The Origin of Col. Knight Rider and His Car COLT

No superhero is complete without an origin story. Why should I be an exception?

DISCLAIMER: The events and characters depicted in this work are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or any events, past or present, is coincidental and unintentional.

The story begins in 1855, the birth year of Friedrich Muenster, son of Josef and Adrianne, in the northern coastal German town of Lübeck. As a boy, Friedrich enjoyed travelling to sweet shops in his home town and its neighboring districts, gazing in bewilderment at what concoctions candy-makers could make appear before his tiny eyes. When he was about thirteen, he decided to follow his passion and became an apprentice to baker and chocolatier Marten Baumeister Sr. and his cousin Adelbert Stroopwafel (his father was a Dutchman). Six years of mastering the chocolatier craft later, young adult Friedrich thanked his father and mother for all they had given him and promptly set sail to the New World for a promising business venture.

Arriving at New York City Port in 1875, after months of being tossed about by raging Atlantic waves, Friedrich became immediately disgusted with the city, which he would describe in his autobiography as “lacking in a sense of adventure, like there was nothing new to discover. The whole island had already been colonized to the extreme. I wanted to go where there was still a sense of grand adventure, something itching to be discovered. Yes, something that needed colonization, not something that already had it in excess.” He vowed to make a dangerous journey across the Great Plains to the west coast, where the young state of California was still prospering from the effects of the Gold Rush, as if to open business in San Francisco. His journey was indeed dangerous: he was pursued by wild animals and Native Americans, and he was bitten in the calf by a rattlesnake. Nevertheless, he persisted, soon arriving in Spanish-American territory, where he likened to the beautiful ranch horses that Spanish-speaking ranchers called “mustangs.” Friedrich called that word “strong and masculine, yet very suggestive about the cosmopolitan makeup of American identity, as described in their motto: ‘Out of many, one.’” In fact, he liked “mustang” much, he literally adopted it as his American last name, and, after travelling up the west coast, came to be known to San Franciscans as Frederick Mustang, the city’s most eccentric yet soon to be most beloved chocolate enthusiast.

By 1880, Frederick, with the help of experienced factory supervisor Harold Jenkins, had established his first chocolate factory under the brand name Knights Templar Chocolate. Though Frederick came from a family of devout Lutherans who despised Catholicism and therefore all military orders associated with the Catholic Church, he remembered boyhood rumors that a faction of the Templars was still in secret operation in his hometown of Lübeck. This idea intrigued him, and he wanted his chocolate shop and factory to intrigue all passersby. In the same year, Frederick married Evangeline Du Pont, the daughter of a Franco-American gold prospector he met in his travels.

When a shortage of raw cacao beans hit the factory in 1881, Fredrick decided to expand his business southward into Latin American lands, where cacao beans were always plentiful. Refusing to face the sea again, he took a long series of train rides that, within three weeks, landed him in Rio de Janeiro. There, he established a second factory with the help of a copious but starving supply of cacao bean and sugar cane farmhands as well as factory construction workers in the bustling city. Surely enough, sales and profits doubled within the following year in part due to the rare fruits he encountered in former Spanish colonies, adding unique flavorings to some of his sugary delicacies. He came home just in time to witness the birth of his firstborn son, Anton (later Anthony).

In 1884, Fredrick decided to continue to expand his already cosmopolitan empire. He looked towards establishing a third factory New York, the city with which he was initially displeased. It was his idea to “conquer my displeasure by leaving my personal stamp.” His newly formed factory triangle, now linking both ends of the United States with each other and with South America, became so strong that more hungry customers from across the waters sought after Frederick Mustang’s irresistible chocolate.

