Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov. 20, 2024

Birthdays: Robert F. Kennedy Sr., Maya Plisetskaya, Gene Tierney, Dick Smothers, Bo Derek, Sean Young, Richard Dawson, Estelle Parsons, Barbera Hendricks, Duane Allman, Chester Gould the creator of Dick Tracy, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Benoit Mandlebrot, Alastair Cooke, Sam Wright, Ming Na Wen is 61, President Joe Biden is 82  

 

 

1620- Shortly before coming ashore in the New World, The Mayflower Compact was drawn up by William Brewster and signed by the 24 male Pilgrim settlers "To covenant and combine ourselves into a civile body-politick". 

 

1718- " Fifteen men on a Dead Man’s Chest, Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum! Even though he knew the British Navy had cornered him, and was going to attack tomorrow, violent pirate Blackbeard spent this night drinking and partying with his crew. When someone asked Blackbeard, if you fall who do you leave your treasure to? He replied, “ No one knows where the treasure is but me and the Devil himself. And the longest liver can have it all.” Arrr….

 

1752- Death of John Shore, he was the most celebrated trumpet player of his time. Georg Frederich Handel and Henry Purcell wrote music for him, and he was the inventor of the Tuning Fork. 

 

1795- Beethoven’s opera Fidelio premiered. He rewrote the overture four times and still wasn’t happy with it. So, he rewrote it once more and published the other four as the Leonore Overtures.

 

 

1875- Henry James published his first novel Rockwell Hudson.

 

1894- Prince Ananias premiered, the first operetta of Victor Herbert.

 

1947- The longest running television show in history- Meet the Press, premiered. And it is still on today.

 

1958- On the TV show Playhouse 90, John Frankenheimer presented “The Old Man” the first show shot and edited completely on videotape. Videotape had been around since 1951 but was used primarily for in-studio live news shows and variety segments.

 

1959- The day the famous Twilight Episode aired “Time Enough At Last”. When Burgess Meredith played a bookworm who gets his wish to be left alone to read books, except…”

 

 

1998- Several state governments and the US tobacco industry reached a landmark settlement arising from lawsuits over smoking illnesses. The trial killed off once and for all ads featuring The Marlboro Cowboy and Joe Camel, a cartoon character that at one point was as recognizable to children as Donald Duck.

 

1998- Pixar’s film A Bugs Life was generally released.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov 19, 2024

Birthdays: King Charles I of England, President James Garfield, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Roy Campanella, Tommy Dorsey, Ted Turner is 86, Calvin Klein, Indira Ghandi, Larry King, Kathleen Quinlan, Alan Young -Mr. Ed’s friend, Ahmad Rashad, Allison Janey is 65, Meg Ryan is 63, Jodie Foster is 62, Adam Driver is 41, Dick Cavett is 88

 

1493- On his second voyage to the New World, this day Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Puerto Rico.

 

1939- The Looney-Tunes short The Night Watchman, a Sniffles cartoon that marked the directing debut of Chuck Jones.

 

1941- Princess Iron Fan, by Wan Guchan and Wan Laiming, opened . Considered the first Asian animated feature film. 

 

 

1942- In a concentration camp in Poland, author-artist Bruno Schulz was executed. The author of “Street of Crocodiles” last act was being forced by a Gestapo officer to paint images from Brothers Grimm fairytales on his son’s bedroom wall before he was shot.

  

 

1959- Jay Ward's television show 'The Adventures of Rocky and his Friends' debuts. 

 

 

1969- The great soccer champion Pele scored his 1,000 goal.

 

 

1998- Film Director Alan J. Pakula directed classics like All the Presidents Men, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Pelican Brief. He was one of the Hollywood types who preferred living in New York City. This day while driving on the Long Island Expressway a large truck kicked up in its tires a discarded piece of steel pipe and flung it through Pakula’s windshield, killing him instantly.

 

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 18, 2024

Birthdays: Armelita Galli-Curci, Karl Maria Von Weber, W.S. Gilbert, Johnny Mercer,

Astronaut Alan Shepard, Louis Daguerre, Brenda Vaccarro, Eugene Ormandy, George Gallup, Warren Moon, Pam Dawber, Rocket Ishmail, Delroy Lindo, Kevin Nealon, Owen Wilson is 57, Chloe Servigny is 51

 

 

1718- Francois Voltaire’s first play Oedipe, premiered in Paris. 

