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“Goliath” also marked the first real use of miniature models in selected action sequences. Gill recalls, “The big crash in ‘Goliath’ was all miniatures, and that was the big let down from both David and I. The miniatures looked so hokey with some of the stuff they were doing. They didn’t save much money, but they did save time. We were shooting a five day first unit, sometimes two day second unit, on every episode. They came in and started throwing all these miniatures at us. It got to the point where David and I would cringe when we though we were going to have a goofy miniature.” Holden adds that, “I enjoyed doing the two hour shows, because it gave the writers a chance to go into more depth and have some fun, especially giving David an opportunity to play a dual rode. It was fun playing opposite the ‘evil twin’.
One scene that was not filmed with miniatures was Michael and K.I.T.T.’s ramjet ride through the desert, past a miner and his burrow. Gill, who drove the Trans Am during that scene, remembers a frightening moment as he flew past the animal. “A miner and his burrow were walking and I was supposed to drive by them at a high speed. I had a car at that time that was designed to do about 130. I started far away and they told me to go as fast as I could past the miner. I asked them what would happen if the burrow started to jump around. We ended up tagging his feet to the ground with stakes so he couldn’t really move. I got up to about 115 and called them to see if they were ready. They said they were, and just before I got to the burrow, I hit a bird and it just shattered all over the windshield. I thought that I either hit the guy or the burrow! We had to go back and re-shoot the entire scene.”
Tom Greene, writer and producer of many of the second season episodes, has many fond memories on the set. “I believe the success of Knight Rider was David Hasselhoff. It was just one of those things where the chemistry of the people is not replaceable.” Greene’s influences came mostly from his childhood. “’Knightmares’ was one of my favorite episodes to write and produce and the dam idea is just an 82
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example of something that came from my youth. To this day, when I teach kids in a literacy program, I use ‘Knightmares’ as an example.”
Greene also remembers that he was very detailed in terms of the episode’s content. “I wanted the police precinct sign to look old and aged and of course the props department made it out of cloth. I said,
‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ I then went about making the sign look like it was supposed to.”
Greene openly admits to pulling a fast one on the network. “There are certain scenes in ‘Knightmares’ which would lend themselves to being interpreted as gay. The two that come to mind are when Michael says to K.I.T.T., ‘You’re hot!’ after he presses the turbo boost button, and one where K.I.T.T. tells him to ‘put it into my chemical analyzer’. I’m still amazed we got that past the network censors!” Greene also remembers that Laura Bruneau, who portrayed Cara, was not very well liked on the set. “In the scene in which she is trapped in the well and the water is rising, we filled it up a little higher than usual and you will notice that she starts getting frustrated when the water goes higher than she was expecting!”
One of Greene’s first problems was William Daniels and his role. “I had lunch with Daniels and I was a huge fan of his. He knew me and started to talk to me. Apparently, he was upset that he wasn’t getting a lot of air time for the character of K.I.T.T. during the middle of the second season. I said to him, ‘You’re lucky you only have to come in once a week and record your lines!’” After that, Greene said Daniels was content with the role and never became disenchanted again. Holden also adds that she doesn’t have a favorite episode but, “the episode in which I got to actually drive K.I.T.T.” would qualify. She also enjoyed the scenes in which there was humor bantering back and forth.
Even Hasselhoff became angry at certain points concerning the way things were going with the series. Greene jokes that, “Hasselhoff got pissed and was talking about leaving the show but I knew he wasn’t serious. However, the next time he came into my office, he sat down and we Meet Goliath •
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started to chat. He glanced over at my desk and saw a script entitled, ‘The Death of Michael Knight’. Hasselhoff quickly asked, ‘What’s that?’ and I would tell him that I was just following his request to write him out of the show. I later told him it was just a cover page and not an actual script and he was relieved. David never wanted off the show after that though!”