In 1885, having set his New York factory into operation, Frederick spread his operations overseas, building a fourth major factory in the always exciting London, England. With family expanding at home and business expanding abroad, Frederick built many more factories, harvesting a unique resource each time. By 1896, he had opened industrial operations in his home town of Lübeck as well as Normandy, Lisbon, Africa’s Ivory Coast, Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, Madagascar, Bangalore, and even British Hong Kong. In that same year, Frederick’s mentor, Marten Baumeister Sr., met his tragic death at the age of 83. Marten Jr. gave the 41-year-old Frederick an honorary award on behalf of his father for being what Marten Sr. described in his final moments as “the most exceptional student in the noble profession of sweet-making.” Frederick had rightfully earned that award in addition to the $18 million he had made thus far from global chocolate sales (that was quite a lot of money in those days), a company value that was destined to continue increasing in the coming century.

During the First Great War, Frederick faced a difficult decision: he had a factory in his homeland of Germany, but he had factories in the lands Germany’s enemies as well. Having spent more of his life living in San Francisco than anywhere else, he ordered the shut down of his Lübeck factory. This led into a state of remorse and depression that forced him to retire in 1914, leaving Anthony to succeed him.

Anton Muenster/Anthony Mustang, an alumnus of the young Stanford University, was aged 32, married to Louise Montgomery, and father of six-year-old Peter Mustang when he became the CEO of Knights Templar Chocolate, Inc. To “keep the fire burning,” so to speak, in times of war, he enacted a new business model that allowed the family enterprise to expand its menu, including not just chocolate bars, squares, and truffles but also other baked goods such as cookies, cakes, muffins, and even doughnuts. With a vast selection of treats awaiting eager sweet teeth worldwide, Anthony changed the business’s name to Templar Sweet Emporium and had multiplied his father’s fortune fivefold by the “Roaring 20s.” His son Peter was said to have “gazed in wonderment upon what confections his father had prepared for the world, as did everyone in his schoolhouse, who took field trips with him to one of the family stores.” However, this undisturbed period of economic prosperity would not continue after Peter’s 21st birthday.

With the Stock Market Crash of 1929 came a state of financial despair that affected the whole world, and Templar Sweet Emporium was no exception. Just when old Frederick thought he had conquered his own depression after the war, he sunk into depression again when he found out that no one could afford his family sweets. In the meantime, Peter knew he had to help Anthony with the family business somehow, so he tried employing armies of chocolate tasting testers. This experiment failed, but Anthony and Peter soon came to agree that, if they couldn’t bring the customers to their chocolate factories, they would have to bring their chocolate factories to the customers.

Selling machines that made chocolates and other desserts surprisingly turned a quick profit for the Templar empire shortly after Roosevelt’s election. Now, sweet enthusiasts across the globe could bring the essence of the glory days of Templar, Inc., into their very homes. On the weekend following FDR’s inauguration, Thomas Laurence Mustang was born to proud mother Olivia Laurence. The boy enjoyed using a child’s plaything that made edible truffles, his great grandfather’s pride. It was on a certain evening in 1937, however, that he witnessed the untimely death of his great grandfather. To be exact, Frederick suffered a heart attack when he heard Adolf Hitler speak on a news reel in a theater. He knew instinctively that his homeland of Germany had succumbed to the ramblings of a raging racist fool with a petite mustache and a shock of black hair, so modern relatives still claim he died of a broken heart.

In his autobiography, Thomas recounts vivid memories of FDR’s “A date which will live in infamy” speech when he was only seven going on eight. He describes in detail the sudden rise in wartime employment and how his father, the new CEO of Templar Sweets and Sweet-Makers, Inc., as of 1941, responded by turning his dessert factories into military surplus factories. There were Templar M-16s, Templar snipers, Templar transistor radios, Templar tanks, Templar fighter planes, Templar bomber planes, and many more devices popping out of what came to be known as Templar Technologies, Inc., after the Second Great War. It seemed necessary to change the title because of the Cold War era and its surrounding fears of mass destruction, which thankfully never happened in 45 years of fear.

