The Fractal Hall Journal

The first item from January’s list of ‘08 previews staggers onto the Journal’s radar, and the very first scene with the hero of the piece, one Mike Traceur, has him in bed with not one but two chicks. I guess this is meant to be televisual shorthand to convince us of how super-awesome Michael Knight’s son (oh, er, spoiler alert) is, but instead kind of makes him look like a bit sleazy. In fact, the program makers seem to go out of their way to show him as being an absolute dick, what with abandoning his best mate to face the men who want to kill him after Traceur fails abysmally in his genius masterplan of paying them off by winning lots of money in a casino card game.

So, the protagonist is an unlikable idiot- does the actor’s natural charisma allow us to identify with him regardless? Hells no. But to be fair, he is staring down the ball-freezing possibility that he’s going to spend the rest of his career being upstaged by a car.

I think you can tell where I’m going with this. Oh, yes, I’m afraid to say that this dumb load of tosh is perhaps the finest two hours of television ever created.

Let me break it down for you: it doesn’t matter if Mike Traceur is a cardboard character devoid of all potential. That is not why we are here. Oh no, the star here is the goddamn Knight Industries Three Thousand.

This is probably the longest, most expensive advert for Ford ever made. I am talking major car porn here. My God does the new Mustang looks amazing. And Val Kilmer is perfect as KITT’s voice. The bland, world-weary delivery of a once-popular actor reduced to taking whatever cheque the Orange mobile phone company wave in his face is exactly the right fit for a soulless automaton.

I’m sensing some skepticism.

Ok, what the monolithic entertainment industry has recently grasped is that as long as a film or program is moderately competent and based on a fondly remembered property from my generation’s childhood, people like me lose all sense of proportion (c.f. Transformers). A talking robotic sports car fits the requirements perfectly, helped in no small measure by the fact that the original was pretty shit anyway.

On a related note, I am completely underwhelmed by the new GI Joe and Speed Racer films in the offing. Action Force (as the former was known over here) was never really my thing, and I don’t recall ever seeing a single episode of the latter. So I guess nostalgia marketing isn’t necessarily a sure thing.