During the filming of “A Knight in Shining Armor,” a few reporters were allowed a first-hand look at how the series was filmed. The scene, incidentally, was filmed at the gorgeous Griffith Park in California. While the crew was preparing to film the scene in K.I.T.T. immediately after Michael kidnaps Katherine from her school, a number of the crew members (as well as Daphne Lee Ashbrook, who played Katherine) were playing a game of softball. “The actress who would work in the next scene with David,” says reporter Janey Milstead, “pitched a few balls in her beautiful blue dress and blue high heels. She proved to have an arm-and-a-half! And when it came time for her to bat, she changed into blue-and-white tennies, which made her outfit look sort of like she was going to go jogging in her hot-date dress!”
For almost two blocks, the street was lined with every kind of truck imaginable. There were makeup and prop trucks, as well as a lumber truck in case something needed to be built at the last second. Not to mention caterers’ trucks, lighting trucks, and sound trucks, as well as David Hasselhoff’s personal mobile home. Milstead continues, “Coming over to K.I.T.T., David eased himself behind the famous console, only he looked like he belonged there. Kidding around with crew members, he taped a yellow page of dialogue on the dashboard where the camera couldn’t see it but he could! The makeup man reached through the window and gave David a few expert pats, and David started pulling out tissues and tossing them back at him while everyone laughed. Then the pitcher-actress with the blue dress got into the other side of the car with David. Since her feet wouldn’t show in the shot, she was still wearing her tennies!” As Daphne and David boarded K.I.T.T. to prepare for the shoot, the crew members were busy mounting three cameras and two sets of lights on K.I.T.T.’s hood, as well as installing a hidden microphone inside. For a driving scene such as this, 84
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K.I.T.T. was hooked to a flatbed truck that was responsible for recording the sound and adding yet another camera angle. “David was in a silly mood as they left,” says Milstead, “and kept throwing a trail of different things out of the window. Bits of paper, more tissues, etc. until he ran out.”
Because Knight Rider was such a popular show, the crew had to take extra measures to ensure that the filming wouldn’t be spoiled by large crowds and eat up time. In order to reduce the chances of this happening, the filming locations were usually top secret and they would try not to film on the weekends, when the chance of forming a crowd was greater. While the filming continued, the stunt coordinators would go off by themselves and would actually use miniature toy cars to plot out K.I.T.T.’s next moves before attempting them in the real car.
Not new to the pressures of the network, Greene ran into trouble on the set of “A Knight in Shining Armor.” “The network wanted me to completely rewrite the ending and I would not do it. The whole point of the story was to have the girl find the true hidden treasure that lied within. The network wanted me to change it to her finding an actual hidden treasure!” Greene became angry and refused to rewrite the script. “David stood by me and threatened to walk off the show if my script did not remain intact.” Greene also remembers the personal experience that influenced him to write the episode. “’A Knight in Shining Armor’ came about because my nephew was a geologist. I was amazed one day when he showed me how the outside of a Gioed rock could be so ordinary and that you really don’t know what is inside. I thought it would be neat if there was a cave that looked like that.”
That cave was located in Bronson Canyon; it was the same one used for the Bat Cave entrance in the original 1960’s Batman series. “Models were used to get them into the cave. When the cave collapsed, I introduced a reverse turbo boost, a concept that would appear later in ‘Goliath Returns’.“ Greene also liked the idea of this cold man being warm enough to share a treasure with his daughter that was worth more to the heart than the wallet.
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Tom Greene also revealed that “Speed Demons” was originally intended to be the first Knight Rider spin-off. Richard Lindheim wanted to do a spin-off and Greene was approached. He says that Knight Rider was becoming an international show and Universal wanted to cash in. “I pitched the idea of Ironside meets Knight Rider, about a guy in a wheelchair and his brother who fight crime on motorcycles.” The pilot of the series would have found the character of Devon Miles approaching the kids to join the Foundation for Law and Government to go places and do certain things that Michael Knight and K.I.T.T. could not. “The motorcycles would have been as advanced as K.I.T.T. and on par with what they did in Streethawk a year later, but even more sophisticated.” So why did The Speed Demons fall apart and never materialize? “It was rewritten and I wasn’t pleased at the interference I got. The girl in the episode was not supposed to be in the series for example. The idea was eventually abandoned for ‘Mouth of the Snake’, which become a series for 14 minutes with Code of Vengeance, which completely flopped.” Greene, however, didn’t mind being disassociated with the project. “I am glad that I was not part of ‘Mouth of the Snake’ and the four [ Code of Vengeance] episodes that were filmed after. David was a professional who had been given the bad material and the premise of this network insisted crossover, and he acted like a complete pro and just did his job.”
