#savage steve holland

[maxwellatoms]

How do you feel about the game Pizza Tower?

I haven't played it, but it looks legit. It doesn't look like a '90s cartoon, though. At least not any 90s cartoon I'm familiar with. It sort of reminds me of Savage Steve Holland's stuff. He was the guy that did the Whammy.

And Eek The Cat.

I guess Eek was '92. I always think of Nick and CN when I think quintessential '90s, though. Maybe I'm biased.

Through an ex, I was invited to one of Savage Steve's parties circa 2004. It's where I first met Weird Al. And Pamela Anderson. And Bill Maher. Except you're not supposed to look Bill Maher in the eye, or so his assistant runs around and tells everyone. So I suspect that no one actually meets him.

Steve had a great salsa station too. Dude knows how to throw a party.

[mikeywayarchive]

SDCC 2024: Mikey Way Rings in Holidays All Year Long with Christmas 365 (Interview)

By Justin Epps - Published Sep 7, 2024

Dark Horse Comics

☰ SUMMARY

• Christmas 365 from Dark Horse Comics releases this year, a festive series about a family celebrating Christmas all year round.  • Co-writer Mikey Way talks about the nostalgia and magic of Christmas, and the importance of family in his work.  • Way collaborates with Jonathan Rivera and Piotr Kowalski to craft a dream project embracing the 80s/90s Christmas movie feel.

Full interview under the cut:

Christmas has come early for Dark Horse Comics readers. During this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, the publisher revealed it would be releasing Christmas 365 later this year. This festive new series comes from the creative team of Mikey Way, Jonathan Rivera, Piotr Kowalski, Brad Simpson, and Joshua Reed.

Christmas 365 tells the story of a family who has gone through a particularly challenging year and their attempts to come back together through a Christmas season that lasts the whole year round. Screen Rant caught up with Christmas 365 co-writer Mikey Way and dug into his thoughts behind this unique holiday story.

Screen Rant: From the premise I'm guessing you're a big fan of Christmas. But why Christmas 365?

Mikey Way: As a child of the 80s, a lot of my favorite movies were Christmas movies. I think the holiday stuck with me, the the mythology of it, the imagery really resonated with me. I know I'm not alone on this, the world is obsessed with Christmas. You go in stores and the Christmas stuffs out in August. It was after 9/11 I noticed Christmas started earlier at the store. I remember taking a mental note of that. People needed it at that time. I feel like with social media people have been able to express their love of Christmas and find like-minded people that are like-minded. There's Christmas podcasts, there's Christmas basements.

Mikey Way: Anyway, child of the 80s. Christmas Story, Scrooged, Christmas Vacation, Gremlins, Die Hard, Santa Claus: The Movie, all those great Jim Henson movies. These were important stories to me. And so I've always had that itch in me to tell a Christmas story. And I think it was around 2013 I watched a bunch of Christmas movies in a row and it wasn't Christmas time, it was summertime, I think. I remember watching Home Alone and Christmas Vacation and being like "What stories are left to tell?". Then it hit me like a bolt. "What about a family that're kind of disconnected and one of them gets the the wild idea to celebrate it all year long?". Like that's gonna fix everything.

With Christmas, there's this effort to see the world through the eyes of a child and recapture that feeling of wonderment. Is that what you wanted from your story?

Mikey Way: It's the one month out of the year where you can forget about life's pressures a little bit. And there's wonder and magic and hope and promise. Especially when you have children. It's the Super Bowl. For a child things revolve around "Christmas is coming!". So getting to see it through my two girls' eyes...that's what it's all about. There's so many layers to it. It's a layered holiday. But it's just something that's so great. In a world full of gloom and doom, it's something that's just awesome and great. Like there's a velvet cloud around you in December. Even November.

Mikey Way: There's there's a lot of bad stuff that happens in the world. People get busy, people get stressed, people have responsibilities. And it's the time where you can celebrate being a family, celebrate the people you love, and you could show them how much you love them.

You're co writing this with Jonathan Rivera. Both of you guys did books for DC Young Animal which was definitely a more experimental line, but you guys are trying to tell a more grounded story here, correct?

Mikey Way: We're very like-minded. He went to art school with my brother. We all like the same stuff. Trainspotting, Britpop, Stone Temple Pilots, The Crow, action figures, X-Men, anime. Jon was a kindred spirit. He's one of my best friends in the world. He's someone I wanted to write a story with. This was the perfect opportunity because he feels the same way about this 80s/90s Christmas story. He's got the same itch to scratch.

Your previous book, Collapser, had a real strong family theme to it, which seems carry on in Christmas 365. What is it about family that speaks to you so strongly in your work?

