Knight Rider Agent Knight

Prelude: A few years back I had a frequent commentator on my site who was a truly, truly devoted Knight Rider fan and basically reimagined every new figure I reviewed as a possible Knight Rider crossover toy, to the point where he was getting on my nerves a bit, I must admit. Now I haven’t heard from him in a while and don’t remember his name, either, but buddy, wherever you are, I sincerely hope that this is the toy of your dreams here. There finally is an official Knight Rider Transformer. So this review here is for you. Here he comes: Agent Knight, let’s say go.

Robot Mode: One of the first things going through my mind when I had Agent Knight in robot mode was that he is most definitely not CHUG scaled. He stands roughly 18cm tall in robot mode (not counting the door wings), meaning he is more or less Alternators or Masterpiece scale. Maybe this means will soon see another MP-10 Optimus repainted as the F.L.A.G. truck? It worked for Ghostbusters. Anyway, Agent Knight is roughly Masterpiece-scaled, just in case you are wondering which shelf to put him on.

Now at first glance Agent Knight is a pretty generic car Transformer. He’s got the car’s hood as his chest, the car doors as wings on his back, the front wheels on the shoulders, and the back of the car becomes the legs. We’ve seen that design probably a thousand times before, going all the way back to 1984’s G1 Prowl. Still, it’s a classic design for a reason and it still works pretty nicely 40 years later. Agent Knight appears a bit top-heavy (a swimmer’s figure), but overall he looks nice. Articulation is modern standard, so pretty good, and leaves no room for complaint.

He is mostly black, naturally, except for some grey, some red, and those blue Jeans shorts he is wearing. Not really, but it kind of does look like that, doesn’t it? Well, the Hoff usually wore Jeans as Michael Knight, so that fits. Agent Knight comes with two guns, the larger one kind of looking like a machine gun, the other a generic blaster. He can store both of them on the back of the car doors if he needs his hands free.

Now what makes this rather standard Autobot into Knight Rider? Well, the design of the car hood pretty much gives it away, of course, as it’s got the Cylon-style sensor in the front. Agent Knight contains an electronics package (a first for the Collaborative line) that hangs under the hood. Pressing the button on the hood activates the red light of the sensor and plays several different sound effects, such as the car starting the “whoosh-woosh” of the sensor, and some voice lines, too. If you don’t press the button again after a while, Agent Knight says “K.I.T.T. signing off”. Now I’m not usually a big fan of electronics, but a Knight Rider Transformer without the red sensor would just not have worked. If you keep the button pressed a bit longer, then the sensor will simply light up and stay lit for a while without any sound effects. Very nice.

Apart from the light and electronics, Agent Knight also carries the wrist watch communicator that Michael Knight used to stay in contact with K.I.T.T. during the series. Finally, the head. Again, at first glance it seems to be a pretty generic Autobot head, but if you look closely the forehead resembles K.I.T.T.’s speaker light from the first season (the red rectangle). Also, apparently the face mold is supposed to resemble the Hoff, but personally I don’t really see it. They really should have styled the helmet to resemble the Hoff’s 80s hairdo, I think.

So bottom line here: Overall an average robot mode, but with enough Knight Rider elements to make it work as more than your generic Autobot.

Alternate Mode: In car mode, of course, you have the familiar custom Pontiac Firebird Trans Am that we saw race across the TV screen in the 1980s. The transformation is pretty basic (if you can transform G1 Prowl, you can transform this guy), but the resulting car looks fabulous. I’ve always been a big fan of this car model (probably BECAUSE of Knight Rider), and I love to have it in hand again.

A few downsides: the car has transparent windows, but all you see behind them is kibble, so it might have worked better to make them solid. K.I.T.T. could tint his own windows, after all. As mentioned above the electronics package makes for a bit of a bump under the hood, so the car only has very little clearance there. And finally, instead of the familiar “KNIGHT” licensing plate, we have the Knight Industries logo on the back, the knight chess figure.

Despite all that, I love this car. We have very nicely sculpted tires, flip-open headlights, the electronics work in this mode, too, of course, and it’s a black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am! That’s really all I needed. So bottom line for the car mode: not quite perfect, but close.

Remarks: Knight Rider was a highly popular TV series in the 80s, featuring a young David Hasselhoff cruising around the country in a talking, wise-cracking car to fight criminals and seduce young ladies in whatever town he ended up in. And it is a bit of a surprise that it took 40 years for a Transformers Crossover to happen, given that we’re talking about a car with special powers and a mind of its own that could even partially transform (Super Pursuit Mode, anyone?). I mean, sure, K.I.T.T. never actually transformed all the way into a robot, but even a kid like me saw the parallels and made up his own make-believe world where K.I.T.T. ended up having been built with the help of Cybertronian technology.

Now technically this is not the first Knight Rider transforming toy, as there was a Knight Rider that transformed into a robot in ERTL’s “Pow-R-Trons” toyline in 1985, imported from the Japanese “Attack Change Machines Powertrons” line by Fujisho. But really, that was basically just a friction-drive toy car that “stood up”. Think the G1 Throttlebots. Nothing more than that.

A little side note: As mentioned I was a huge fan of Knight Rider as a kid and basically still remember the (German) intro by heart. For writing this review I looked up the original English-language intro for the first time and was kind of dismayed to realize that K.I.T.T. is never once mentioned in it, it’s all about Michael Knight. If you just watched that intro, you’d never guess that the car is a character of its own. For comparison, the German intro says “He comes: Knight Rider! A car, a computer, a man! Knight Rider! A man and his car fight against injustice!” Now I might be biased here, but I find that to be a much, much better description of what the series was actually about than the weird English intro about “a man who doesn’t exist!”.

So what’s the bottom line for the first official Knight Rider Transformer? He’s cool! Much of that coolness comes from being Knight Rider, of course, as without the crossover aspect he’d just be a pretty generic car Transformer. So if you are a Knight Rider fan and fondly remember the days of K.I.T.T. and Hoff, then you really should get this toy here. If not, well, you should probably spend your money elsewhere. Me, I preordered this thing the moment it came out and haven’t regretted it. Turbo Boost!

Rating: B