Even Edward Mulhare had his moments of frustration, according to Greene. “During the taping of ‘Speed Demons’, he refused to come out of the dressing room because he did not want to ride the motorcycle. He thought it was ridiculous. So, I went to his dressing room and told him that he was a better actor and should be back doing theatre instead of this shitty series! I even offered to let NBC know that he wanted to leave the series.” Of course, Mulhare stopped him before he went out the door. “It was one of the few times he would not do a scene.” Jack Gill did most of the motorcycle riding anyways, and Mulhare was only required for the close-ups which were filmed on a platform.
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Near the end of season two, during February sweeps period, David Hasselhoff once again donned a goatee and sideburns to bring Garthe Knight back in the two-hour episode “Goliath Returns.” In it, Garthe managed to escape from prison yet again and kidnapped Devon and April. Garthe planned to use them to lure Michael in so that he could finally seek revenge. “Goliath Returns” was also unique in the fact that it was the only Knight Rider episode that brought back two villains from separate episodes so they could team up to achieve their goals. Ann Turkel, who gave a delightful performance earlier in the season with “Soul Survivor,” revived her character Adrianne Margeaux with Hasselhoff’s character, Garthe Knight. The part of Elizabeth Knight was not brought up again since the writers wanted to take a different angle on the story. Of course, Michael managed to trick Goliath into careening off a cliff to a watery grave. Viewers would not get to see if Garthe or Adrianne survived the crash. Greene helped write “Goliath Returns” to “Goliath Returns” and says,
“It took just one day to write the script. We went to a place called the Hamburger Hamlet on a Saturday morning. We needed eight acts so we worked out what was going to happen. All four of us did two acts, each writing about 20 pages, and titled it, ‘Déjà vu All Over Again’. They had decided to write a no-holds barred adventure that put the entire team in danger. Greene came up with several key scenes in the episode. “I came up with the parachute and suggested that we drop the model down. It worked so well because there wasn’t any perspective.” Although models were used to establish that K.I.T.T. was falling to the ground, the producers used a crane to suspend a real car in the air to film Hasselhoff’s reactions inside. Jack Gill comments, “We hung the car on a crane and took it up about 250 feet with David in the driver’s seat and a cameraman in the right seat to shoot him in the sky. We started to take the director up to see if he wanted to do some point-of-view shots. About fifteen feet up, he freaked out so I had to go up instead.”
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The Trans Am was suspended by a crane to film Hasselhoff’s reaction in “Goliath Returns” [Courtesy of Jack Gill] One of the major parts of the “Goliath Returns” script, the jail scene, was also Greene’s idea. “I had Devon and April trying to break out of jail. Ann Davis (one of the shows higher-ups) liked the idea of using ‘spies bread’, along with the buttons and material from a cardigan, to make an explosive to free them from the cell. I found out years later that someone over at ABC must have taken notice of our idea. Who knows? We could’ve been the inspiration for MacGyver!” Greene also jokes that the idea of Klaus’ wallet and his bill from the Bahamas came from his own pocket.
“My girlfriend at the time urged me to get the currency when I was there and the money was so beautiful that I kept it in my wallet. I still have it to this day!”
