KITT the...VOLKSWAGEN? Exploring Knight Rider's VW powered Dune Buggy Jump Car! What Happened to It?
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- Опубліковано 2 сер 2024
- What? KITT as a VW? Blasphemy! But, alas, it is true. Today we will examine the screen used KITT car built from a dune buggy chassis and VW motor!
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I'm amazed it even seems to have a working scanner! Funny how they also use it for driving on the beach. It is a dune buggy after all 😅 Pretty cool how it stayed in one piece doing all those jumps. Tough little thing 😎
Very awesome video! I remember when I was a kid asking myself "Why does KITT look like that?" Well after so many years, now I know from your early commentary episode and this one! Keep up the good work!
Cover the drone Thunderbirds.
It's funny to note the early flivver car jumps have the car landing ass end first. I guess they realized that didn't look right so eventually they must have added weight to the front to make it land more like a front engined car.
Definitely the knight of the drone thunderbirds!
Yeah I wondered about that as well. It also seems considerably less "production" (effort) often went into most of the flivver stunts whereas they seemed to spend more time and expense on the real Trans Am jumps
Yea but in Good Day at White Rock and No drop to drink, the flivver car landed nose first heavy.
I’ve always wondered why KITT looked a little funny during those stunts. It’s great how they tried to hide that fact. I loved how the original car looked. The 2008 series didn’t do any justice and was cancelled after only one season due to bad ratings. The original series is the best. This channel is great, and I’m going to watch all the content regarding all the vehicles used in the series. Great work!!
To me, there's only one Knight Rider series. Right this one. All the rest failed.
It's crazy how they managed to get *everything* wrong in the 2008 series. They started catching on at the mid-season reboot but it was too little, too late.
@@KarriKoivusalo Let's just not think about it.
@@KarriKoivusalo At least with the 2008 series they TRIED to respect the legacy and heart of the original show. It was certainly flawed, they made a lot of mistakes, but with just a few changes it could've been really good. My first thought was "why didn't they have Hasselhoff talk to the new KITT at the end of the movie...they could've even implied it was the same AI, just upgraded and more advanced, and even have him recognize Michael".
I think of the 2008 series as good, but not as good as the original
These "SEPCIALS" are the reason why i keep coming back to your channel , please produce more of these , as they are absolute amazing . your new intro is 1000x better then before. Kick Ass !!!
Thank you!!
I remember some time in 2000's or 2010's there was Volkswagen TV ad demonstrating their automatic parking feature, and Knight Rider theme was playing in it :)
Have noticed there quite a many Mazda cars as a background vehicles or a guest character cars in Knight Rider, for example Cara in Knightmares drove a RX-7, and in Custom KITT, the girl rear ended Devon, driving Mazda 626.
Just a coincidence, or did they have some kind of deal with Mazda?
When Knight Rider was on TV the first time in the 80's, our car was 1983 Mazda 323 (GLC in US), so that helped noticing them :D
I thought I heard a long time ago that before production began they were thinking about using like an RX-7 as Knight Rider but they said they wanted to use an American muscle car.
I enjoyed watching the front end of the rubber body flapping up and away from the chassis at 4:01 :)
Still unfathomable to me that they let it slide. Any sensible director would have called in welders to add support to nose and shoot the scene again.
The Model T's four cylinder engine had a very rough idle, so much so that the fenders would shake around in a "flivvering" motion, hence the term. I think the VW KITT was called the Flivver for similar reasons - the body panels were not secured very well, especially at the front, and you can see the whole structure flivvering about in several scenes. I remember watching these episodes first run, and thinking about how fake that car looked, I thought it was a sandrail (turns out I wasn't far off) and I always marveled at how they didn't bother with any closeout panels in the construction, so you could see daylight through it in many places.
Never knew, but being an air cooled VW fan, it’s very cool!