Despite the world’s general fear of imminent American-Soviet nuclear war, the 1950s witnessed the arrival of many marvelous Templar inventions for both military and civilian use, all of which were co-designed by Peter and Thomas. Civilian inventions included the retractable diner bar stool, the radio wave-activated self-adjusting television antennae, more sophisticated dessert-makers as a throwback to family tradition, and the radio-controlled wheel claw, which could efficiently change wheels and tires for automobiles. On the other hand, military inventions included the shelved soldier’s backpack, the machine crossbow (as a less messy alternative to the machine gun), and an airplane rocket that could be steered with electromagnetic signals in mid-air after being launched. In a long period of largely untroubled economic prosperity, Templar Technologies was growing faster than ever, and so was the Mustang family when Thomas’s only son, Walton, was born in 1958.

Dr. Walton Charles Mustang, Ph. D., Ph. D., Sc. D., M. D., M. B. A., has been canonized as one of the finest scientific minds of the 20th century. He received two doctorates in scientific engineering and artificial intelligence at age 27 in 1985, the year his first son Henry was born. Being a fan of the popular television series Knight Rider, which concluded the following year, Walton was inspired to pursue building an artificially intelligent automobile of his own and so devoted the next 20 years towards developing a real-life version of the fictitious Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT). With zest and zeal, he committed many hours per day to research in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and even a new and growing field of study: nanotechnology. In the midst of his research, he conceived of more inventions, including the incineration tank and the minute but ultra-explosive “nano-bomb” projectile for the machine crossbow.

Walton’s efforts to build the perfect fighting car proved fruitful in 1997 when he constructed a force of ten combative “police” cars driven by built-in androids. He called them the Android Automobile (ADAM) units, which were lead by a non-android-controlled car that could shift into a humanoid robot monstrosity with its four wheels replacing what could have been legs. This device, his pride and joy above all other inventions, was named the Droid Intelligence Supervisory Program for All-Terrain Combative Hardware, Version 11, or simply, DISPATCH-11 (or, even more simply, D-11). When asked in a recent interview as to why Walton chose this name, Henry replied point-blank, “It means he really wanted her name to spell DISPATCH.”

What distinguished D-11 and the ADAMs was their exterior shells reinforced by nanotubes, which are, by definition, capable of infinitely reproducing themselves. It was on a fateful day in 2000 that Walton was called to produce a device using such “nano-skin” for another organization beyond Templar Technologies. That institution was and is none other than the Old Order of Marius, King of the Marions, which were a race of ample-nosed Medieval people whose descendants consist of all varieties of Europeans, including a certain pair of Italian plumbers. Unlike other old knight orders, the Marion order is still an actively fighting order, as its members still wear full plate armor (with bulletproof vests and stab plates underneath) and carry weapons to clean up crime within national boundaries (and international if needed).

It was in the partnership between Templar, Inc., and the Knights of Marius that, over the next six years, Walton and his sons, Henry and Vaughn, developed a computerized automobile to serve as the car of the elite members of the old knighthood, a Ford Mustang lookalike called the Commissioned Officer’s Licensed Transportation (COLT). Among the COLTs’ myriad features were nano-skin exteriors built to resist everything from knives to bombs, shells able to change colors and morph themselves into other likenesses of automobiles, windshields that were also to serve as screens for video chat, and turbo boost functions that were to let the cars leap over mind-bending distances at breakneck speeds. The COLTs’ distinct “attack modes” involved morphing their exteriors into the likeness of a hybrid between a Ferrari Enzo and a Ferrari F-1 racer. Unfortunately, before they were put to use, the COLTs met a tragic fate.

On November 7, 2006, Walton was preparing to give a lecture introducing COLT to the world. In the middle of his speech, however, DISPATCH-11 suddenly appeared behind the outdoor stage in her robot-exoskeleton form and fired a missile, obliterating the good doctor, killing dozens, and injuring hundreds. Something had turned D-11 to the Dark Side of the Force, but no one could identify what it was until a month later, when the motivation for D-11’s horrific act was revealed to have been caused by a virus of unknown origin.

