Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by gas escaping, but in the Canadian version of the pilot, there was smoke coming out of the bike as he jumped, mostly to hide the fact that they matted in a stationary shot of the bike over the moving background and moved the shot of the bike to make it look like it was doing the jump. In the U.S. version of the pilot and subsequent episodes, they filmed an actual jump with the bike instead, so unless they added some kind of smoke generators in the later episodes, you wouldn't see smoke coming out as he jumped. I'll have to check some later episodes against the U.S. pilot and see if I can spot a difference.
EDIT: Yep, it seems in some later episodes the smoke is back, but I think you're right that it doesn't appear in the U.S. pilot. Thanks for the information -- I'll definitely make mention of this on the DVD.
I'm not sure exactly what pilot was originally broadcast in the UK, but since they had to get the rest of the episodes from the U.S., it stands to reason that the pilot shown on Bravo could have just been part of the original package of episodes from the U.S.. meaning that the original UK broadcast might have shown the earlier "blue lightning" pilot, and they reverted to the U.S. "red laser" version when the series was re-run on Bravo.
I agree though, that the red laser was inferior to the original blue plasma ray. I guess it's possible that they felt that while the blue lightning worked okay for disabling the car, it might not have been a versatile enough weapon, although it was used again for a different purpose later in the pilot. Most likely, it was just more expensive to animate that blue ray over a straight laser beam, and that minor cost savings was important enough to change the weapon. I never really think "Knight Rider" so much when I see that, but more that the blue ray looked more like the Emperor's "force lightning" in Return of the Jedi, while the red ray looked more like it was from a laser pistol.
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scottspinvinylnow
18 years ago
Just to let you know, I noticed on Ebay someone is selling the complete set of Street Hawk on three dvds. Im not interested as I could make my own dvd collection, however I just thought id make you aware that someone is "selling" it on Ebay. I don't believe its the disc your working on.
I hate cheap Ebay rip offs.
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pdtv_info
18 years ago
The guy on eBay is probably selling the same content we're using as source material for "STREET HAWK Vol. 2", which will be the twelve regular season episodes. Looks like the auction has already been removed, because I couldn't find it. Anyway, the episodes we'll be offering are from the 2001 airings on the UK Bravo network, which is typically what most other people are selling. Some dealers may have just downloaded the episodes, so you definitely need to watch out for them, but if you only want to be able to watch the show, go with the best price. The source material for "Vol. 2" has actually been converted to NTSC from the original PAL, so obviously PAL DVDs might be better quality but might not be playable on certain DVD players. The set I have is all out of order and sometimes includes commercials, and for "Vol. 2" both problems should be corrected. There have also been reports of audio sync issues, but my set doesn't seem to have any, except possibly in the opening sequence.
The bottom line is that the menus for "Vol. 2" will probably be a little better than most of the fan-made sets out there and it won't contain the pilot (because we have a better source, not to mention the two different versions), but it'll really be a bare-bones release just for those people who want all the episodes. The really high-quality release is gonna be "The STREET HAWK DVD", which will be the one with fancier menus and bonus features. It's also worth mentioning that PDTV doesn't own the rights to STREET HAWK, so we can't stop anybody from selling their own DVD sets -- that's Universal's job. ;)
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