Also would be cool to find out a bit about how George Barris' Ferrari 308 was acquired to be used as the Dagger DX in Knights of the fast lane. As that's an early S3 episide, it was likely filmed while Barris was doing the work on several of the S3 cars. Iirc you guys said that was one of the rare episodes where the S1/2 hero car wasn't used as it was likely being converted to the right hand blind drive car at that time after they finished filming KITT vs KARR.
It’s great to see at how many different camera setups they tried with each jump for the flivver car. Some looked really good and others didn’t unfortunately... but hey they tried and I really admire that 👍
Huh, never realized that jump over the lake used the dune buggy version. That's one of the only times it actually looked convincing as the real car.
I also never did.
I never knew they used a Dune buggy either for stunts at all, I always thought it was just a stripped out Trans Am, That had a roll cage and other safety odds and sods. I know they used little models in some shots, as you can tell.
You can see the rear leaf springs on the car as it jumps over the lake - VWs don't have those so I don't think the lake car was the VW based version.
Let's be honest KR was always ahead of its time....none of the cgi nonsense the abysmal KR 2008 used....and as kid I barely noticed the swapping of cars. The fact they went to all the effort of using a flivver car shows just how good the production was back in the 80s. Soo wish they would do a follow up from the 80s show using the same actors with new actors (Devon aside obvs). Great work Joe...Best channel going is this 👍
This was not the first time Hollywood did this, as in the Back to the Future 3 movie. The Dolorean in this was a custom VW beach buggy chassis and they put a Delorean body on the top of it, because it had to do some off-roading in the desert and a standard one would have got stuck in the sand/dirt.
Also in Miami vice, they used the testarossa in driving shots but in chases and stunt driving it was a de tomaso pantera under a Ferrari shell
Another superbe platinum nugget from this great channal. Thank you.
I’m looking forward to the KITT vs KARR commentary. My favorite episode
I love how shaky the body panels look now that I was looking closely lol This car would be cool to see brought to the channel
It's so good to finally getting it confirmed, that there were a lot of different cars. Because when i was a kid, i thought i was loosing it, that KITT sometimes looks different.. But it was harder to spot on the tv's of the old days.
Awesome Work Buddy, thaaaaanks!!!👍👍👍 Greetings from Helsinki, Finland 🇫🇮🇺🇸🇫🇮🇺🇸
Who doesn't love a Turbo Boost montage?
I would like to see a feature on the Ford Thunderbird Drones!
This is amazing.To me it looked like a Trans am.But I guess that was the idea anyway.Loved the compilation of all the fiver cars jumps.Thanks again Joe.
Again a great video! Go on, you Rock! Greetings again from Germany
P.S is it possible to see the look of the cars after the jumps? Think this wood be funny
You should cover the red Gremlin with a white stripe on it that can be seen in many episodes through the series. It was obviously a studio owned car, driven or parked in various episodes. I think it stopped appearing by the last season.
All those episodes and only 77 seconds. It's interesting to watch the clips after you provide the backstory- you can watch the body bounce LOL
Well, that just proves what I thought I saw watching Knight Rider as a kid. When Kitt the flivver jumps you can see into the interior through the wheel arch. 🤣 I'd like to know what happened to Devon's Mercedes SL.
Awesome content as usual! Is this the first time we have seen actual moving video clips from Knight Rider? Keep up the great work!
Reminds of the Delorean from Back to the Future III....it was a modified Delorean from a dune buggy for the desert scenes.
Cool video!
Awesome episode, great fotos 👍🏻. I personally would like to see a coverage of #1177.
Awesome video covering the flivver car its a much part of the show just as the trans am were thanks for giving us more on this vw power kitt Joe 👍👍👍
In 1986 I went to Disneyland, Universal Studios and Knotts and one of these places had a KITT on display that the sign said it was a Volkswagen underneath and used for jumping. Can't remember which but probably Universal. The car was on a small barge anchored in a pond.
Before somebody nitpicks, wheelbase is front to back, track is side to side.
I don't care, I don't think the average person knows the difference, but I'm sure somebody will complain.
You beat me to it! And you've explained it more succinctly than I would've.
