tom sito's animation almanac for April 4, 2025

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Eadweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence-Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters-born McKinley Morganfield, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Bea Benaderet, Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr is 60, Barry Pepper, Craig T. Nelson is 81, Hugo Weaving is 65

 

Ira Spence

 

1924- On a dry lakebed in California, Tom Milton ran a Miller race car at 151 mph.

 

1952- CARTOON COMMIES- Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the owners of a New York commercial animation studio, Tempo Productions of Communist sympathies. One of the owners was Disney Layout man Dave Hilberman, who was a union organizer and was the only artist personally named by Walt Disney to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The F.B.I. began investigating Tempo and their Madison Avenue clients quickly pulled their business. Tempo closed, laying off 50 artists. Mr. Clean, Markie Maypo and the Hamm’s Beer Bear were once again safe from Red subversion. 

 

1954- Arturo Toscanini, who had been making music since the 1880’s, conducted his final concert. Toscanini’s studio space at NBC is today the set of the Saturday Night Live TV show.

 

1967- Van Nuys premiere head shop Captain Ed’s Heads & Highs first opened for business.

 

 

1967- Snoopy’s little bird friend Woodstock debuted in the Peanuts comic strip.

 

 

1973- The World Trade Center Twin Towers first opened to the public.

 

1984- In George Orwell’s novel 1984, this is the day Winston Smith started a secret diary and first wrote the dangerous thought-crime “Down With Big Brother”.

 

1987- Ronald Reagan’s hand-picked FCC voted to repeal The Fairness Doctrine, which mandated news services report only unbiased news, reflecting all opinions. It also said you clearly had to separate hard news from opinion. This set the stage for the highly partisan Right-Left reporting of today.

1994- Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark started Netscape. Clark also founded Silicon Graphics, Inc.

 

2007- Bob Clark, the director of the holiday classic film A Christmas Story, was killed in a head on car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He was 67. 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 3, 2025

Birthdays: Marlon Brando would be 100, King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington Irving, William Marcy "Boss"Tweed, Sally Rand the Fan Dancer, Bud Fisher “Mutt & Jeff”, Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Amanda Byrnes, David Hyde Pierce is 67, Alec Baldwin is 67, Eddie Murphy is 64, Jane Goodall is 91.

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 1860-The Pony Express system started. Relay riders from Saint Louis across the prairies and deserts all the way to Sacramento, California. Ten days to get a letter from St. Jo to Denver. For all its romance, The Pony Express failed after just 2 years. Stagecoaches and telegraph wires soon covered the same message business much more easily.

 

 

1869- First performance of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor. 

 

 

1897-composer Johannes Brahms died.

 

1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald married.

 

1941- With the possibility of a labor strike at his studio, and war looming, Walt Disney held the first meeting with U.S. government officials to try and obtain work for training films. 

 

1943- Conrad Veidt, famed German actor who played the evil Major Strasser in Casablanca, collapsed and died on the Riviera Golf Course in Los Angeles. He was 50 and suffered from a heart condition, not helped by his chain smoking. Veidt was anti-Nazi and had a Jewish wife. He put in his contract that in movie roles he wanted to play suave evil nazi bad guys. His death occurred just as his movie Casablanca was receiving rave reviews. 

 

 

1968- Stanley Kubrick's epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered. The N.Y. Times review said it was: " Somewhere between hypnotic and boring". Pauline Kael called it "monumentally unimaginative!" After an academy screening in Hollywood, movie star Rock Hudson walked out saying” Will someone please tell me what the hell that was about?” 

 Writer Arthur C. Clarke always said HAL the computer was not a coded reference to IBM. At the Oscars, Clarke and Kubrick lost the best screenplay award to Mel Brooks for The Producers. 2001 won only one Oscar, for visual effects. It was the only Oscar a Stanley Kubrick film ever won.

 

1973- Standing on the corner of 6^th Ave in Manhattan, Motorola scientist Marty Cooper made the first cell phone call. He called his competitor Joel Engel at Bell Labs to tell him he had lost the race to invent the cell phone. He said of that first phone, “It was the size of a leg of lamb.”

