Steve Canyon

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages and ethnicity, please welcome to the stage for one night only the great, the grand, the glorious...STEVE CANYON, as he attempts to pilot a jet through a larger burning jet while also making love to two women simultaneously! And, as if that wouldn't be enough of a feat to accomplish, Steve Canyon will be doing all of this...on a board game!

Honestly, Steve Canyon might be one of the weirdest we've covered, just because it's got such a strange history (not to mention a Saturday Morning Cartoon title). For starters, the game is actually based on a "popular" comic strip titled, you guessed it, Steve Canyon. Actually, Steve Canyon isn't just a run of the mill filler comic strip either, it was made by the same man, myth, legend who created the classic "Terry & The Pirates", Milton Caniff and ran for over 40 years. But still, even as an enormous fan of comic strips and comic strip archival, what an odd origin, don't you think? To make a board game based off a classic newspaper comic strip? I know, I know, in this day and age almost anything can get a game representation, but back then...

And Steve Canyon wasn't just a comic strip, for the record. It went to television, illustrated novels, and there's even a goddamned statue of him erected in Idaho Springs, Colorado while a nearby mountain was actually renamed outright Steve Canyon. Hell, the CIA/US Air Force covert air war in Laos during the Vietnam War was unofficially called the Steve Canyon Program. This cartoon apparently meant a lot to people, even high up in the military.

So how did we get to a board game iteration? Well, sadly, there's not really a whole lot of information regarding that aspect.

Released in 1959, the game is apparently fairly luck based and quite interesting gameplay wise. A brief description from Board Game Geek is as follows:

"Four players fly their F-105 Thunderchiefs to three different air bases. The first person to complete this circuit wins. Very luck driven, in that a roll of one die determines movement on the map and also altitude increments of 1,000 ft. Player choices amount to deciding what altitude to fly and which air field to visit next. Random weather cards cause problems while flying over certain areas of the board or flying through certain altitudes. Fuel consumption is basically one unit every time the die is rolled, and running out of fuel can force a landing at an emergency air field or cause a pilot to bail out. The game is interesting because of the scale plastic planes used as playing pieces (actual reproductions of the F-105) and in the cardboard 'control panels' which players use to keep track of altitude and fuel."

All that being said, I feel confident in stating that I don't know what the hell it is I'm actually looking at here. It looks like the motherboard of a desktop computer. This is a visual nightmare, and it makes me mad that I can see. This is perhaps - and maybe it's just due to the year it was made - one of the ugliest boards I've ever set eyes on.

Then again, maybe it makes more sense up close, when being actually interacted with. It's very likely that some of these boards are just an incoherent blob of color and shapes from a distance, but once you get up close and personal with them they start to make a lot more sense to your eyes and brain. That being said, the colors are at least gorgeous. The whole thing has an almost childrens book watercolor feel to it, and I kind of dig that.

Though admittedly, on the flip side of that, the inserts and pieces used are super cool. Just look at the 'control panels' players are given. The color, the design, the overall artistry presented here. This is kind of high quality stuff, then again in 1959 people put a lot more effort into the arts it seems, especially when the arts were fairly limited to board games in many ways. But these control panels are perhaps one of the nicest player pieces I've ever seen, so that makes up for the boards otherwise questionable design.

Interestingly enough, I cannot find a designer for the game, but the artist is listed as, unsurprisingly, Caniff himself. I assume that's for the art on the box, and not the art inside proper, but who's to say really. I have no way to either confirm nor deny this suspicion. But perhaps, even more interesting than that tidbit, is how it was published by Lowell Toys who, from what I can tell, went defunct in the 60s. Their other games include such titles as "The 3 Stooges Fun House", "Groucho's You Bet Your Life" and "Gunsmoke", so maybe this was just their niche, to produce board games based on pre-existing IP, something that only became more popular over time. In a way, they could be considered a sort of pioneer in this sense. That isn't to say their entire backlog is just that, they seem to have plenty of games of originality as well, and I think we'll cover some of them even, but it was just an little fun fact I thought you'd appreciate.

You know, it seems like the last few times I've done this blog, I've come away with less and less information than usual, and perhaps it's just that time I'm picking extremely obscure and hard to find board games to cover, but still, even with a lack of information, I feel they deserve to be recognized. They were still made, and people still put effort into them, and that's worth of admiration regardless of its longevity.

And now, for our final trick of the night, Steve Canyon will do the seemingly impossible.

Stay relevant!