I wonder how hard it was to make that rubber shell
I like the way you spelled "flivver". That's the Knight Industries way. I never noticed this car until I came to this channel and saw you mention it.
Well, I don't know what else to be covered. Some suggestions here are cool. Perhaps that big Yellow tractor from the Junk Yard Dog or that Juggernaut.
Very cool video on the VW Dune buggy jump car, the research that you guys do for the show is incredible, thank you very much.
Excellent video. Maybe the roll cage acrylic jump car for next car documentary. Out of all the cars, that one is the most interesting to me. Once again, great work on this channel!!
Funny how as a kid watching the show on a low res small TV I didn't notice, but as a teen on a better standard def TV I immediately noticed the use of this "dune buggy ramp car" as we called it back then. Thanks to studying and pausing VHS recordings of Hardcastle and McCormick in the 1989 reruns we figured out the ramp Coyote was a dune buggy ramp car so when Knight Rider re-ran in 1994 it was easy to see.
I'm glad they made the flivver car since it allowed many more turbo boosts then we would have gotten without it.
I'd really really love to see the outtakes of all the stunts they cut that we never got to see - the crashes, mistakes etc. Wonder if that old 35mm film still exists?
The Wraith and even Fast And Furious used VW Buggies too... there is a good chance there are other low budget film/shows using the Flivver too...
I take it the only time the Flivver car doesn't play the role of KITT was "Trust Doesn't Rust," where it exclusively played KARR its brief time on screen.
(I'm guessing.)
Always got to love the use of turbo boost no wonder it looked interesting. KITT still looks futuristic to this day.
Never knew this about the KITT jump car before. Great video as always. Amazing how VWs featured in versions of my two favourite film and TV cars; Kinght Rider and Back to the Future. Possibly another reason why I'm so nostaligic for the Beetle my Dad had when I was little.
Topic idea? All of Michael Knights love interests! Or a show on all guest appearances by different actors?
That's really a cool idea! It almost works perfectly in some shots and some are just so wonky it's still cool, it's a neat story!
I’m reading all these comments saying how bad it thinking ‘you rather it would’ve been like on the Dukes where they would’ve wrecked 100+ KITT’s?’ I think the flivver car was a great idea! Sure it could’ve used some improvements like maybe some extra rubber pieces so you cant look through the wheel well and such but it allowed for much more and amazing stunts instead of having to use miniatures..
The montage at the end REALLY made me smile! No matter how many times I hear that Turbo Boost sound effect it always makes me grin. I wonder how many jumps were done by flivver vs real Trans Ams vs models in later seasons. I tip my hat to the flivver car and to KRH!
Funny you did this video. I was just thinking the other day about what ever happened to it. Now I know...that last body is probably a planter in somebody's front yard Lol! 😀
Great to see this, thanks for the upload!
This just blew my mind into tiny pieces. I'm shook!
I never knew that car actually ran. I always thought it was just a hallow plastic shell they would launch in the air.
It's just a honor to watch Knight Rider when was on the air for 4 years (1982-1986) and I own it on DVD and there's so many trans ams and I always root for the good guys not the bad guys
Great video Joe & AJ!! The next car you should cover is: 'All of them'.
Maybe that Volkswagen chassis was later used in Back to the future as the "Wild west" Delorean.🤔🤷
I would say cover the most forgotten "extra" cars which popups somewhere parked on screen as a prop?
Ooooooo, that lands a bit hard above six feet, even for a wide kidney belt and thick seat cushion :o) Looked a fun buggy to rag around the dunes so I expect it got used until it was wrecked.
Gotta admit, I want one for a dune buggy!
Great video. Loved that 77 seconds at the end. Thank you for this upload, needed it today.
Hey do a video on that beautiful Lear Jet they used in the pilot and some of the episodes. Also any history on the foundation limos and Devon's Mercedes. Come to think of it, everyone in the show had a vehicle except for Bonnie and April. No fair, I guess they had a bus pass to get back and forth to work lol
77 seconds, 19 episodes. (average of 4 seconds) this should be a knight rider trivia question.
nice to see i wasnt the only one doing that math.