 

 

1865 Mark Twain's first story "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' published.

  

 

1889- Richard Strauss completed his orchestral tone poem Tod und Verklarung, Death and Transfiguration. The 29 year old created a musical illustration of what it felt like to die and your soul ascend to glory. Fifty-nine years later in 1949, as 85 year old Richard Strauss lay dying, he said to his wife, “Yes....yes,....It is exactly the way I saw it…”

 

1902- THE TEDDY BEAR BORN-The Washington Evening Star published a story of how President Teddy Roosevelt while hunting couldn't bring himself to shoot a grizzly bear cub. Cartoonist Cliff Berryman illustrated the incident with one of his signature “dingbat” bear cubs in a gesture of  “oh no!” Brooklyn toymaker Morris Mitchcolm sewed a doll from the illustration in the newspaper and sent the first one to the White House. Mitchcolm did so well with the sale of Teddy Bears he founded the Ideal Toy Company.

 

1928- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MICKEY MOUSE- At Universal’s Colony Theater in New York, Walt Disney’s cartoon "Steamboat Willie" debuted before a movie called Gang War. The first major sound cartoon success and the official birth of Mickey Mouse. Two earlier silent Mickey's were being completed, but when Walt saw Al Jolson speak in The Jazz Singer, he held those two shorts back so the sound experiment could go ahead. At this time Walt Disney had just 11 employees. 

  

 

1963-The first push button telephones go into service. By 1980 they pretty much replaced the rotary dial phones..

 

1968- Mattel introduced Hot Wheels toy cars in stores.

 

1970- At the Lakeside School in Seattle, a young kid named Bill Gates was first shown computer programming.

 

 

1983- A Christmas Story opened, directed by Bob Clark. The film adaptation based on the stories of Jean Shepherd did not do well in its initial run but has since become a seasonal holiday classic.

 

1985- Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin & Hobbs debuted.

 

1988- Disney’s Oliver & Company released.

 

1988- Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time was released.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 17, 2024

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Vespasian 9 A.D, Il Bronzino, August Ferdinand Moebius-1790 the inventor of the Moebius Strip. Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, Rock Hudson- born named Roy Scherer Jr, Walt Peregoy, Peter Cook, Isamu Noguchi, Lauren Hutton, Tom Seaver, Gordon Lightfoot, Les Clark, Lee Strasberg, Shelby Foote, Sophie Marceau, Martin Scorcese is 82, Lorne Michaels is 80, Danny deVito is 80

 

1839- Oberto premiered, an opera written by a new composer named Guisseppi Verdi. ( Joe Green). The great composer would go on to write Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata.

 

1853- San Francisco passed a law to put up street signs at the intersections of major streets.

 

1858- A Pennsylvania businessman named William Larimer founded a new town at the foot of the Rockies called Denver.

 

1869- The Suez Canal opened. The opera "Aida" was commissioned to be premiered for this occasion but Verdi missed his deadline by ten years.

 

1875- Russian psychic Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott found the American Theosophical Society.

 

1876- Peter Tchaikovsky’s musical rhapsody the Marche Slav premiered.

 

 

1891- Polish pianist Ignaz Paderewski made his American debut at Carnegie Hall. Paderewski created the cliché image of the temperamental classical musician with long flowing hair. Classical music became known as longhair music.

 

1926- The Chicago Black Hawks played their first game, 

beating the Toronto St. Pats 4-1.

 

1933- The Marx Bros classic Duck Soup premiered.

 

1978- This night, our world was rocked by a disturbance in The Force more powerful than the destruction of Alderon, It was "The Star Wars Holiday Special", a two-hour comedy variety show on CBS, with Harrison Ford, Beatrice Arthur and Nelvana’s animated cartoon. To this day even Mark Hamill jokes about how dumb it was.

 

 

1989- Don Bluth's animated film All Dogs Go to Heaven premiered. 

 

1993- US Congress voted for the free trade, bill called NAFTA.