 

1994- Disney chief executive Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter crash on a skiing trip. It’s been speculated that blowing snow off some high peaks caused an ice ball to be sucked into the copter’s air intake manifold. Clint Eastwood was supposed to be on that trip but couldn't make it. Billie Joel and Christie Brinkley had a similar scare with their helicopter on the same day. The death of the Disney CEO set in motion the events that would lead to Jeffrey Katzenberg leaving Disney and forming Dreamworks, as well as Michael Ovitz’s brief tenure as a mouseketeer and Michael Eisner’s eventual fall in 2006. In 1999 the Hollywood Reporter estimated that little iceball cost the Walt Disney Company over one billion dollars.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 2, 2025

Birthdays: Frankish Emperor Charlemagne, Giacomo Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, Marvin Gaye, Emile Zola, Max Ernst, Buddy Ebsen, Sir Alec Guinness would have been 111, Frederick Bartholdi, Emmy Lou Harris, Isaiah Washington, Karl Castle, Linda Hunt is 80.

 

 

1722- A Boston newspaper The New England Courant printed an article of homespun wisdom from a self-described old widow named Silence Dogood. It was in reality the first published writing by Benjamin Franklin, then 17 years old. The publisher was his older brother. After awhile Franklin argued with his brother the editor, and moved to Philadelphia.

 

1800- Beethoven's First Symphony premiered. Vienna's leading music critic called it - 'a vulgar, impertinent explosion, more to be expected from a military band than an orchestra!’

 

 

1836- Charles Dickens married Elizabeth Howarth.

 

1877- First man shot out of a cannon.

 

1877- The first White House egg-rolling contest.

 

1902- The first movie theater opened in Los Angeles.

 

1934- Ward Kimball’s first day at Walt Disney as an inbetweener.

 

1943- Disney short 'Private Pluto' the first Chip & Dale cartoon.

 

1943- Warner short “Super Rabbit”. Directed by Chuck Jones.

 

1943- This day Harvard Dean Henry Chauncey supervised the distribution of 316,000 High School seniors of the Army-Navy College Qualifying Test, later re-titled the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or SAT. The SAT became a standardized test that manages every year to raise the stress level of seniors regardless of race, class or religion. Go On To Next Page.

 

1951- Author Jack Kerouac began writing his masterpiece On the Road, on one long roll of teletype paper. He tried to write in a marathon, reinforced by cigarettes, coffee and Benzedrine. The book was one long paragraph, with no page or chapter breaks.“ The only people for me are the mad ones…”

 

1974-While actor David Niven was speaking at the Academy Awards telecast a nude streaker named Bob Opel ran past him on nationwide television. Mr. Niven, completely unflustered, dryly commented: "The only laugh that man will ever get is by stripping off his clothes and showing off his shortcomings. " 

1974- Later at that same Oscar telecast, Francis Ford Coppola presented the last award of the evening, the Best Picture. Francis held up the show to launch into a speech about the coming revolution in computer technology in movies. “A revolution that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a small-town try-out!” The audience was confused and annoyed at being delayed any longer to get to their parties. No one knew what he was talking about.

 

1978- The TV show "Dallas" debuts.

 

 

1993- Bullocks Wilshire department store with the famous Tea Room closed.

 

2004- Walt Disney Studio released Home on the Range.

 

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 1, 2025

Welcome to April, named for Aprilis, an Etruscan Goddess of Agriculture and planting, or it may even be a corruption of the name of the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love. OtThe month was considered by Romans sacred to Venus- Venuralia.

  

 

Birthdays: Big Jim Fisk , Edmund Rostand, Lon Chaney, Sir William Harvey, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ali McGraw, Toshiro Mifune, Debbie Reynolds, Phil Neikro, Wallace Beery, Jane Powell, Bo Schembechler, Annette O’Toole, Barry Sonnenfeld, Rachel Maddow is 47, animator Andreas Deja is 65.

 

 

1867- Opening of the Paris World Exhibition. This world’s fair was seen as the zenith of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Visitors marveled to exhibits as Dr Lister’s new disinfectant, a new metal called Aluminum, a new butter substitute called margarine, and in the American exhibit, a novel bit of furniture called a Rocking Chair. The Art galleries of the exhibition were filled with Ingres, Courbets and Delacroix. But nothing from Cezanne, Manet, Pizarro or any of the other weirdoes who would one day be called Impressionists.

 

1918- The British Royal Flying Corps (RAF) formed. 

 

1923- Developers S.H. Woodruff and Canadian William Whitley start advertising lots for sale in Hollywoodland, beneath their giant new Hollywoodland sign. The sign originally was covered with lightbulbs. It collapsed and was repaired in 1939, the 'land' part never restored. The Hollywood Sign was made over again in 1978.