I wonder if the 77seconds is also counting re-used footage.
They must have wrote off tons of cars!! 😮😮
Kitts molecular bonded shell 🤣 .only joking ,this is very cool
I don't know if this would make a good subject for a video, or it may even be one you've done. But I always found it interesting how they borrowed footage from other movies. At the moment, they only two I can think of off the top of my head is the use of footage from Superman: The Movie in "Not a Drop to Drink." And then in "Trust Doesn't Rust," when KARR launches himself off of the cliff at the climax of the show, they use footage from the James Brolin movie "The Car," where the car in that movie goes over a cliff. I'm sure there are others, I just can't think of them at the moment.
Pretty much the same thing about airwolf back in the 80s .... When airwolf was being chased by a ton of aircraft carriers and aeroplanes the tv show would "cut" to footage of 1970s aircraft carriers! 😆😆🤣🤣
And I also noticed in the episode of "NOT A DROP TO DRINK" of knightrider.....u see kitt helping to stop a ton of rocks crashing over a big hoover dam! ....which was the very exact scene from superman 1 !! N yes in the episode of knightrider season 1 kitt meets karr ... karr is a different shape as he goes off the end of the cliff. 😉👍
@@mattayres371 yeah, that whole scene where Michael and KITT are trying to stop the flood is interspersed with scenes from STM. There’s a few scenes where if they hadn’t cut it right where they did, we would’ve seen Superman.
@@dbmabe exactly! Ha ha ha 😂 would have been hillarious if they did. 😂
@@mattayres371 😂😂 I’ve always wondered if the wrote the script specifically planning to use STM footage of did they just write the script and then go looking for footage that would fit…🤔
The dune buggy chassis car was a logical choice for a jump car as the stock Trans Am is much more nose heavy and would not fly through the air as gracefully.
Thank you for sharing your wonderful videos I appreciate you sharing all videos I am watching from South Africa
Joe do a video what GM engineer designed the original 1982 T/A.Back ground music and sound effects are amazing.
Guys, I'm 90% sure the car that jumps over the lake in 'Good Day at White Rock', is not the same dune buggy car.
I looked at it on different copies over and over, and it definitely has leaf springs at the rear, which that dune buggy hasn't. Either it's a different car, either it' a different modification of the car.
I mean, in retrospect, using a dune buggy was a damn good idea. Looking at the jumps it was used for, and how it flew and landed compared to the T/A, it definitely gave them the confidence to try ballsier stunts (although the entire show was full of them). They're probably the only vehicle that can handle jumps of that calibre (apart from Gr B rally cars maybe). Just wish they looked at changing the tracking, reinforcing the body somehow to reduce its jelly-like qualities and the "holes" which are visible from the underside of the body, it probably could have fooled a lot more people thinking it was the real thing until home viewing caught up to them.
Great video & insight into something I didn’t realise I needed to know until now 😂 looking at the “flivver” car today it is so obviously not a trans am but as a 9 year old in 85 I had no idea!
As for another vehicle to look into, maybe finding out what the Juggernaut from Knight of the Juggernaut was? 🤔 Please forgive me if that’s already known.
Keep up the great work guys 👍🏻
I spotted the Juggernaut in a movie called "Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone".
Thanks Joe for the jump compilation I especially like the added sound effects.
Do a video on the juggernaut and if it still exists and it's whereabouts.
Thanks Joe and A.J. for a real interesting video.one of the neat things about Knight Rider is the creativity and imagination of the production team stunt team 2nd unit ect . Certainly the flivver car saved and even extended the service or usable life of the Trans Am jump cars. I really get a kick out of seeing the flivver car in the clips but hearing the small block chevy engine sounds over dubbed! Whatever subject you guys choose for the future videos is fine by me as you guys always deliver entertainingly fun content!!😀😀👍👍
Did you ever notice that all the cars that kitt ever jumped over........all those cars were placed exactly in the right position!! 😃
lol In the jump at 4:00 you can see the entire nose of the car flex downward after hitting the jump
Shout out to the editors too for incorporating all these various KITTS (Trans Ams, jump cars and miniatures) into a production that looked totally seamless to 12 year old me. So much work for just a few seconds of perfect action.
