When S. Breezy, a member of the local electro hip-hop group The Royal Society, went out for a smoke at work near Union Station today, something remarkable happened. He got duped by what appears to have been a a network TV publicity stunt and he just happened to be one of the first to bring the story and photographs to the beast that is the Internet.

"I just figured... why not? I guess it'd be cool to have a photo with KITT," he half-embarrassedly tells. Getting in line for his turn to pose up close, he started snapping pics from afar with his camera-phone. And that's when it happened.

"This guy just dropped his coffee on the ground and jumped in and took off in the car," he says. "I wished I'd gotten shots of that moment... the girl beside me who took video was immediately approached by a guy from the Toronto Star, who told her that they wanted to buy the video!"

Breezy lingered around for about 20 minutes, taking in the scene, and waiting for KITT to come back. But KITT didn't come back.

"The car delivery guy was screaming about insurance, and the woman who left the car unattended was bawling," Breezy explains.

Shortly thereafter, he blogged about and posted photos of the incident on The Royal Society's Myspace, and a few hours later a low-quality video ended up on YouTube. That's when the Internet took over. A few links were passed around on message boards and blogs (including one that we linked to), and by mid-afternoon the web was abuzz with ZOMG!s and ICALLBULLSHIT!s.

The stat counter on The Royal Society's Myspace player indicated that they were approaching 25,000 plays today - which is well more than they've had since their page first went up several months ago.

I asked the Society's female vocalist Nikki Awesome how she would feel if 95% of the group's fans ended up being Knight Rider geeks, and she seemed totally ok with the possibility. "The Knight Rider producers should totally approach us for licensing... the track Roborotic is like a dialogue between me and KITT - he just doesn't know it yet!" She laughed about the whole ordeal, and is totally taking in in stride and having fun with it.

The Royal Society, fresh off of signing a new record deal with How To Kill Music (a label by Die Mannequin front woman Care Failure) will be performing at Circa on October 10th.

They don't yet know which ad agency was responsible for crafting the reasonably well-executed stolen KITT publicity stunt, and until then they'll just have to thank serendipity for those 25,000 hits (and counting).

Photo courtesy of The Royal Society.