Mikey Way: Family's everything. As you get older you start to realize that. And it plays into the holiday of Christmas. When it comes down to the family's all you got. You can have an important job. You can have all the material possessions in the world. You could have fancy this and that. But when it comes down to it, who's sitting at the dinner table with you? Those are who's important and the people that pick you up when you're needing it. They're there for you, you're there for them. So the family unit has always been something extremely important to me. Especially as I get older and have children and extended family. That's really all you got in this world and it's the most beautiful thing there is.

In addition to Rivera, you're also working with Piotr Kowalski. How was it crafting this dream project with him and his art?

Mikey Way: What's interesting about him is he's mostly a horror guy, really. When we got his artwork, most of the demonstration pages and pieces were horror and then I went on his Instagram recently and it's all horror and I'm like "It kind of works, because this is supposed to be an 80s/90s Christmas movie.". If you watch these movies, they're all dark and they always tried to sneak a horror element into it. In Home Alone there was the scary boiler.

For me, it was A Christmas Story when Ralphie goes on the slide and the Santa just boots him down.

Mikey Way: There's always a moment of playful scariness in those movies. So I think it fit the tone, because you want it to look a little VHS. I feel like he was able to tell it exactly. Like if we closed our eyes and we were envisioning Christmas 365 as a movie, that's what it would look like. Me and Jon saw his art and were like "This is the guy.".

You previously spoke about the influence of suburban genre movies like The Burbs and Better Off Dead. How did these movies inform your Christmas story?

Mikey Way: So the story goes me and my brother watched Better Off Dead probably a couple of times a week for years. That and One Crazy Summer, those those two movies for me and my brother were very important. There was this Gonzo stuff in it. It was a slightly grounded, suburban comedy that had all these kind of wacky, fantastical ideas in it. All those movies had a sport. Better Off Dead was skiing.

Oh, like Heathers and croquet?

Mikey Way: Team Wolf had basketball. They all had a sport. Also there's a weird claymation dream sequence, remember? There was all this weird stuff, but there's something about that movie that struck a chord with me and my brother and we watched it literally once or twice a week for decades. But yes, Savage Steve Holland was a big influence on me and Jon Rivera.

Christmas 365 #1 is available on December 4th from Dark Horse Comics.

[abs0luteb4stard]

W A T C H I N G

[bta-productions]

Another drawing of Nathaniel, Walkie-Talkie and Sylvia. This time in Savage Steve Holland's art style!

[haveyouseenthisromcom]

[adamwatchesmovies]

Legally Blondes (2009)

While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...

Calling Legally Blondes an insult might sound like an overreaction, but hear me out. This film is cheap, badly acted and poorly written. It attempts to cash-in on the popularity of Legally Blonde while featuring none of the characters we fell in love with. Worst of all, it doesn't even understand the appeal of the series, meaning it had no chance of pleasing its intended audience.

Elle’s twin cousins, Annabelle “Annie” and Isabelle “Izzy” Woods (Camilla and Rebecca Rosso) move to America with their father to study at Pacific Preparatory. Their love of punk and family reputation draws the ire of Headmistress Elsa Higgins (Lisa Banes) while the school bully, Tiffany Donohugh (Brittany Curran), sets out to get them expelled.

This is clearly another script re-worked to be part of the Legally Blonde franchise. The twins are not attending law school, they’re given chihuahuas at the beginning but the dogs play no part in the story and there are no familiar faces to be found. Not even Elle. That’s right. Reese Witherspoon does not make an appearance. References to her character are made and the twins stay in her home while she’s away but if you sit through the end credits hoping to see a cameo, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, you’ll see something I’ve never seen before: the movie’s deleted scenes. They play while the names scroll. I guess director Savage Steve Holland knew no one would bother to check out this disaster’s special features but wanted us to see them nonetheless.

2001's Legally Blonde is not a perfect comedy but it has a lot of appeal. Although she didn’t fit initially, Elle had a good head on her shoulders. She had a few things to learn but ultimately, law school was where she belonged. The same can’t be said for the twins. It’s obvious to everyone watching that Tiffany hates them but every time the conniving brat approaches the sisters to give “helpful advice”, they accept it. Her true colours are first revealed when the girls show up at a party in inappropriate outfits. Sound familiar? I’d say spoiler but if you’ve seen Legally Blonde you saw that one coming. You’ll see everything coming, in fact. Izzy and Annie are introduced with title cards that describe what their character arcs will be. One can’t stand public speaking. The other is terrible at history. How profound.