 

1944- Tex Avery's "Screwball Squirrel" Only a few shorts were made. As animator Bob Givens reminisced:" Eventually, everyone found that squirrel just too annoying!" 

 

1945- OKINAWA- The Marines land and the battle began. Because it was not a conquered territory, but part of the home Japanese islands, Washington weighed it’s decision to use the atomic bomb by its observation of how tough Okinawa was, indicating how tough it would be to land on mainland Japan, only 360 miles away.  

The fighting was brutal, hand to hand with bayonets and flame-throwers. Of the 125,000 man Japanese garrison only 7,500 didn’t fight to the death, and many civilians threw themselves off cliffs in mass suicide. A children's class trip visiting from Tokyo who were caught in the battle, were shown by soldiers how to cluster themselves around a single hand grenade, so as to save on the number needed. Today there is a shrine to their memory. The Cave of the Maidens is dedicated to a group of schoolgirls who hid in a cave and when the Americans heard Japanese voices inside and none would answer their calls to come out and surrender, filled the cave with flamethrower fire. 

Almost every American soldier who was captured was executed.  The U.S. Navy suffered the worst number of ships sunk and men killed since Pearl Harbor. There were 1,900 Kamikaze plane attacks. U.S. casualties were so high the government re-imposed a press blackout.

This battle has the rare distinction like the Plains of Abraham in 1759 where both opposing generals died. US General Simon Bolivar Buckner, whose father had fought Ulysses Grant in the Civil War, was killed by an artillery round three days before the battles end. Japanese General Usijima committed hari-kiri almost at the same time.

 

1949- Zsa Zsa Gabor married George Sanders. (Shere Khan )

 

1961- Rev Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker get married.

 

1970- A symbol of the 70’s, AMC’s compact car the Gremlin introduced.

 

1972- In a gesture of turnabout-is-fair-play for women, Playgirl Magazine ran its first male nude centerfold- Burt Reynolds.

 

1976- Two college dropouts, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started a company named Apple Computers. A third partner, small businessman Ron Wayne, sold his shares to Jobs & Woz for $800 before they filed papers of incorporation. He didn’t want to get stuck with the bill when they failed. In 2011 Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s richest company.

 

1984- Motown star Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his own father in an argument over plans for the singer's 45th birthday party the next day. 

  

 

1996- Animation World Network, Toontown’s virtual trade magazine, started up. www.AWN.com

 

2004- G-Mail invented.

Tom Sito animation almanac for march 31, 2025

Birthdays:  Rene' Descartes, Franz Josef Haydn, Serge Diaghilev, Harald von Braunhut 1926- the inventor of Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs, Richard Chamberlain, Cesar Chavez, Herb Alpert, Gordie Howe, Liz Claiborne, Gabe Kaplan, Rhea Perlman, Shirley Jones is 90, Richard Kiley, Volker Schlondorf, William Daniels, Lucille Bliss the voice of Crusader Rabbit, Christopher Walken is 81, Colin Farrell is 46, Ewan McGregor is 53, Al Gore is 76, Ed Catmull is 79.

 

1836- Charles Dickens first work published "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club."

 

1840- Congress lowers the minimum workday for federal workers from 11.4 hours a day to 10 hours a day. At this time in mines and factories people worked an average 12-16 hour day. The 8 hour day wasn’t achieved until 1913, not until 1941 in Hollywood.

 

1860- Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper refers to Harriet Lane, President James Buchanan's niece as "FIRST LADY of the Land". Buchanan was a bachelor and was probably gay, So Ms. Lane performed the duties of the White House hostess. Earlier in 1840 President Zachary Taylor eulogized Dolly Madison as First Lady, before that Martha Washington and Abigail Adams were referred to as Lady Washington and Lady Adams. But this is the first official use of the term First Lady for the President’s consort.

 

1889- The Eiffel Tower first opened to the public, to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution. Twice as tall as the Saint Peter's in Rome or the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Wizard of Iron Gustave Eiffel also designed the armature holding up the Statue of Liberty. Eiffel’s original deal with the French government called for the tower to only stay up for twenty years, then pulled down if no further use can found for it. Eiffel agonized about what to do as the deadline approached.  Fortunately by 1909, wireless radio transmissions became important and the Eiffel Tower turned out to be a great broadcast antenna.

