2 Knights. 7 Rings. 1 Guest.

Both Rey and Newsarama clued me in to the official unveiling of the new Knight Rider. Yet I was confused. I've been following developments on and off about big screen versions of Knight Rider, The A-Team, Voltron, G.I. Joe and other ‘80s favorites. Last I'd heard, Knight Rider would be in theaters, with David Hasselhoff's Michael Knight taking on the mentor role to a new driver. Yet the description of the ceremony the other day spoke of a television movie, one that might serve as a backdoor pilot to a new ongoing series. And while the new driver would be Knight's estranged son, Hasselhoff would probably only have a cameo role. He never did appear on Team Knight Rider, even after it was revealed that one of the drivers on that show was secretly his long-lost daughter. I love that these spin-off series consistently acknowledge the consequences of Knight's cross-country romantic liaisons. Alimony? College tuition? I can just imagine how he'd avoid that with a super fast car....

So, what's the deal? Is the theatrical project scrapped? Further searching led me to Ain't It Cool News of all places, where I learned the film is not necessarily a defunct project. While the network retains rights to do the TV movie, Glen Larson has rights as the show's creator to bring it to the big screen. It's entirely possible we might still get both, but the AICN article is a few months old, so who knows what might have changed. Past efforts to revive the show on television have failed; will this time be any different? I'll tune in either way.

* * * * *

I once defended Quasar over Green Lantern. As a Marvel fan in my collecting days, I had a lot of good reasons for choosing him over DC hero. One used a ring that needed recharging while another wore bracelets that tapped in to a limitless dimension of energy. One had a ring that could be removed, a weapon not at all unique as an entire corps wielded the same weapons. The other wore armbands that wouldn't come off unless their owner were deceased, and they were the only ones in the universe. I have a lot of fond memories of Mark Gruenwald's Quasar series, the only character I could say I collected from the first issue until the last. After all, everyone else I was reading about had been around since the sixties. Quasar was a unique series that launched the career of artist Greg Capullo, and introduced a lot of cosmic facets to the Marvel Universe.

Times change.

That series ended after 60 issues, and while Quasar became a background character, Mr. Gruenwald sadly passed away in 1996 from a heart attack. The character who had gained so much relevance in his hands was recently brought out of obscurity and killed off, and his Quantum Bands passed on to the daughter of Captain Mar-Vell. These developments wouldn't entice me to pick up anything related to this new incarnation of the Quasar character. Meanwhile, I just read about a brilliant change in the status quo of the Green Lantern.

From what I've read or gleaned from animated versions over the years, while the various Green Lanterns had their rings, powered by will, rogue Lantern Sinestro wore a yellow ring, powered by fear. Both types of rings manipulated energy, allowing the wearer to fly and make force fields or constructs. For a time, the green rings had no effect on the color yellow due to some impurity in their makeup, but I've heard that's not the case any longer. Meanwhile, Newsarama has reported the latest development in the Lantern saga. It seems Sinestro had formed a Corps of his own, distributing yellow rings and leading a war against the Green Lantern Corps. In the wake of this storyline, no less than seven Corps are being introduced across the spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. Each color will correspond to an emotion. Just as Yellow was powered by fear, Red will be powered by anger, and so on. It's a cool concept, one of those “Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?” ideas that sprung from the mind of writer Geoff Johns. When this stuff is inevitably collected in a trade paperback, I may have to check it out. Not only does he have a lot planned in the coming year for the seven corps of light, but he's already planning for 2009 in which an eighth type of ring, one of darkness, will raise the dead.

Whoa.

* * * * *

“HEY!! HEYYYYY!! THERE'S SOMETHING DOWN HERE!!!”

I'm not used to hearing that kind of fear in my dad's voice, and it's not often he yells. Every now and then he has this recurring dream about someone coming on to his property, and we can here him muttering “GETOUTTAHERE!” in a similar tone while he sleeps. This was different. It was a Saturday morning, and I was sitting at my computer checking to see if the temperature would go up, because I hadn't had much luck chipping the ice in our driveway. My dad had gone downstairs to do his laundry, and something startled him.

“What is it?!” I shouted, bounding down the steps two at a time. He explained that something had ran past him from under the stairs, disappearing into his work area. Our two cats were upstairs and accounted for, napping in my parents' room. He thought it might have been the stray we'd been feeding in our entranceway, but it might also have been a raccoon.

I grabbed a flashlight, and began navigating the narrow chasm of toolboxes, whilst he ran up to find my mom. I thought about the tracks I followed outside earlier in the morning. We had fed him Friday night, but he was conspicuously absent on Saturday, and my mom feared he might have frozen to death. After I gave up on chipping ice, I followed small pawprints to a neighbor's child's playhouse, but he was nowhere to be seen. As I crawled on the floor of my basement, I realized the tracks were facing away from that structure, and toward our house. They only went in one direction.

Friday night, I stopped home for dinner before meeting my friends at the movies. Like clockwork, the stray appeared, so my mom made some hot turkey broth, mixed in some dried cat food, and put the dish on our landing, propping open the screen door and closing the door to our kitchen. When she looked again, there was no sign of him. Many times he's finished eating, and ran back outside. “...unless he ran down the cellar,” joked my mom. She looked anyway, didn't see him, and closed the outside door. I went to the movies, and when I came home, I looked around for him outside. I figured he had just gone whereever it is he goes at night.

I couldn't see a thing under my dad's toolbench. I thought I heard something, but then voices confirmed that it was my mom's footsteps. My dad insisted he wasn't crazy, that something had ran past him. My mom couldn't figure out how he got in, while my dad wondered if he ran in when we went out to shovel. He won't come near the door if it's not propped and people are nearby, so that was unlikely. I reminded my mom about his disappearance after she'd fed him the night before, and wondered if he'd spent the night downstairs. We hadn't heard a sound, and in fact at one point one of our cats had ran downstairs when I was getting the shovel. I scooped him up quickly and returned him to the top floor, never once suspecting that the reason I caught him so easily was because he'd caught a scent, and had frozen while trying to pinpoint it. We're very lucky there wasn't an encounter.

Sure enough, my flashlight eventually found a pair of wide, frightened eyes. We put food down, and he came out of hiding once we were a safe distance away. I'm just glad it was the cat and not some other wild animal, but we definitely need to reconsider keeping the door open at night. Eventually, he came up to the landing, and didn't seem to mind that the door was closed. He blinked at the sunshine coming through the window, and curled up on the top step while my mom prepared another meal. A week ago when he swatted her hand, she vowed he'd fend for himself. It didn't take long for her to soften up, nor did it take long for him to hit her again. Within three hours of becoming aware of our surprise guest, my mom tried to feed him food from a spoon, hoping he'd accept human proximity. He gave her hand a nice whack, the same one he hit last time, and now she has a new swelling. When we headed out for 5:00 mass, I found him on the outside step, uttering a pleaful meow. He ran when I opened the door, and hissed when I extended my hand, albeit at a safer distance. And so, our antisocial little friend is back out in the cold.

At least, as far as we know...