After Walton’s murder, the executives at Templar agreed with the Knights of Marius that all COLTs be destroyed in the Templar incineration tank, fearing that the COLTs, too, could be infected or even replicated for malicious purposes. However, one COLT, #587-A, was spared by the knights because they believed that someone outside the Mustang family would one day prove trustworthy enough to use the car to rid the world of all its evils. It was also at this time that Henry mysteriously disappeared, so his brother, Vaughn, succeeded his father as President and CEO of Templar Technological Research and Development, Inc.

In March of 2008, a battle broke out between the Knights of Marius vs. DISPATCH-11 and her ADAM units, which cost DISPATCH her first, third, fifth, seventh, eighth, and tenth ADAMs before she ordered a tactical retreat. Word of this battle spread until it reached the ears of an ordinary young man--Robert MacDiarmid, the son of Scottish immigrants Angus and Fiona--who vowed to join the Knights of Marius to help them finish the job they had started. Over months of training, MacDiarmid quickly gained favor as a devoted swordfighter and aided in taking down major criminal operations nationwide. Eight months later, on the eve of the second anniversary of Walton’s demise, the last of the COLTs was entrusted to the young man as a gift for receiving his promotion to Lieutenant of the Old Order. After saving his superior officer, Colonel Grant Grayson, from near-fatality, Grayson, having “seen it all,” resigned his commission and chose MacDiarmid to succeed him as officer in charge of Knight Regiment #223. MacDiarmid then adopted the sobriquet Colonel Knight Rider, or “Colonel KR” for short, to the delight of his troops and became a true superhero.

In September of 2010, CKR and COLT found the lost Henry Mustang, who was posing as an “evil equivalent” of the young colonel from ten years in the future (it was part of another villain's ruse to trick CKR and COLT into thinking they had traveled through time). The Templar heir explained he was working to pay a debt owed by his father, who was, in fact, kidnapped in 2002 by the Iranian extremist group Zahhak Industries, named for a mythic Persian Zoroastrian beast and lead by the Yellow Scorpion, a mutant Iranian supersoldier and Ali Khamenei’s chief consultant of advanced weaponry. Instead of building them a nuclear bomb, Walton constructed a nanotube-enhanced suit of knight’s armor capable of resisting every weapon the extremists threw at him. One of CKR’s troops remarked, “Talk about foreshadowing; that’s the plot of Iron Man!” KR replied, “I haven’t seen that movie yet. It looks cool.” Returning home, he rented the film, screened it for his men, and enjoyed it very much.

After heroically rescuing Henry and reuniting him with his brother Vaughn, CKR and COLT were guided by the Mustang brothers to explore their father’s archives and uncover the armor Walton had built and since kept in a secure facility. The armor was appropriately named the Soldier’s Uniform Interaction Technology (SUIT) and was originally programmed to work in harmony with COLT. Although this SUIT lacked in the ability to fly, it could automatically fit itself around its wearer, had a fully functional COLT satellite computer in its helmet piece, and featured ultra-magnetic gloves to allow its wearer to throw and retrieve the included sword, also conveniently enhanced by nanotubes.

Today, CKR still wears the SUIT, drives COLT, and keeps the planet safe from the threat of criminal forces, including DISPATCH-11 and her surviving ADAM units. Meanwhile, Henry and his wife Viola are now the proud parents of Frederick Walton “Freddy” Mustang, and they run Templar Technologies together with Vaughn and his wife, Holly. Despite the many troubles the Mustang family empire has encountered over their century-and-a-half-long journey, it has become a symbol of the American dream, teaching us all that anyone, regardless of his origins, can make a difference in the world, whether it involves candies or a young adult knight with a talking car. All a person needs to make such a difference is a good purpose, and whenever each generation of Mustang found a good purpose, he succeeded, inspiring CKR to do likewise.

And that’s how it all began.