A Recreation Of Knight Rider’s Pilot Presentation

Filler video time because I needed a nap this afternoon after not so much a lousy night’s sleep so much as a lousy waking up.

Pilots used to be how show creators showed off that they could pull off the pitch they used to sell the network or syndicator on a project. It’s sort of a proof of concept, usually the same quality as the final show so they can use it as the first episode, but occasionally it’s a lot cheaper looking simply to show the network to pay for a proper first episode.

When putting out Knight Rider for NBC, Glen A. Larson put together a half-hour proof of concept pilot out of the footage he was putting together for a full first episode, the TV Movie/two-parter (depending on how it airs or is put on home video) we the audience got to see. While that video is currently lost in the halls of time (or possibly some dude’s basement), the YouTube channel Knight Riders Historians Official gave us an idea of what it might have looked like. I’m guessing that’s the official channel for a group of Knight Rider historians and not Universal actually creating a group to keep track of their currently unused franchise. That would be why we don’t get a proper recreation with surviving clips, as that would get them hit by Universal with copywrite strikes, but an explanation of what scenes they used and what was shot just for the pilot. Take a look.