Despite rumours to the contrary, KITT, the star of television's Knight Rider, was actually a real car equipped with advanced AI technology. However, it proved impossible to miniaturise the electronics sufficiently in the mid 1980s, so KITT had to be built five times larger than a normal car in order to accommodate the computer systems. All scenes in which KITT appeared were actually filmed either using novelty oversized props, or with the car some way back in the distance to achieve the correct sense of scale. David Hasslehoff was fitted with special inflation devices so that he could be enlarged at will so as not to look like a curly-haired midget. Ironically, advances in computer technology mean that if KITT were to be built today it would fit in a matchbox. The only time when the state of computer technology could have permitted the building of a car at the correct scale was for two weeks in August 1990.