hooked on a Feeling
Transformers has had an ongoing line of pop culture mashups, from Jurassic Park to Universal Monsters. It’s particularly impressive when working with iconic cars, like the Back to the Future time machine or Ghostbusters’ Ecto-1. For a Top Gun crossover, they even made a jet that became kinda-sorta a robot Tom Cruise. With Knight Rider, and an Autobot they are pointedly calling Agent Knight rather than KITT, the alt mode definitely resembles robo-Hasselhoff. Complete with blue jeans paint deco, of course. Now to make him a Decepticon, they just need to add a goatee.
The car is a Pontiac Trans-Am, an American car despite the fact that, as Norm Macdonald always told us, “Germans love David Hasselhoff.” This mashup will go onsale at Hasbro Pulse July 30th, starting at 1 p.m. eastern. To sweeten the deal, Agent Knight even has electronics! Six phrase, six sounds, and scanner effect lights. Don’t ask us why so many ’80s TV robots had a red eye that kept bouncing from side to side. Maybe it was because we just loved Pong and thought it was so futuristic.
Would KITT have chosen to resemble Michael Knight, his own driver? There’s something maybe mildly weird in the implication. Best not to think too hard about it.
