Interview with Savage Steve Holland and Bill Kopp

    "Out of the early eighties wasteland of Saturday morning cartoon fare there appeared people who were sick of formulic carttons, which employeed re-used animation and little, if any, plotline. The frustration of these would-be animators would continue for some time until they had a champion in the form of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Disney and Amblin’s toon homage which ignited the explosion and made Saturday morning safe to watch again.   
    Such men were Savage Steve Holland and Bill Kopp, animation producers known for work in the filed of live-action features. Drawn together in college by an irresistible love for comedy (which Holland used against Kopp frequently) the two made plans over the years spent making making live-action features with animation in them to become full-fledged animation producers. They had a tough job selling to a studio their ambitious concept for a animated comedy, but with their features’ success, respect came.
    History will record that in the early nineties, the Fox network would leap to dominate the animation field in such a short amount of time it almost boggles the imagination. Still, with creative ideas such as "attack of the Killer Tomatoes" (First season), and lucrative deals with Time/Warner Communications on airing new materials from Tiny Toons to Tazmania to Batman; the Animated Adventures, Fox became a major player, possibly the horse to beat in a vicious business called Cartoons. This, then, is a small chapter of the history of that cruel industry....A story of two men and their visions of cat abuse; of silly cartoons both present and future; of Saturday morning the way it was meant to be!
Eek! the Cat rose Phoenix-like from the ashes of true tragedy. Filmmaker Savage Steve Holland, burgeoning animator, was also a cat owner who couldn’t keep his cats alive. One cat jumped after a bird...out of a 15 story window. Another cat was carried away by a hawk. A third cat, according to Holland, was sleeping on the driveway, as he was in the habit of doing, and after three days of baking in the sun in the same exact spot, it became apparent that this kitty, the one named Eek! in real life, was dead, poisoned by radiator fluid.
    As a result of this tragedy, Holland decided he would rather draw cats than watch them die, thus was born the animated purple zone of destruction that has added a level of humor and charm to Saturday morning programming not seen in several years.
The title character is an unlucky sclemiel of a purple feline whose attempts at doing good never fail to cause harm. His trademark "It never Hurts to help!" (Voiced with enthusiasm by Bill Kopp) is the poorly chosen battle-cry of the alter-ego of Savage Steve’s real cats, all of whom suffered tremendously in life due the lack of animation’s squash and stretch.
   It is this quality which allows Eek! not only to get back up from his falls, but to also face down the worst that life has to throw his way, secure in the knowledge that good will always triumph. Eek! shows us that kindness is the key to happiness....even if it does get painful from time to time.
    Eek’s life may not be a safe one, but his zest and wide-eyed optimism make it a happy one. He is a cat of action, willing to jump into the thick of things to help those in need. Eek! has been blessed with an eye for observation that can only be blinded by trying to seek out the best in others.
    Holland and Kopp worked together drawing a redrawing the characters which would populate their new show. One would draw a character, and the other would punch the design up a little further. The collabrative efforts brought out a cast of un character led by the hapless pussycat. They continued collabrating on Eek! from the early character designs, to overseeing the entire production in as many phases as possible.
The two animators begam knocking on doors in Hollywood. They had worked together on such projects as Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, which utilized animation, but they were not at the time known as animators. Savage spent a year and a half developing the concept, creating a small Christmas story, animating a minute’s worth of the show, and spending a large chunk of money on it. The project eventually ended at Fox.
    "It sat there for two years, and we had never known what had happened. It apparently ended up at (president of the Fox Kid’s Network) Margert Loesch’s office, and she said ‘Yeah, let’s make this into a show,’ and the note got stuck on somebody’s desk. It had been there for a year and a half. Margaret thought that we were not going to deal with it, that we were psycho’s who didn’t want to make a cartoon. It was all a big mess... and now it’s Okay." Recounted Holland.   
    Bill Kopp adds his won tale. Fox had been looking for a "characters that was cool, kind of edgy, and of course, they all failed. So we thought it would be neat if there was a character who was sympathetic. Sort of inverted. It turned out to be a nice Chaplinesque twist from what Fox expected."
    Canada’s Nelvana studios were not the original choice of studio for Holland and Kopp. Murakami-Wolf-Swenson had that distinction. The animation company, known primarily for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, has been Hollywood Players for years. The animation company’s name can be found on title sequences for movies dating back to the Sixties. Holland explains:"They were our heros. They were going to make Eek! back when Fox said, ‘Well, we need it done tomorrow.’ We liked those guys; they were great. Somehow, the money never came trhough from Fox, and we had to tell them {Murakami-Wolf-Swenson} we couldn’t do it, but we were very grateful to them. I still owe those guys a favor.
