Happy (1949). The character stirred Caniff's imagination so much that he hired Ilona Massey personally to pose for him. Besides casting Ilona Massey as Lynx, Caniff patterned Pipper the Piper after John F. Kennedy, and Miss Mizzou after either Marilyn Monroe or actress Bek Nelson. The character of Charlie Vanilla (who would frequently appear with an ice cream cone in hand) was based on Caniff's longtime friend Charles Russhon, a former photographer and U.S. Air Force lieutenant who became a technical advisor on five James Bond films. Other media Cinema In the late 1940s producer David O. Selznick considered a Steve Canyon film series starring Guy Madison, but Madison's agent Henry Willson talked Selznick out of it. Television The strip was adapted into a filmed, half-hour television series of 34 episodes on NBC in 1958–59 (with reruns on ABC in 1960). Dean Fredericks (1924–1999), formerly the Hindu manservant on Johnny Weissmuller's 1955–56 Jungle Jim series, played Canyon—a troubleshooter for the United States Air Force, spending half the season traveling from base to base before becoming the commanding officer stationed at the strip's fictitious Big Thunder Air Force Base in California. With the exception of General "Shanty" Towne (in the pilot episode), none of the other supporting characters from the newspaper strip appeared in the series. The show is broadcast periodically on the Decades over-the-air television network. From 2008 to 2009, the first 24 episodes were released on DVD; the remaining episodes were released on July 28, 2015. Novels A series of novels was published by Grosset & Dunlap in the 1950s. They were all written by Caniff, with illustrations by himself. Real world depictions A statue of Steve Canyon was erected in Idaho Springs, Colorado, and a nearby mountain canyon was renamed "Steve Canyon". A mosaic of Steve Canyon's ward, Poteet Canyon, stands in front of the city fire station in the town of Poteet, Texas. The CIA/US Air Force covert air war in Laos during the Vietnam War was unofficially called the "Steve Canyon Program" Reprints Harvey Comics reprinted the strip in a half-dozen 1948 comic books, and Dell Comics published seven issues of original stories (1953–1959) by former Caniff assistant (who had anticipated Steve Canyon with his own Bruce Gentry about a charter pilot) in their Four Color series (#519, 578, 641, 737, 804, 939, 1033). Steve Canyon was reprinted by The Menomonee Falls Gazette, Kitchen Sink Press