GOLIATH - Where is KITT's Evil Nemesis Today? Uncovering some info on Knight Rider's Baddest Vehicle

[Music] so so many of you have been asking us about goliath and where this evil super truck is today some of you out there believe that we found it the night runner historians we purchased it and are waiting to unveil it to the world and given the fact that we waited two years between saving the flag semi tractor and letting you guys know i suppose that theory wouldn't be out of the realm of possibilities we've even had people contacting us saying that they own goliath and it looks exactly like it did back in 1984 and they won a hundred thousand dollars for it we had someone else contact us saying they saw it in a junkyard in missouri so today let's talk a bit about goliath where it came from its tv appearance after goliath returns and where it just might be today are you ready to dig into this miserable mechanical masher let's go [Music] so i figure we'll kind of do like an unedited impromptu conversation about goliath all right so i'm going to bring up photos i'm going to talk to you a little bit about what we know about goliath and go from there so everything that we know tells us that goliath is a 1973 peterbilt 352 pacemaker now do we know 100 that it's in 1973 well i personally don't some of you out there might know you know when you look at early 80s trans ams you know i can look at it and i can tell you if it's an 82 an 83 or an 84. i don't know that much about these peterbilts so it could be a 71 it could be a 74 i don't know but based on the internet research the general consensus is that goliath was a 1973 model now one other thing about these uh peterbilt pacemakers so here's a side shot of goliath obviously and they had a couple different cab designs so this appears to be and it probably has another term but like the super cab this with the integrated sleeper in it right so they made these peterbilts um i think they made them just with a cab and then an extended cab that went to right about here and then this sleeper cab that went all the way to the back and the easiest way to tell if it's the sleeper cab obviously it's longer but if you're looking at the passenger side you see these two doors and you also see these grab handles curve around to the top so let's take a second and let's look at a stock here's a stock peterbilt it's 1973 peterbilt pacemaker so this is what goliath would have looked like roughly from the factory so we can see here we've got the the longer sleeper quarters and the double sleeper compartment doors here and compare that to this photo here so you see this peterbilt pacemaker just has a has a smaller cab right it doesn't have that second door and it's not quite as long and the pull handle is just this straight piece it doesn't come around at the top so the the peterbilts came in different cab configurations and in some ways the fact that goliath had this uh sleeper cab this extended cab will make it easier to identify because based on what i can tell in the research i've done it seems like this was the rarer of the two types of calves it seems like most of them were the shorter version at least than all the different surviving peterbilts that are out there most of them are not this this extended cab they're they're shorter they cut off right about here okay so with that said what do we know about how this specific peterbilt pacemaker got placed on the show um well i guess actually let me back up a little bit so throughout the course of the series at least as far as i can tell there were three episodes no excuse me four episodes that featured the peterbilt pacemaker we've got um no big thing so let's let's take a look at that real quick so we've got um this this is a peterbilt pacemaker this is the scene from no big thing when the truck is trying to um run kit off the road but we can see here that this definitely is not the same truck that would become goliath because this is again that shorter cab right it's got the straight pull handle it's only got the one side door it's not quite as long so but this is a peterbilt pacemaker so we can discount this as as being related to goliath so we're going to get rid of that all right so in order to figure out where this truck came from we reached out to a friend of ours he used to work at universal studios in the transportation department and he was there during the night rider days so i sent him an email um asking him you know was this truck part of universal's existing fleet of semi-tractors or was it a rental you know what what did he remember about it so he confirmed that this specific truck was not part of universal studios rental excuse me not part of universal studios transportation fleet they didn't have any peterbilts in their long-term fleet this truck would have been rented from a local truck rental outfit now he couldn't remember the name of it but it would have been one i'm sure that did a lot of rentals to them to the movie industry and it definitely would not have been what we consider a product placement vehicle meaning peterbilt wouldn't have supplied this truck to the studio and for two reasons one the truck at this point if it's in 1973 so they filmed goliath in 1983 so the truck would have already been 10 years old so if peterborough was going to supply a truck they'd probably supply a brand new truck right because they want to promote they want to get their image out of the latest and the newest vehicles they're not going to promote a 10 year old vehicle also peterbilt would not have placed a vehicle that was going to be evil right they wanted they would want their vehicle to be to have a good and a positive image so they're not going to place this truck in a show where the truck is evil so based on all that information this truck was a rental from a local truck semi tractor rental outfit near universal studios and backing up a little bit one thing i did want to point out i did a little research