While most viewers enjoyed the scene in “A Good Knight’s Work”
where K.I.T.T. ejected Mighty Mouth, a talking teddy bear, on to the street, this was not the case with a young boy from England. The episode’s writer, Richard Okie, recalls, “It was about this time when I realized the true impact of what we were doing. I received a letter from England with 88
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a picture of a kid holding a picture of David Hasselhoff and K.I.T.T. His mother wrote the letter and told me that her son was upset that Mighty Mouth was ejected from the car. So, I wrote a letter to the boy directly and told him that K.I.T.T. really liked the bear and they only ejected it for fun. I went on to tell him that Mighty Mouth was okay because someone was there to catch him! That story ended up on the front page of two England newspapers!” William Daniels also voiced some concerns for that scene. He was very protective of his character, but ultimately the ejection scene was left in.
Besides being amused by K.I.T.T.’s growing frustration with Mighty Mouth, “A Good Knight’s Work” was also remembered for a spectacular turbo boost through a fourth story window. Richard Okie continues, “The landing in the apartment was real. We actually built a set of the entire apartment to destroy it later on. We shot all the scenes with the actors first, and then Jack [Gill] made the jump into the set. We hooked a cable to the back of the car so it would stop just short of the wall to prevent it from going through the other side. Incidentally, the building used for the exterior shots of the apartment complex is called Richfield Tower. It was just built and wasn’t fully occupied at the time of filming.” Even Okie wasn’t exactly sure how K.I.T.T. was supposed to get himself down from there!
“A Good Knight’s Work” would begin the transition from writer Tom Greene to Richard Okie. “Rick was scared,” says Greene. “After all, he was an executive at NBC and now he wanted to write scripts. I got him through it though. Twenty-five rewrites later, I got him through it.”
Greene says that “A Good Knight’s Work” was a great episode to be a part of. “It was the only time where you basically saw a rainbow of script colors. Even John Vernon, who I loved immensely from other shows and cast in the part of Cameron Zachary, started to wonder about it. Of course, once we were finishing up, we started to give John another rewrite just for the fun of it!”
Holden reflects on her character and the popularity of April Curtis by saying that, “I was grateful that April was intelligent and I think a good Meet Goliath •
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role model for young girls. She wasn’t the typical ‘bimbo’ stereotyped character. She truly believed she was on a mission and used her ingenuity to
enable K.I.T.T. to have more abilities with which to aid Michael in his fight against crime. What was funny at the time was that I really knew nothing about computers, so that part was totally acting. Fortunately, out of necessity, I have become much more computer literate!”
During the height of its popularity, David Hasselhoff and K.I.T.T. made a guest appearance in a two-part episode of Diff’rent Strokes entitled
“Hooray for Hollywood” (February 11 and 18, 1984). In it, Arnold and his best friend Dudley visited Universal Studios with only one goal in mind: meet the Knight Rider. They sneaked away from the Universal Studios tour and eventually ended up on the set of Knight Rider. Although the guard at the gate tells the boys that it was a closed set and they were not allowed to enter, Arnold and Dudley managed to sneak in and hid in a police cruiser parked on the set. The director did not see the kids in the car and loaded it with explosives for an action scene. David began his scene with K.I.T.T. and noticed that Arnold and Dudley were in the back of the car. David yelled for the special effects man to cease the car explosion and ran over to the car. When David told Arnold and Dudley that the car was to be blown up, Gary Coleman (Arnold) delivered his trademark line (adapted to fit the circumstances), “Whatchootalkin’bout Knight Rider?” He and Dudley explained why they were in the car and David then agreed to give an autograph to both the boys and arranged to have their picture taken with K.I.T.T. Later, Arnold bragged to his family that he was saved by the Knight Rider, but his family did not believe him. The close-ups of K.I.T.T.’s voice modulator are simply reused footage from Knight Rider due to the fact that it was not in sync with what K.I.T.T. was saying most of the time. William Daniels was not available to voice the car, so producers had to improvise with another actor. Also, the scene being performed in this episode did not correspond to any Knight Rider scene, and even utilized Diff’rent Strokes director Leslie H. Martinson in it.