Songfacts®:

• This was featured in the movie Footloose, starring Kevin Bacon as a young man who comes to a small town where dancing in public is not allowed. The screenplay for the movie was written by Dean Pitchford, who also wrote the lyrics to the nine songs used in the film. This one appears in a scene where Bacon is playing chicken on tractors with a local. He becomes a "hero" when he wins - not by force of will, but because his shoelace gets caught on a pedal and he can't jump off (yes, he couldn't get hit foot loose).
• In putting together songs for his movie Footloose, Dean Pitchford used seven different co-writers and eight different artists, since he wanted a variety of styles. On this song, he wrote with the mercurial Jim Steinman, who wrote most of Meat Loaf's hits, including "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" and "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)." In our interview with Dean Pitchford, he told us how this one came together: "We decided that we were going to go after Bonnie Tyler, who was not even really happening at the time. I had fallen in love with Bonnie Tyler because she'd sung 'It's a Heartache,' and the song 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart' was a hit in Australia when I heard it, but it had not broken in the United States yet. But when we went to try to find her, nobody at Columbia Records knew who had signed her and where she was. We finally tracked her A&R rep down to Nashville, because in the United States she had been signed as a country act, and that was where 'It's A Heartache' had first broken. But in order to get to Bonnie Tyler and to get her to sing something for us, I was going to work with Jim Steinman. And I'd known Jim Steinman's work from all of his Meat Loaf days. So I sat down and listened to a lot of Jim Steinman. And I came up with 'Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods? Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?' I wrote that lyric with an ear toward snaring Jim Steinman, and it worked. He looked at the lyric and he immediately knew what to do with it because it was so much in a style that he was familiar with. So in every case I tried to write a lyric that was in the style of the artist I was working with or the writer that I knew I would have to write with. Bill Wolfer, for instance, was a producer for Shalamar, and I knew what I needed to do in order to snare his involvement. And 'Dancing in the Sheets' is different than 'Holding Out For A Hero' is different than 'Almost Paradise.' So every one of those represented a different head set, a mindset."
• Jim Steinman literally bled for this song when he demoed it for the Footloose director. Dean Pitchford told us the story: "I remember bringing in a girl to sing 'Holding Out For A Hero' with Jim Steinman pounding the crap out of the keyboard. When we were done, I looked over and there was blood on the keys. That's the kind of 'DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN da DON DON DON da DA DUN.' He was just pounding the s--t out of the keyboard. Everybody was just grooving along as he's pounding and this girl's singing, singing, singing. And at the end of the whole thing I looked over and there was blood up and down the keyboard. It cut his fingers."
• The introduction to this song was originally used by Jim Steinman on the song "Stark Raving Love" from his 1981 solo album Bad For Good. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Kelley - Hickory, KY
• Ella Mae Bowen recorded this for the 2011 remake of the Footloose movie. Bowen, who was just 14 when she recorded the song, came up with a stripped down, countrified arrangement with her producer Seth Bolt. The movie's director, Craig Brewer, chose her version from many submissions.
• A version by Jennifer Saunders was featured in the 2004 movie Shrek 2. It was also used in the climactic scene from the movie Short Circuit 2. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Gerry - Trinity, AL