12 year old?! XD I was 5 and noticed all of it's incosistencies hence why I lost interest in the series atop of a cringe acting.
@@minmogrovingstrongandhealthy so you're staying tuned to a Knight Rider channel for what reason?
@@MLife1972 Learning about production and it's craft. Never cared for the show itself.
At 7.11 seconds in the front on shot you can see the rubber mould wobbling as it hits.
Ah so that explains why K.I.T.T sometimes looked out of proportion. The one car I have wondered about is the one when K.I.T.T was being shot at. There always seemed to be a double skin on him when the sparks flew
That's the same rubber shell we talk about in this video!
@@KnightRiderHistoriansOfficial
Ah right. I always wondered
When watching the show in the old days I did notice that sometimes the body was flopping around like if made out of rubber, but I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me :D
I think it would be interesting to know about the convertible trailer with the retractable roof.
4:02 - you can see the rubber nose pop up at the start of the jump.
I don’t think I ever noticed that when KITT was in the air etc. mind u I have only watched KR a few times. Dukes of Hazzard I have watched thousands of times and I am just learning stuff still. So I guess over time even if I hadn’t watched this video I woulda likely noticed it someday lol
It was pretty smart to build the flivver car. Probably saved a fortune. Trans-Ams weren't cheap then. It sure beats destroying hundreds of 69 Chargers ;)
First "thumb up", second push the "play" button 😁
That was great stuff as always!! Loved seeing that car bourse around during and after turbo boosts.
The flivver was the equivalent to Jack Gill in automobile terms. 👍
I just noticed at about 7:20 it looks like KITT is jumping over the Minnow IV used in the 1979 Gilligan's Island TV movie. Doing some googling I haven't seen any reference to it, has nobody noticed this before?
Well I guessed that wrong... I figured flivver was short for "fly-over car."
When you doing the season 3/4 hero car?
Soon!
Great detail pictures of the chassis, I guess it was a beetle engine in the rear? This would be a fun 1/25 model to make, just have to vac form a body. Have to get practicing that. I remember being in school when this was on and everyone was making the sound effects of Kitt's sound when jumping and turbo boost. How did they make that sound?
Eat your heart out Herby the Love Bug! 😆. Seriously though, I always wanted to know what a flivver car was. Any ideas why it was never used in Season 3? Another great video.
P.s. - Any way you could do an episode on all of the sounds of KITT such as his various interior startup sounds, all the turbo boosts sound effects, Surveillance Modes, the original pilot scanner sound versus the main one used throughout the show, etc.? 🤓🙏
I made this little comparison several years ago. The chemical analyzer sound effect in "Knights of the Fast Lane" is from.the arcade game Centipede
ua-cam.com/video/jpU8T4mHSG4/v-deo.html
Season three was when the train derailment cars were in full swing - many KITT "actors" were available, many of them already worn by other stunts, so they didn't mind jumping them to scrap. I guess the return of the flivver car and reduced amount of turbo boosts in the fourth season was a combination of reduced budget (the flivver car was less likely to damage itself and less expensive to repair after a jump) and probably also a decline in serviceable Firebirds. I'm pretty sure some of those involved in the mass scrapping were actually already damaged beyond repair by then.
@@TheSergioTurbo interesting. I thought the train derailment cars were more in season 2. The 2nd car Knight Rider Historians owns was a 1984 base firebird converted by barris in the summer of 1984. It was the 2nd to last new car introduced to the series. I believe the last car was a 1984 maroon V6 acquired by Barris to convert into the convertible car in the spring of 85. That's why it and the car owned by KRH still exist along with the 1982 car they own (one of the original 3 cars). All of the train derailment cars were 1983 models.