 

 

1905- THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought back his famous sleuth in a new series of adventures. Conan Doyle had created Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in 1887 but by 1893 he had tired of the characters, he wanted to write more serious fiction like his novel The White Company. So he killed him off. Holmes fell to his doom fighting Prof. Moriarity at the Reichenbeck Falls. The reaction of the public was astonished outrage. It seemed whenever Conan Doyle went out inevitably someone would stop him and say "You Blackguard! How Could You ?!" He did a speaking tour in America, but all anybody wanted to know was how Holmes and Watson were doing?  Finally, Conan-Doyle bowed to public pressure and resumed the career of the inhabitants of #221B Baker Street. He would later refer to Holmes success as “his monstrosity.”

 

1930- Floyd Gottfredson began drawing Disney’s Mickey Mouse comic strip after Ub Iwerks quit. He continued to do the strip uninterrupted for 45 years, until his retirement in 1975.

 

1930 -Reacting to charges that the movies had become too naughty, Hollywood producers accept the MOTION PICTURE CODE. It was regulated by Will Hays, former Republican Party Chairman. The regulation wouldn't really start to have strength until 1935-36 when pressure groups like the Catholic League of Decency went after Mae West and the Tarzan pictures. 

The Hays Code forbade open sex and obscenity:

  - twin beds only in a bedroom, nightclothes buttoned to the neck. 

  - if a couple were seated together on a bed they must have at least one foot touching the floor,

  -"kisses with a duration of no longer than 3 seconds, parting with lips closed."

-  One other little known clause was the forbidding of members of different races from kissing on camera. So Anna Mae Wong, the greatest Chinese-American actress of her time, could not play a Chinese heroine if her co-star was a Caucasian made up to look Asian.

   Lots of jokes were spawned like: "Give him the bird!" "If the Hays Commission would let me, I'd give him the bird!"

 

1931- ITT transmits the first message by microwave, from Dover to Calais.

 

1932- Ford introduces the V-8 Engine.

 

1933- Max Fleischer's short cartoon "Snow White" (starring Betty Boop) premiered. Cab Calloway singing the "St. James Infirmary Blues" is a highlight.

 

1943- Rodger & Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" debuts.  Despite the opinion of producer Mike Todd -"No legs, No Laughs, No Chance", the musical becomes one of the great hits of American musical theater.

 

1950- Thor Heyderthal's book of his exploits Kon Tiki published. This was an account of his 4,200 mile voyage which proved ancient mariners could have traveled from Peru to Polynesia on boats made from tied reeds.

 

1959- The Dalai Lama fled the Communist Chinese invasion of Tibet and began his long exile.

 

1962- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened on Wilshire Blvd. No, it didn’t display customized surfboards, or the ideal tuna melt with sprouts, but an exhibit of paintings by Bonnard. 

 

1967- In a small London nightclub, rising young rock & roller Jimmy Hendrix burned his guitar for the first time. Rock luminaries like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and Pete Townsend sat in the audience stunned at the technical brilliance of this unknown former paratrooper who played left-handed. The pieces of his guitar were purchased by Microsoft chairman Paul Allen and today are in his Seattle Rock Museum.

 

1973- Comic strip hero Smilin' Jack gets married; the strip concludes next day.

 

1991- Former child star Danny Bonaduce arrested for a fist fight with a trans prostitute.

 

1995- In Corpus Christy Texas legendary Tejana singer Selena Perez was shot and killed by an obsessed fan. The woman Yolanda Saldivar was president of the Selena Fan Club. “The gun just went off, I didn’t mean to shoot anybody.” Just last week her request for parole was denied again.

 

1999- The movie The Matrix opened in theaters. Whoah!

 

tom sito's animation almanac for march 30, 2025

Birthdays:  Maimonides- Moses Ben Maimon, Anna Sewell (the author of Black Beauty), Vincent Van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Peter Marshall, Ray Magliozzi (CarTalk), Warren Beatty is 88, Eric Clapton, Arthur Lee Harrington the designer of the first Jeep, Tracey Chapman, Robby Coltrane, Paul Reiser, Celine Dion, Nora Jones is 46, Disney animator Marc Davis, Maurice LaMarsh is 67, John Astin is 95

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1858- The pencil eraser patented. The Eraser, or Rubber outside the U.S., was developed in 1770, but Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia first attach it on the top of a pencil.

