Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Hot Wheels K.I.T.T.!

I have to be completely honest here. When I was a kid, I was never a huge fan of Knight Rider. The stories were all pretty boring and I seemed to have been born with an innate dislike towards David Hasselhoff. However, I am a sucker for pop culture vehicles, like the General Lee or the A-Team van, so I would occasionally tune in to Knight Rider in hopes of catching a minute or two of K.I.T.T. talking and doing other cool talking-car things.

This lukewarm attitude toward the show, however, has had no effect whatsoever on my burning desire to find one of the new Hot Wheels K.I.T.T. toy cars. As soon as I heard about them, I immediately started checking toy store shelves. No luck. Then I went to eBay. Holy crap! These puppies are going for up to $15! I then scoured some comic conventions. Only found one and it was priced at $10, still too rich for my blood. I was just about to give up hope until last night's quick stop at a local grocery store.

I found myself, with arms full of Hot Pockets and Coffee Mate, being drawn to the cereal aisle, where a few toys often hung, trapping moms into impulse buys to quite begging kids. There was a small stack of Hot Wheels cars hanging between the Fruity Pebbles and the Cinnamon Life, and the fourth car down was none other that K.I.T.T. himself!

$1.09. Take that scalpers!


This find really pleases the collector in me, as well as the TV and movie car lover. Like I said, even though this isn't exactly my favorite pop culture vehicle (I mean, it's basically an '82 Pontiac Trans Am with a Cylon eye in the front), it'll look great with my other cars, Like the 1966 Batmobile, Back to the Future Delorean and my Ecto-1.



One nice detail that the designers added to the toy is this killer dashboard display. This is a detail that could have easily been skipped, but its presence is an absolutely brilliant touch and ups my opinion on the toy by several degrees.


And, of course, K.I.T.T. wouldn't be complete without his signature pulsating red Cylon eye. There is a part of me that wishes this lit up somehow, but that may be asking a lot.


So, anyway, a killer score if you ask me.

And finding this yesterday just happened to coincide with me drawing a K.I.T.T. for my VROOOM! series (which I'll have some major news about very soon).