    "Fox had a deal with Nelvana, who were making Beetlejuice for them at the time, and the Fox execs were very big fans of them {Nelvana}. I’m also a pretty big friend of Toper Taylor, who runs the company now. Fox insisted we talk to them about making Eek!. Taylor was a good salesperson about it, and we told him we were going to be real d**ks about it and really fight. A lot of people would make up a show, and say ‘Good luck guys, here’s one character, go make scripts,’ but Bill and I were drawing everything, writing up everything, and we told them,’you better make it come alive or we’re going to another animation studio,’ and they did. I think there were some incidental characters that we don’t have time to draw that we weren’t too happy with, but for the most part they do a tremondous job."
    The genesis of Eek! had interesting detours with other animators. The minute and a half Holland developed went to International Rocketship in Vancouver, run by Marv Newland of Bambi Meets Godzilla fame. Newland is described by Holland as one of last true animation artists on the planet.
    "I said, ‘Here’s a chance for you to make millions of dollars if we do Eek! together,’ and he said ‘No, you know I’d like to do the minute and a half for you, but I just don’t want to be involved with Saturday morning stuff,’ recalled Holland.
Holland pleaded, but to no avail.
    "These guys are living in this little hovel, eating bugs and stuff, and I was so impressed by him, and so proud that the show got sold on his minute and a half. They’re probably the best animators in the world. To go from guys like that to Nelvana was a little frightening. I did learn that some of the those guys do free-lance work for Nelvana {The production house is based in Toronto}. Apparently they farm some of the work out, so some of the freelance guys may have been the same guys who secretly worked on Eek! years ago. In Eek’s International Adventure, the scene where Eek! goes through the Howarya Airlines’ baggage compartment where he gets all slammed and crashed looks like International Rocketship, so I have a feeling that might have been from Vancouver."
    Both Kopp and Holland speak well of Nelvana, and are extremely happy with the results....
    The show itself is a collection of self-possessed and hysterical characters. Wendy-Elizabeth is Eek’s more dominate owner, who confides in Eek! here sercret desires, and is a little slow to understand obvious situtaitons; J.B., the brother, who simply lacks personality, and Mom, probably the comedic stand-out, constantly listening to Berlitz tapes and repeating phrases which get more and more bizarre. Here tapes were in French the early episodes, but have since degraded into an unintelligible language with lines like "Your infant has swallowed my hand grenade," or "Pez, Saddam, Boolie, Boolie... The Librarian’s head and popped off."
    Bill Kopp hopes these people don’t exist in real life.
    Eek’s girlfriend, Annabelle, a rotund southern belle, voiced by the not-so-rotound Tawny Kitaen, is a romantic, slightly self possessed who wants to be loved more than anything in the world. By the way of example, in Hawaii-Eek 5-0, Annabelle tosses Eek! aside in favor of the worship of an entire village. She is basically a good character, and one of the very few shown to not have some aggression towards others. She is usually the perfect girlfriend..except for that damn dog!
    Eek’s main nemesis is Sharky the Sharkdog! Also owned by Annabelle’s unseen owners, Sharky is pretty much what he sound like, a 50/50 mix of beagle and shark. Flauting such genetic incongruities, Bill Kopp drew the character from his own experiences with a neighbors’ none-too-friendly walking mouth with razor-like teeth.
    The Squishy Bearz are a blatant jab at the Care Bears and other cute Saturday morning drivel that typified the worst of animation. Terminally stupid, they have become mainstays of the series with minute long shows, and appearances in their own episode in which a lynch mob gets turned on them.
    Shardy, the Magical Dancing Piece of Glass, who appears for ten seconds in Eek! Vs. the Flying Saucers as a brief interlude before another program does have a real-life counterpart. Holland remembers a huge glass case at the Nelvana office which contained toys for the animators to work with. One day, the case broke, and "there was a huge shard of glass among all these children’s toyus, so we thought we should put these in cereal boxes or something like that," said Holland.
    Feedback from the public has been very positive, although the press hasn’t always been gracious. Newsweek referred to Eek! as the worst thing on Television, but Holland was heartened that his response was printed by the publication. Kopp’s experience is that women like the show more than men, probably due to the sympathetic mature of the main character.
    "The nice thing is that our peers like us," Holand explains. "There is a quote from Matt Groening which reads ‘...A big Ren and Stimpy fan, Groening also numbers Nickelodeons Rugrats, Doug, Batman, and Eek! the cat as shows that have the touch of individual style, and don’t look like they came from an anonymous factory.’ That made us happy."
    Fox, like other networks, has strong rules and regulations for children’s animation. Kopp waxes philosophic.