 

1918- Thomas Edison sold his studio and got out of the movie business. He fired W.K.L. Dickson, inventor of the movie studio set, Edwin Porter the inventor of the narrative film, Willis O’Brian, and J. Stuart Blackton, the inventor of cartoon animation, for annoying him too much about filmmaking. Edison was more interested then in finding a way to extract iron ore from rocks using magnets. 

 

1939- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BATMAN Detective Comics # 27, Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, first appeared in a comic. It was called the May issue but it actually came out this day.

 

1968- In New York City’s Bowery district two children find the dead body of a homeless drug addict. It took weeks to identify the remains as Bobby Driscoll, 31, Walt Disney child star, and the voice of Peter Pan. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in Potter’s field.

 

1980- Easter Fever by Nelvana premiered.

 

1988- Beetlejuice, directed by Tim Burton. Starring Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton.

 

2000- Dreamworks animated feature The Road to El Dorado premiered.

 

2007- Disney’s Meet the Robinsons.

 

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for march 29, 2025

Birthdays: President John Tyler, Sir William Walton, Pearl Bailey, former English P.M. John Major, Bud Cort is 77, LaToya Jackson, Eugene McCarthy, Jennifer Capriati, M.C. Hammer, Walt "Clyde" Frazier, Cy Young, Christopher Lambert is 70, Jimmy Dodd, Disney animator Jack Kinney, Brendan Gleeson is 70, Lucy Lawless, Elle MacPherson, Eric Idle is 82

 

1859- In St. Louis, unemployed drunk Ulysses S. Grant voluntarily freed his one slave, given him by his slave-owning father-in-law. He could have gotten up to a thousand dollars to sell him. But he hated the concept of owning another human. He would go on to win the Civil War and become president.

 

1886- COCA-COLA invented. Atlanta Pharmacist and liver pill salesman John Pemberton developed the carbonated drink, originally with cocaine in it. His bookkeeper Francis Robinson penned the famous script logo, still in use today. Advertising for the drink claimed it cured everything from hysteria to cholic and the common cold.

The formula is still a secret. During World War II the Nazis openly worried how a break with the United States would affect their supply of Coca Cola, so Reichminister Goebbels arrested Coke execs in Germany and forced them to develop a substitute. This became Fanta Cola. 

 

1891- Impressionist painter George Seurat died at age 31. Before he died, he told his parents that he had fathered two children with his model Maureen Knobloch. Surprise!

 

1936- Republic Pictures formed.

 

1939- Moviestars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard married. They had a happy marriage until Lombard was killed in a plane crash in 1942. It’s been said the first California King Size mattress, slightly larger than normal king size, was ordered custom made for Gable and Lombard for their rather exuberant rendevous at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. 

 

1951- 'The King and I' debuted on Broadway with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, who shaved his head for the first time for the role.

 

1974- Mariner 10 was the first satellite to reach the planet Mercury.

 

1974- Chinese farmer Zhao Kangmin digging a well discovered the huge, lifesize terracotta army buried with Chinas’ first emperor at XIAN.

 

1979- The House Committee Investigation into Assassinations, published their conclusions. They concluded that "President John F. Kennedy was in all probability killed by a conspiracy " but just who and why and what to do about it, they didn’t know. 

 

1989- As part of one of the silliest Oscar telecasts in history, actor Rob Lowe had to dance and sing 'Proud Mary" with a Las Vegas showgirl named Eileen Bowman dressed as Disney’s Snow White.  Rob Lowe had just been embarrassed by the publication of a videotape shot in a hotel room of him having sex with two teenage girls. The Walt Disney Company immediately threatened a lawsuit. The Academy apologized and replaced producer Alan Carr with Gilbert Cates.

 

1992- Presidential candidate Bill Clinton uttered the legendary American phrase:" I smoked pot- but I didn’t inhale!" 

 

1993- At the 65^th Academy Awards, Disney’s Aladdin won two Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Soundtrack. Best Animated Short was Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase by Joan Gratz.

 

2019- Tim Burton’s remake of the Disney animated classic Dumbo opened in theaters.

 

2020- At President Trump’s insistence, the FDA approved emergency use of an anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine despite little evidence that it was effective in treating coronavirus. Even after the FDA declared hydroxychloroquine totally useless against the disease on Aug. 1 President Trump continued to tout its miraculous qualities.