So I'm watching KITT vs KARR of Knight Rider (the second episode where Karr shows up) and I noticed something interesting about Karr. They've given him WAY more intonation and character in his voice than Kitt.
Not that Kitt doesn't have his own vocal style going on, but for the most part he sticks to his certain cadence and tone. Karr though, has a much wider range of intonation. His voice changes pitch, speed, and timbre much more like a humans, giving a very different emotional feel than Kitt's.
It got me thinking...why would they do that? Why would they give the bad guy the emotional voice? Why would they give him the ability to use metaphor and figurative language? Make him able to use language manipulatively and be very persuasive?
Beside the obvious answer that they needed that to make the plot work, it's kind of interesting to me. Karr is the prototype. He was the first of the AI's that was truly independent, and he has little restriction on how he's able to grow and learn... but Kitt does. Knight Industries realized after Karr that it wasn't a safe thing to do, leaving all that open-ended programming in. So Kitt got all the restrictions, including dampened abilities to expand and learn. It's only a side-effect that it shows up in language and how he expresses himself.
Karr, though... he's just as brilliantly smart as Kitt, but for him it's gone in a different direction. He figured out what's happened to him, he figured out that he was abandoned, he's figured out that Kitt was his replacement and is seen as the "new and improved version". So what happened to Karr? He learned to be weaselly. He learned that he's smarter than almost everybody, and he has no programming against using that to his advantage, or using that ability to hurt other people in order to get what he wants.
Not to mention that Kitt tossed him off a cliff and let him be mostly buried in the sand for years. Alone again. And what did that teach him? It taught him to hate people. Not only does he have no programming to stop him from hurting people, now he just does not give a single fuck. They're merely agents of his will. Hands to use to get places that he can't.
He's pissed the fuck off. He's pissed and hurt because he never got closure on the lab incident, and he knows that Kitt is still out there doing HIS work and getting HIS recognition and HIS admiration. So as soon as he gets the chance, he throws every resource he has at getting his way with people. He talks like them, he's cunning, he's persuasive, he's violent...he's unstable. He's brilliant and angry and fucked up from what everyone has done to him, but he knows he can get what he wants, if he plays these people right.
And that's a lot of characterization done by a simple change in voice acting.
