Knight Rider was one of the truly great action series of the 1980s. The show centred around Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff), a “young loner” who battled crime with the aid of his specially equipped super-car K.I.T.T. Created by Glen A. Larson, it ran on NBC from 1982 to 1986, with TV movie revivals in 1991 and 1994, plus a one-season spin-off entitled Team Knight Rider in 1997.

Clearly, Knight Rider is a premise with gas in its tank. The show has now been revived as an NBC TV movie, which could serve as the pilot for a new series if all goes well. Justin Bruening plays Mike Traceur, the current occupant of the driver’s seat, while Val Kilmer supplies the new voice of K.I.T.T. Breuning and executive producer David Bartis spoke to Abbie Bernstein about cool cars and nostalgia.

What made you decide this was the right time to bring back Knight Rider? Did the success of the Transformers movie, with its lineup of talking vehicles, have anything to do with it?

David Bartis: Transformers definitely played a role in it. It sort of heightened everyone’s awareness of the potential of the show. But to be honest, it wasn’t my idea to bring it back. Ben Silverman at NBC had a lot of passion for the show, and I was lucky enough to be on a deal at Universal, [who are] partners with NBC. So I got lucky being in the right place at the right time.

I was also working on another project with Dave Andron, who wrote the new Knight Rider. We were sitting in my offices when the folks at Universal and NBC called and said, “Is this something you guys would be interested in?” We jumped on it. For both of us, it was something we remembered from the first time it was on TV.

So we definitely had a lot of passion for it from our own experience of it on the air the first time around, and the chance to reinvent it and bring it to a new audience was definitely something that was exciting to us.

How did you decide what the tone should be?

David Bartis: We had a lot of discussions about the tone…I grew up watching a lot of eight o’clock and lighter, fun, ‘action-y’ shows. The shows from my childhood are things like Dukes of Hazzard and Rockford Files and Knight Rider and Baretta – shows where there’s this model of the cool guy in a cool car. They were fun. You love the fight scenes and you love the action, and the stories were great and the characters were great. And that was something we felt hadn’t really been on TV in a long time.

We didn’t want to go dark with this – we wanted to go back to the roots of what everybody loved about those classic lighter one-hour shows.

Do you think younger viewers have fond memories of Knight Rider through re-runs?

Justin Bruening: I was a huge fan. Knight Rider was an iconic figure in my childhood. I’d run around in a leather jacket and fight indiscriminate crime in my house. I never saw it when it ran initially, because I was about four [at the time]. But I watched it when it was syndicated.

Everything that David said before – it’s the cool guy, the cool car. As a little boy, that’s the best show on television. So just to be able to take over that role was such an amazing honor.

What’s it been like working with the new K.I.T.T.?

Justin Bruening: Working with the new K.I.T.T. was an amazing experience. Actually, it’s the Shelby Cobra 500 GTKR. It’s an absolutely amazing piece of machinery. All our little bells and whistles that we added to it also heighten the experience. It’s great, absolutely a joy.

David Bartis: One of the things we were able to do on the show is create something which we called the Pod car. It allowed us to put Justin and Deanna [Russo, Knight Rider’s female lead] in an actual car, run the stunts live-action and record their performances, rather than putting them in a car on a green screen on a [sound] stage.

A lot of the performances you see from Justin and Deanna are actually them in the car on the road, with a stunt driver who is sitting in a cage at the top of the car. It’s the real car going the real speed; it’s not them faking it on a stage. For me as a producer, it brought a level of reality to the performances and the action that was really special.

Were there any unexpected events during filming?

Justin Bruening: In the middle of a fight scene, I dislocated my knee. They were gracious enough to give me three weeks to heal. I came back and finished that scene and another couple of fight scenes.

There’s a scene that turned out differently I did about four billion times in the audition process, because I helped read with the girls [who were auditioning for Sarah]. Every time we did it in the audition process, it was a comedic scene and it was very funny. When we got to filming, it took a serious tone and, surprisingly, it felt right with that.

David Bartis: We were really excited about how the chases and the car stunts came out. I love the scene Justin is talking about – it was great to see something evolve from almost pure comedy to pure emotion.

Did you always plan to bring back David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight?

David Bartis: We always knew that David had to have a role in this production. The thing that surprised me the first time I met him was that Knight Rider is something that is really important to him and that he’s really passionate about. More so, I think, than almost anything else that he’s ever done – even Baywatch, which he produced and was on the air for 11 years.

He has this inherent understanding of what made [Knight Rider] work and what the fans responded to. For us, that was a tremendous asset to be able to tap into and to get a sense from him of what elements he felt made the show work for the audience.

So he definitely had a role in helping us conceive what this would be, as well as, obviously, being in it. And I think everybody will be excited to see the way that we’ve worked him into the show as Michael Knight.

What’s happened to the original K.I.T.T. in this version?

David Bartis: We do reference the original K.I.T.T. and you actually see glimpses here and there if you look really carefully. We believe that the original K.I.T.T.’s motherboard is buried somewhere and enhanced in the new K.I.T.T.

Knight Rider airs on NBC on 17 February 2008.