    "Of course, we’ve received censorship. That’s one of our pet peeves. Our humor is not based on vulgarity or just for the shock value. Fox misreads a lot of our stuff, but they are getting better at it now. Saturday morning is always stringent as far as standards and Practices goes, so we do have to watch it. If somebody appears to be blown up, we have to show that they are okay, stupid stuff like that. Often times they’ll tell us something that we can nor cannot do, and we will find a more devious or sinister gag that we can still manage to get through, but it’s kind of disquised. Sometimes we throw fakes in just to get their attention in hopes of getting other gags through."
    Merchandising did not precede the series, and Fox was slow to get around to doing any at all. Stuffed dolls and bendable figures started to appear in late March of this year. Fox merchandising did not put a high priority on the cartoon orginally, but stuffed Eeks, stuffed sharkdogs, etc should be available soon.
    Also available from the Fox Kid’s Club is the Eek the Cat Comic Strip. Holland and Kopp were the artist behind that as well. Unlike Garfield, the comic strips are completely a product of the orginal creators.
Holland and Bill work together to script the show as tightly as possible. The timing is all worked very carefully. The timing is all worked out very carefully, allowing for little improvisation by the voice actors. However, the two are not closed to the idea, particualary since they have such an impressive voice cast.
    The voice work for the series has included, besides Tanwy Kitean, an impressive array of name actors including Buck henry and Phil Harman. The creators are quite happy with casts work, and speak very highly of them. Hoilland and Kopp help with voices as well. Bill Kopp, is of course Eek! and Holland has cameoed in such Roles as Elmo the Elk.
    "We have some cool people," said Holland. "Eleanor Donahue as Mom cracks me up all the time. I love Tawny as Annabelle. She’s funny. She’s a Babe-a-rama."
    The two creators are loyal adherents of traditional hand-drawn animation. Holland, in fact, balks at the idea of computer animation, which is a surprise since he was integral to the production of the Last Holloween, a live action/computer animation special that debuted on Halloween a few years ago.
    Holland does have some cause for alarm concerning computer animation. Reminded what computers did for the second season of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, he gets very vocal.
    "Oh, God, it was horrible. Somebody plugged it in and said, ‘Here, check out this Killer Tomatoes. You won’t even notice it.’ and it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. It was horrific. I think they are miles ahead of that now, but it will still be a while before they can replace the beauty of ink and paint."   
    The future of animation for these two includes a second season of eek! with some interesting differeences. The series, which has worked in the single story per half-hour format, will go to two nine-minute stories a week. Also included will be a short featuring any of Eek’s cast, and a Squishy Bearz cliffhanger.
    Kopp said, "The Squishy Bearz will get stuck inthe bathroom in their house in the first one with a burning F-16 jet headed right for them, and they all end in this impossible situation. Kopp launches into a "narrator" voice. And then of course next weeks there’s some miraculous escape, just like the old serials. The next part of the show will introduce a short called the Terrible Thunder Llizards about very smart dinosaurs and two stupid cavemen. That might get spun off next year."
    The writer’s bible for the Terrible Thunder Llizards describes a society of sentient dinosaurs shortly after a large scale war. The dinosaurs, of many sub-species, all live in harmony, save for those few who have been imprisoned. Recruited, A-Team like, by General Galopogas, to hunt down and track two humans, are the dinosaurs Day Z. Cutter, Bo ‘Diddly’ Squat, and Doc. Their mission is the basis for this spin-off hopeful, which will play out as a kind of Keystone Kops versus Inspector Clouseau.
Bo, a vicious Stenonychosaruas, is described sepcifically in the text o the bible as "Kind of like a dinosaur veriion of Bill Kopp, only he’s got more reptile skin." Three guesses who wrote that one.
    Also in the hopeful wings of the future are two animation producers is something called Betty of the Jungle, which would be a late-night cartoon along the lines a sexy George of the Jungle. "There’s an animated barbie in it, it’s funny, and they’re just bimbos. We’re not proud of it, but we make it anyway." Said Holland. The cartoon is not inspired by the fifties pin-up queen Bettie Page, whom the producers admire, but Holland admits to being a big fan of her’s "...we just like her name."
    Betty of the Jungle must first go to Fox for right of refusal, and has not, as of this writing, been cleared for production. Still the future needs only wait for something like this to give Jay Leno a run for his money.
Holland and Kopp have returned to the grueling job of cranking these cartoons out. They fight with Nelvana, which has jumped into the fray and survived by producing exactly what the pair want to see. This fight, which keeps the two extremely busy, has produced a cartoon that mixes that rare Chaplin-esque gentleness with some of the more absurd and painful-looking pratfalls around.
    Thanks to the talents of me like Bill Kopp and Savage Steve Holland, the battle for supremecy in the Saturday morning cartoon wars is fought the way we had always hoped it would be. ..with big yuks!"