on other 73 peterbilt 352 pacemakers in other productions around that time and i kind of focused on universal studios productions well not exclusively but in doing so i found this picture isn't the best but this is a scene from chips from i think 1979 and this is a 73 peterbilt pacemaker and it it's hard to see if it has that extended cap i can't really tell it almost looks like it does here so you know it's very possible that this ended up being goliath and then if we look we've got a 1977 evil knievel movie and this definitely is the extended version of the peterbilt pacemaker and you can even see the the grab handle that bends over and we can tell it's the longer version so did this end up being goliath it's very possible again um if the if goliath came from a truck rental outfit chances are that truck was used in many other productions as well all right so let's talk a little bit about some of the modifications that were done to the peterbilt to turn it into goliath right and the details i'm about to share you know might help us one day in identifying goliath so obviously the first thing you notice is the giant grate on the front right so this clearly was added by the knight rider crew and if you look at it closely and let's pull up this image here so if you look at it closely it's a little blurry but we can see here that the sides of this grille were screwed in to the factory cab here so you know looking in at a peterbilt you know one of the first things we do is see if there are screw holes on the side here um so and then of course this this massive bumper here in goliath they obviously added the rockets on the roof working rockets i might add obviously they weren't loaded with ammunition but they actually did fire and then of course the uh the gunmetal gray paint job that the the truck received to include the the gas tank here although if you look closely it looks like diesel fuel spillage has wiped away a lot of that gray paint that they sprayed all right so we know goliath the truck the peterbilt was used in two episodes right it was used in the season premiere of season two of knight rider goliath and it was used toward the end of season two um in goliath returns so goliath was filmed in the i believe the summer of 83 and then goliath returns was filmed at the beginning of 1984 so you're talking about six months between the filming of the first and filming of the second did they keep this truck did universal keep this truck for those six months and leave it as goliath knowing that there would be a second story later in season two or did this truck get returned to the the truck rental outfit you know all the goliath pieces were removed and then it was rented out for other productions and then came back to universal to be converted my guess is and this is purely a guess my guess is that it did not go back to the rental outfit i think the studio probably would have kept it and would have kept it looking like goliath for those six months so it probably sat at the studio for those six months in late 1983 until they filmed goliath returns so obviously when they film goliath returns the storyline ends with goliath going over a cliff into the ocean so they know that you know there's probably not going to be a third installment of of the goliath story then we're going to turn it into a trilogy so at that point they're done with this truck you know as it appears so then we fast forward just a couple weeks after they finish filming goliath returns and we have mouth of the snake right so so in mouth of the snake we see this truck right another peterbilt pacemaker and this one shows up as the vehicle that's hauling the mobile missile command whatever so if we look at some shots of this truck we can see hey this is the same cab style as goliath right we've got the the double door double sleeper compartment doors we've got the pull handle that curves around so we know this was filmed you know this was filmed almost a month later it was more than a couple weeks it was like three and a half weeks later between the end of goliath returns and mouth of the snake so you know is this goliath you know was go did they did they repaint goliath let's do some analysis and see if that might be the case so first we're going to look at a small detail which in and of itself is not going to confirm or deny that these are in fact the same vehicles but take a look at this so this is from goliath returns this is when adrian margot is it was dropped off in the van and gets up into goliath she climbs up which by the way there's this really cool um camera right here mounted on the dashboard anyways so she climbs up and gets in so obviously goliath like we said was repainted we've got gunmetal gray all of the accents are black right like a matte black so look at this mirror see how this mirror is matte black here all right remember that so now let's go over to mouth of the snake and let's look at that same mirror so take a look at this the mirror is chrome right but look there's some remnants of black paint right there does that mean this this uh mirror had black paint they removed it maybe you know we don't know for sure so let's dig a little further so now let's rewind back to the beginning of goliath returns and take a look at the scene where garth is escaping and trying kicking another prisoner out of the cab so let's take a look at this steering wheel right so the steering wheel we've got a tan colored steering wheel but it's got some uneven black steering wheel wrap on it right if you look around here you can see that there's some wrap here it doesn't go the whole way around or it did and it had been falling off and and whatnot so now let's take a look at the same truck from mouth of the snake and let's zoom in now what what do you know look at that we've got the same steering wheel the tan tan hub and look at the steering wheel it's also tan with some black wrap but not completely so what are the odds of that right not to mention the interior so so we've got black you know black with a wood style trim and if we go over and look in goliath let's find a good still here bear with me so here's a scene from goliath and we look at the inside and we can see it's got the same style interior which may or may not mean anything right all of these peterbilt pacemakers might have had this exact same interior i don't know i don't know if they came in different colors but what i can tell you is the interior matches all right all right so we've seen a side mirror that looks like it had some black paint left on it we've seen a steering wheel that seems to have the same type of wear same colors and everything we've seen an interior that's the same color so one more thing i want to point out all right so take a look at this so we've got this scene again from goliath this is uh after kit had fired the laser broke the trailer away from the cab the cab is filling with smoke and garth jumps out so take a look at this uh door jamb here we've got rubber weather stripping right here but look right here you see this there's like a hole here right a strange hole breaking up the rubber weather stripping so let's go over and look at mouth of the snake and look at this there's a chunk of the rubber weather stripping missing in that same spot to me this is the smoking gun that goliath is the same truck that we see here in mouth of the snake which means goliath is not out there rotting away in a salvage yard looking like goliath and if you think about it logically it doesn't make sense right because this rental place got the truck back and you know they have it to make money they're not going to keep it looking like goliath they're going to convert it into whatever the next production calls for it in this case the next production was still knight rider so my theory is not only did universal keep this truck between goliath and goliath returns but they also kept it through mouth of the snake they probably had i don't know maybe they had a year lease on this truck and they kept it for that full year and they used it in goliath and then they used it here maybe they used it in another universal production before it went back to the the movie rental outfit but to me 100 percent the truck and mouth of the snake is goliath so what happened to this truck after it went back to the movie rental outfit well there's a couple possibilities right you know it's it uh was continue it continued to be rented out to a number of productions over the years and maybe after you know it became too old or or there were too many mechanical issues who knows but maybe it got sold as a used vehicle and it was out there somewhere maybe it was uh damage beyond repair in a future production maybe this rental outfit is still around today and it's sitting in there in a field on their lot somewhere we just don't know but what we can tell you is you know don't expect to be driving around in the desert in southern california and you see a rundown goliath looking peterbilt and think that's it because it's not going to be looking like goliath but we're hoping should it ever pop up or suspected to be you know to be the real deal that we'll be able to look for some of these clues maybe they never replace this weather stripping maybe the steering wheel hasn't been rewrapped maybe there's holes in the front where they had the grille mounted all these different possibilities but so so in conclusion and ending this video and i appreciate you listening to me ramble on for nearly 20 minutes about this but um we don't own goliath we're going to put it right out there we don't own it we didn't find it it's not sitting in our possession just waiting for us to reveal it to you unfortunately that's not the case and by the way that's the same with the flag trailer we have yet to find the flag trailer all we have is the semi all right and we don't have the first semi either we have the second seven we haven't found the first one either just putting that all out there but you know hopefully one day we'll be able to find this truck and i think the key to finding the truck will be to figure out who rented it to universal studios and see if they're still around and see if they have any paperwork so there you go there is the story on goliath right there um it's at least as far as we know and of course it's not the end to the story right hopefully one day we'll be able to come on to our channel here and tell you hey we found goliath it's sitting at our house and it's haunted and gives us nightmares all right guys thanks so much for watching let me know in the comments below what your thoughts are about goliath and its whereabouts and you know just don't don't don't email us and say that you own it and you want 10 billion dollars for it all right guys thanks for watching have a great day we'll talk to you soon and now while we listen to joe's selection of night rider music that we receive directly from don peak himself we'd like to thank these patreon supporters look at you guys scrolling up the screen to my right wait a minute how can you tell which side is my right since you can't see me because i'm not on camera oh well you know what i mean we're featuring these fine supporters at our knight rider prop restorer level thank you very much for your support and for those of you at the knight rider history hunter level we're recognizing you right now in the description now if you enjoyed seeing this golden nugget of knight rider history being rescued from obscurity then please consider supporting us on patreon your support would empower us to bring you even more of these historical nuggets we are the night rider historians till next time take care everybody bye bye

Channel: Knight Rider Historians Official

Views: 411,167

Keywords: knight rider, night rider, goliath, kitt, david hasselhoff, nbc, garthe knight, goliath returns

Id: X9mbUIkPqCs

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021