You’ll be so bored you’ll want to stab yourself in the leg just to stay awake. Legally Blondes does nothing interesting until 2/3 of the way in when the plot FINALLY kicks off. It’s a school trial. Ah, so that’s where the title comes from. Took you long enough. This is where the film could have earned itself some points. At least now there’s a clear thread to follow. There are stakes and in theory, figuring out how our heroines will win the case should be fun. Too bad the screenplay by Chad Gomez Creasey and Dara Resnik Creasey can’t even do that right. The jokes are so terribly executed you won’t understand the punchlines until the movie is a distant memory and certain ideas introduced earlier that should be important turn out to be useless, making you feel like you're wasting your time paying attention.

Legally Blondes has no reason to exist. It won’t please fans of the series, it won’t win over anyone who didn’t like Elle previously. The apathy everyone had for the project is obvious. There are numerous logical gaps, the funny jokes are rarer than four-leaf clovers and there’s little to like. I’d say there’s nothing to like but it does get slightly better as it goes along. Not enough for me to recommend, mind you. Not to anyone. Not ever. (July 31, 2020)

[reyturnofbensolo]

I love this flick!

[thegreatwhinger]

The Morality of a Paperboy

I was thinking about Rupert Hine while listening to his theme for Savage Steve Holland's Better Off Dead, when my thoughts drifted to the movie itself.

And I only just realized that I had the star of the movie wrong because despite appearances to the contrary, it isn't Lane Meyer (John Cusack) but a character known only as 'Paperboy (who according to IMDB was played by two actors, Joey Tushnet and Sabastian Dungan)' because he understood that sometimes it's the principal that counts, represented by his dogged determination to get the $2 he was owed.

And sure, it likely cost more in terms of time and engineering to attach skis to a bicycle than it would have to forget about the money, but like I said, it's a matter of principal and sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

Thanks to 'Dragonlord 1958' for uploading the video to YouTube.

[heartbreakfeelsgoodinablog]

Insanity doesn’t run in the family, it gallops.

[muttonchopsalley]

Saw this for the first time last night. I loved the surreal cartoonish elements of it, but I felt it lost steam in the last half hour. A shame Holland's career kinda petered off into just doing kiddie schlock after a few films.

[blogdemocratesjr]

Better Off Dead by Savage Steve Holland (1985) & produced by Andrew Meyer

[chernobog13]

Artist James Bama’s original painting of Doc Savage for the Bantam Books 1964 edition of The Man of Bronze.  This is the first of 62 covers of the 96-book series that Bama would paint.

Steve Holland, star of a short-lived Flash Gordon television series in the 1950s, was Bama’s model of choice, given his rugged features and physique.  As seen in the painting, Bama matched Holland’s hair closely to give Doc a more realistic look.  It also closely resembles how Doc was pictured in the original pulp series and comic books.

However, Bantam’s art director, Len Leone, who was a big Doc Savage fan, didn’t want “normal” hair for Doc; he wanted a look that conveyed that Doc was no ordinary man.

Doc’s hair is described in the pulps as a darker shade of bronze than his skin, and that Doc usually wore it combed back so that it resembled a skullcap made of bronze.  Leone wanted that look.  He also mandated a widow’s peak which he said had been mentioned in the pulps; this a matter of small controversy because many fans don’t recall anything about the widow’s peak ever being mentioned.

Nevertheless, Bama did as he was told by his boss, and changed Doc’s hair in the painting.

Thus was born the iconic Doc Savage look that has prevailed to this day.

[patart-illustrations-stuff]

Steve Holland as THE MAN OF BRONZE

[maxxxines]

BETTER OFF DEAD (1985) dir. Savage Steve Holland

[dailyflicks]

BETTER OFF DEAD (1985) dir. Savage Steve Holland

[vintagegeekculture]

RIP to James Bama, the artist for the 1960s paperback revival of Doc Savage. Even more so than his pulp era, this age, when the pulp adventurer was revived to fit the taste of 60s-70s era “Men’s Adventure” novels, defines our mental image of the character....and it is primarily due to imagery created by James Bama. 

It was Bama who first drew Doc as a lantern jawed, grave faced man with a blazing gaze, a rugged cowboy primarily based on model Steve Holland. The ripped t-shirt is the look associated with the character, and Bama created it off occasional references in the book to strongman Doc Savage’s muscles ripping clothes when he really flexed. The novels also described Doc’s hair as a close cropped skullcap with a dramatic widow’s peak, two things forgotten in illustrations but which Bama captured perfectly. 

Bama is best known for his Western illustrations, as he was a native of Wyoming. He seemed to have an eye for craggy, pained faces that have done a lot of suffering and hard living that you can see in their eyes, like the kind hard living men in the West used to have. Tragically, with his death, one more link to the world of men’s adventure in the 60s closes behind us. After all, you can always tell a Bama illustration when you see one, even if it isn’t Doc Savage or a Western, like this one: