Creator / Derek Savage

Ignorance of the law is not an excuse.

Derek Savage^note real name Darryl Ray Evans, according to some Internet sources (b. May 13, 1962) is a film director and writer.

He is best known for Cool Cat Saves the Kids, a No Budget So Bad, It's Good movie released in 2015, which was actually patched from three earlier Cool Cat videos. Most of his film projects involve Cool Cat, a character Savage says was his childhood Imaginary Friend. Cool Cat was introduced in a series of self-published picture books for children. Other self-published Savage book projects include children's books starring such characters as Trolly the Trout and Bible Birdie, and novels with titles like Bad Boy: The Male Dancer (formerly titled Midnight Stripper: A Male Dancer Story and The Dancer: A Male Stripper Story), Sweet Revenge and The Judgment (originally Hell's Nightmare, among many, many other titles).

Very little is known about Savage and his background. Among the few tidbits he's revealed are that he posed for Playgirl magazine in the late 1980s, and worked as an extra in projects like Back to School and Fatal Beauty. He's also the host of his own awards show, the 420 Awards, which began in 2019 and is hosted every, you guessed it, April 20th.

Savage gained infamy in November 2015 when he began taking down web reviews of his film, including ones by I Hate Everything and Bobsheaux.

Filmography

• Back to School (1985)
• Fatal Beauty (1987)
• Cool Cat Stops Bullying (2012)
• Cool Cat in the Hollywood Christmas Parade (2012)
• Cool Cat Finds a Gun (2013)
• Cool Cat Saves the Kids (2015)
• Gun Self-Defense for Women (2016)
• The Savage Crime Show (2016)
• Cool Cat Kids Superhero (2018)^note A Re-Cut of Cool Cat Saves the Kids.
• Gun Self-Defense for Ladies (2018)^note A Re-Cut of Gun Self-Defense for Women.
• 420 Awards (2019-2021; 2023-present)
• Cool Cat's Crazy Dream (2019)^note Almost the entire short is made up of footage from Cool Cat in the Hollywood Christmas Parade.
• Cool Cat Fights Coronavirus (2021)
• Cool Cat Saves the Kids: Director's Cut (2022)^note Another Re-Cut of Cool Cat Saves the Kids.
• Self-Defense for All (2022)^note Another Re-Cut of Gun Self-Defense for Women, originally titled Guns, Knives, Mace: Self-Defense for All.
• Cool Cat vs Dirty Dog: The Virus Wars (2023)^note A Re-Cut of Cool Cat Fights Coronavirus.

Tropes related to Savage go here.

• Approval of God: Savage himself started out praising YouTubers who criticized his movie. Suddenly, he began taking down videos on a massive scale.
• As Himself: He portrays himself in Cool Cat Saves The Kids.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Derek likes to make up fake reviews, usually by celebrities who don't even know him or even unknowns, to put on the DVD covers of his films.^note Seriously, no one would unironically say that Cool Cat is better than Barney The Dinosaur The most glaring example is when Savage claimed that Bill Meléndez praised Cool Cat. This 'press release' was published in 2013, but Meléndez died in 2008.
  • Savage would also often make up blurbs from groups such as the "Going Green Coalition" and "Parents and Kids First Organization", neither of which actually exist.
• Carpet of Virility: For some reason, he likes to wear unbuttoned shirts that show off his chest hair. The same goes for his character in CCSTK.
• Character Blog: This Twitter account is, in theory, supposed to be a family-friendly place run by Cool Cat himself. But Savage often uses it to express his own political opinions, bicker with people, complain about problems he's facing, gush over celebrities, flirt with women, and generally promote himself.
• Copiously Credited Creator: Besides the prominent note "Cool Cat is created by Derek Savage", Savage is also credited for directing, producing, writing, acting, additional camera, color correction, writing and producing the opening and closing credits, and writing and producing the songs (with other people listed for "music track by"). He's also been accused of making up pseudonyms so he can avoid crediting himself with any more stuff.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • Derek Savage took to harassing anyone who uploads any content that mocks his film in any way. He's even gone as far as to threaten legal action against I Hate Everything and gotten into fights with his fans on Twitter, to the point where Cool Cat's tweets were protected for a while. The sad part is that it didn't used to be this way. When the film was popularized by the YourMovieSucks.org review, Derek Savage found out about it, and took the criticism in stride. The only thing he complained about were the "Cool Cat is actually a pedophile" jokes, which he thought were taking things a bit too far. Otherwise, he acted far more reasonable than he does now.
  • As said by IHE in his "IT'S OVER" video, he received an email from a "law firm" Byrne & Shapiro pressuring him into taking down his video for Jurassic Shark. Although initially believing it, he said that cracks began to show when he noticed that they didn't leave a phone number, didn't try to hit his video with a copyright strike, don't have an office and sent the email from a Yahoo account, the same e-mail service Savage uses. Additional digging from Your Movie Sucks shows that the director and producer of Shark have never even heard of the law firm or Savage. Needing more evidence, IHE tricked Savage into admitting he made up B&S when it started to bite him in the ass.
  • He also managed to dox several YouTubers who made parody videos including Mr. Bump, maker of the YouTube Poop "Cool Cat Joins ISIS", whom he threatened to send the address of to the real ISIS. Later he threatened to send the same address to the FBI terror division under the false pretense that Mr. Bump was actually affiliated with ISIS. It really goes to show what depths Savage will sink to in order to "protect his brand."
• Dear Negative Reader: Derek Savage has baited his haters to send criticism his way, only to report their negative reviews for copyright violations.
• George Lucas Altered Version: Savage tends to do a lot of these for both his Cool Cat films and his film Gun Self-Defense for Women (later Gun-Self-Defense for Ladies and Guns, Knives, Mace: Self-Defense for All).
• Gun Nut: Outside of CCSTK, where he makes it clear that kids shouldn't be messing with guns, Derek LOVES them, and even made a movie called Gun Self Defense For Women.
• He Also Did: He used to pose for Playgirl in the 1980s and wrote a book titled Bad Boy, dealing with the life of a male stripper, before moving on to (relatively) family-friendly content.
• Hostility on the Set: According to Jason Johnson, Derek Savage frequently hit on Momma Cat's actress April Berry^note credited as April Ann Reese for Momma Cat, though she would always reject his advances and dinner invitations. On the final day of filming, Berry reportedly allowed Johnson to use her shower after he had spent the entire day in the Cool Cat outfit, at which point Derek stormed into her house uninvited and furiously confronted them, mistakenly under the impression that something was going on between Berry and Johnson. Berry never worked with Savage since this incident, resulting in Savage recasting Momma Cat in the recut, and Johnson only worked with Savage on the new scenes in the recut, with Savage taking over Cool Cat's voice himself afterwards.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Except for Cool Cat Stops Bullying, all the Cool Cat books have Cool Cat Loves [X] as a title.
• Large Ham: Hams it up all the time.
• Malaproper:
  • There's a TV interview of him talking about his books Cool Cat Loves Going Grink^note Going Green and Cool Cat Loves Alternatul Fuels^note Alternative Fuels.
  • In his YouTube videos he's talked about famous singers such as Peril (or Parallel) Williams and Andre Grande.
  • He's also been known to pronounce his own name in a way that makes it sound like he's calling himself Garrick Savage.
  • He commonly pronounces "several" as "sevel".
• Product Placement: There are product placements for Cool Cat T-Shirts and books in CCSTK, as well as him showing off his Van Halen signed guitar (that was probably a replica). There are also various famous cars shown in the movie, like The Mystery Machine, the ECTO-1, the DeLorean and Bumblebee. Now, what was that about copyright, Derek?
• Real Men Love Jesus: He made a book called Bible Birdie, and quotes from the Gospel are plastered all over Cool Cat's house.
• Stage Name: Evidence points to Derek Savage being one, though Savage has never confirmed this.^note Presumably because the info came to light via records of a felony conviction for illegal firearm possession in The '90s, which goes against the supposedly family-friendly image of the Cool Cat franchise
• Streisand Effect: You could rename this the Savage Effect, based on how Daddy Derek's copyright strikes and grandstanding took Cool Cat from obscurity to major phenomenon practically overnight ^note including the creation of the Cool Cat page on This Very Wiki, as well as raising the profiles of I Hate Everything, Bobsheaux and Your Movie Sucks.
• Vanity Publishing: All of Savage's books are published by a self-owned publisher called Blue Thunder Books.
• What Could Have Been: Over the years, Savage has planned a number of unrealized projects, including a documentary called Medical Marijuana: Does it Work?, as well as Cool Cat vs. the Wicked Witch (which got merged into Cool Cat Stops a School Shooting).
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: In this video, Derek Savage admits that he didn't conceive Cool Cat Saves the Kids as a full-length project. Instead, he started with a single short video (Cool Cat Stops Bullying, with Erik Estrada and Vivica A. Fox), then when he had trouble selling it, tried making two other shorts (finding a gun and the Hollywood parade), then when he realized that he'd have more luck with a feature-length film, stitched them all together with an additional half-hour of new material. Some of the oddities of the film, like Cool Cat's habit of pausing in the middle of sentences ("it's not cool to...paint on someone's wall!"), the type of unpolished delivery you get from child actors who never had a chance to rehearse, and Non Sequitur lines (like Daddy Derek's response to being told how crazy the day was: "Hey, I hope that's a great thing!") make it seem like the dialogue was ad-libbed or was scripted on the fly, but Jason Johnson has said that there was an actual (grammatically-incorrect, sometimes incoherent) screenplay.