‘Knight Rider 2000’ featuring S.A. now parked at Netflix
“Knight Rider 2000,” a madefor-tv movie filmed in San Antonio, has just been added to Netflix along with all four seasons of the 1980s NBC TV series starring David Hasselhoff.
Among the scenes in the futuristic film is a talking red sports car avoiding rush hour by cruising in the San Antonio River near the Rivercenter Mall and prisoners in a deep freeze at the Century Building off Loop 410. In another scene, police officers are eating chicken wings while the mayor is assassinated in the Tower of the Americas.
The 1991 movie follows undercover cop Michael Knight, played by Hasselhoff, and K.I.T.T., an artificially intelligent and talking sports car. Trinity University alumna Susan Norman also stars in the film. She plays a rookie cop who gets injured and has a memory chip implanted in her brain that makes her just as smart as K.I.T.T.
While the movie is based in San Antonio in the year 2000, the city is never mentioned by name.
In this futuristic city, all guns have been banned. Not even police officers carry them; instead they use ultrasound stun guns. Capital punishment also has been outlawed and, thanks to prison overcrowding, scientists have come up with a way to freeze criminals serving their sentences. Problems occur when one of these bad guys, who is part of a deadly ring of gunrunners, is thawed out.
Dozens of San Antonians appear as extras “Knight Rider 2000,” most as policemen wearing all-black garb. According to a San Antonio Light report, Courtney Bell, then 4, was featured as the child version of Norman in a flashback scene.
Officials at the time were excited that San Antonio would be presented as a futuristic city for a change.
“Usually filmmakers emphasize S.A.'S Western image,” Kathy Rhoads of the San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau told the Express-news at the time. “So many outsiders have an outdated and limited vision of the Alamo City. They think of it as quaint and dusty . . . anything but a large, bustling city.”
Viewers today can see plenty of what San Antonio looked like 30 years ago.
The city's skyline is featured prominently in the beginning. There's an explosion that scorches the pavement near the Pearl Brewery. Norman chases the criminal who shot the mayor across Hemisfair Park.
The KENS-5 TV building on Fredericksburg Road serves as the exterior for the Knight Foundation. Rivercenter Mall is the scene for a climactic battle.
The San Antonio River and the River Walk also appear. At one point, Knight's cherry red Dodge Stealth cruises the river like a boat.
San Antonians might remember when one of the three K.I.T.T. cars used in the movie sank in the lagoon in front of the mall.
According to an Express-news story, the movie's crew created a fiberglass body with a boat motor to power it. The vehicle sprang a leak and sank.
Laughing, one technician told the paper: “KITT can talk, has the capability of turning into a boat, but it wasn't supposed to become a submarine!”
When the film aired in 1991, more than 40 percent of all TV sets in San Antonio tuned in. Hopes were high at the time that the movie's success would spin off into a new TV series.
While “Knight Rider” has been rebooted a few mor times, the franchise has yet to return to San Antonio.