@@pdennis93 Yeah, what I meant with "in full swing" was that by the third series all derailment cars had been KITTified and some had already gotten a lot of abuse by then , so they were likely considered more "disposable", or at least it was considered an acceptable risk to jump actual Firebirds thoughout the whole season since there was no shortage of them.
(Which makes me wonder how many, if any, of the Firebirds actually got totaled during jumps.)
@@TheSergioTurbo some definitely did. There was one on the blooper reel from the episode "lost knight" that came down really hard on the front end.
WOW! Never expected this to be a VW haha
The stunt coyote on Hardcastle and McCormick was the same thing. Actually even the hero car on that show was built on a vw chassis.
3:59 it was PAINFULLY obvious as KITT left the ramp...the front end virtually flopped upward by a good foot. And you ASKED....so I'll say it again, RC's bike.
Okay that was a cool episode guys and the video at the end was awesome as well keep up the cool work guys
you know I know its 1980's tv but you would think they could have taken a rattlecan to the underbelly of it and put in some sort of box section rubber shell inserts to act as the inner wheel liners around it so you couldnt see into the car from below, as it would have gone a long way to hiding what it was, also look at 7:04 there, if you time and freeze it there just right you can see what looks to be rubber nailed to slightly painted wood falling out, like maybe that's how they wedged the nose so it didnt fold in on itself while driving.
as maybe it was wood on fiberglass on a dune buggy, hence the name, like maybe Flivver means or ment wooden buggy or something to the guys who made it
as their was some very early attempts with automobiles where people would just stick engines to wooden horsedrawn buggy's to try and make their own home made car and the name was a throwback to that, after all i think the first mercedes benz was literally just that.
Hey Joe! Great video as always 👍 really cool history on the car! MR AJ needs to come often on the channel too. Just saying.............. also love the new INTRO!!!!!
Thanks for all
now I want to know the story behind why they decided to have those two instances of the flivver car not jumping at all
In the pilot episode you can see the front end of the body fly up and go right back down. You can see it at this time 4:01
I remember as a kid that Turbo Boost in "Nobody Does It Better" where the shell flexes at the landing and thinking what the hell was that! Dang that buggy saw some action. Hope somewhere someone still has it and sees this video going dad, isn't that the buggy out back?
Well I just learned something, How interesting. I cant unsee the damned thing now, Thanks Joe 🤣🤣
LOVE that Turbo Boost sound effect.
I was a kid in Germany and I loved this series - I even bought all of David Hasselhoff s terrible music.
Ingenious idea and execution. Just wish they had painted the belly pan black
You’re correct they will use different cars they did it in Dukes of Hazzard when they didn’t want to damage when they didn’t want to damage dodge chargers they used Volkswagens for some of the stunts they just had a dodge charger body built over them because dodge chargers were getting harder and harder to find. After all they went through 350 of them today if you wanna really good dodge charger and original you would have to pay at least $150,000 minimum that’s what they usually go for at auction.
They even use model cars in knight rider as well as Dukes of Hazzard so that they would not have to deal with a full size stunt.
"when they didn’t want to damage when they didn’t want to damage dodge chargers they used Volkswagens for some of the stunts they just had a dodge charger body built over them"
They never did any such thing. Every General Lee jump was with a real 1968 or 1969 Dodge Charger (over half of them were 1968s dressed up as 1969s) up until season 7 when they started using small scale models which looked ridiculous. They might have started using the toy cars in season 6, but either way, they didn't jump any real Chargers after season 5. In season 6 they used old footage of jumps from previous seasons (and maybe some scale models too; can't remember exactly when they started that bullshit; they were definitely doing it in season 7).
"because dodge chargers were getting harder and harder to find. After all they went through 350 of them"
More like 230 of them according to the foremost expert on the subject, Wayne Wooten. And they weren't getting hard to find, except maybe in a very local area around the production of the show. Dodge made around a quarter-million second-generation Chargers; ~230 of them being used up by The Dukes of Hazzard was just a drop in the bucket.
and I thought it was called "flivver" or "flibber" car because the body was wobbling all over the place when it did a stunt XD