 

1994- The Sony Corporation posted a $2.7 billion dollar loss from its first year owning a Hollywood movie studio. Yet despite a lot of industry jokes ( “What’s the difference between Sony Pictures and the Titanic?-answer: The Titanic had entertainment.”) By 1996 the studio was on top with blockbusters like “Men in Black”

 

2002- Premiere of Disney’s Treasure Planet.

 

2019- The first reported case of CoVid 19 was reported in Wuhan China. It grew to become a global pandemic much like the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. So far it has killed 6.6 million people around the world, 1,120,000 in the USA.

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 16, 2024

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Tiberius 42BC, Paul Hindemith, George S. Kaufmann, W.C. Handy, Burgess Meredith, Daws Butler, Bob Watson, Zina Garrison, Dwight Gooden, Maggie Gylenhall is 47

 

 

1801- The first issue of the New York Post. Alexander Hamilton and his Federalists wanted a paper to print their views. Editor James Coleman once had to kill a man in a duel that morning and get back to the office to get the afternoon edition out. 

 

1906- Opera star Enrico Caruso was charged for pinching a ladies’ bottom while visiting the Bronx Zoo. He claimed a monkey did it.

 

 

1915- BIRTH OF THE COKE BOTTLE- The owners of Coca Cola were concerned that the success of their soft drink was being subverted by all the various cheap imitations. They decided if they had a distinctive bottle people would recognize genuine Coca Cola.  This day the first Coca-Cola appeared in their distinctive curved little green bottles, created by the Ross Glass Co. of Indiana.

 

1924- THE MURDER OF THOMAS INCE- Thomas Ince was a film director and early Hollywood studio owner whose property later became the site of MGM studios. This day he boarded William Randolph Hearst’s yacht Oneida for a birthday party in his honor. On the boat among the guests was Charlie Chaplin and Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies. When the boat docked Thomas Ince was dead and everyone very upset. The official cause of death was a heart attack but there was no autopsy or investigation and the Hearst press quickly hushed things up. The legend goes Hearst discovered Chaplin and Davies in flagrante-delicto, and in a jealous rage shot Ince when he came between them. We’ll never know for sure. 

 

1932- VAUDEVILLE DIED- Vaudeville was the generic name for one admission to a showcase of short theatrical acts- singers, comics, jugglers, trained animals, etc. Vaudeville gave their first opportunities to many great twentieth century performers like Chaplin, Jolson, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Gypsy Rose Lee and W.C. Fields. But it was slowly supplanted by more modern forms of entertainment like Movies and Radio. If you asked experts to pinpoint a date for the official end of vaudeville, many would say it was this date, when the New York Palace Theater on Broadway, a premiere palace for Vaudeville, switched from live acts to purely movies. 

 

1946- The Television Academy of Arts and Sciences founded. Fred Allen once said:  "We call television a Medium, because nothing on it is Rare, or Well Done."

 

1952- The first time in a Peanuts comic strip where Lucy pulls away the football as Charlie Brown was attempting to kick it. It became one of Schulz’s best running jokes.

 

1960- CLARK GABLE DIED- The 59 year old star had just completed the film the Misfits, a film in which director John Huston demanded a great deal of physical exertion.  He had told his agent that the unprofessional antics of his moody co-star Marilyn Monroe had driven him so nuts they were going to give him a heart attack. Gable had one after shooting. Ten days later, while convalescing in Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, Clark  was sitting up in bed, joking with the nurse and reading a magazine. Suddenly he closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the pillow, and died. Clark Gable was 59.

He composed his own epitaph, but it was never used- " Oh Well, Back to Silents."

 

1964- Santa Claus Conquers the Martians opened in the U.S. Pia Zadora was a star. 

 

1977- Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind opened in theaters.

 

1981- Actor William Holden died. The handsome star of such classics as Sunset Blvd, Stalag 17 and Network, was told as a young actor to take a few drinks to calm the pre-camera jitters. But by now he was a hopeless alcoholic. On Nov 12, at home alone and drunk, he tripped over a throw rug and cracked his head on a table edge. Too inebriated to call for help, he dabbed his forehead with bunches of Kleenex tissues until he bled to death. This day he was found. He was 63. President Ronald Reagan released a statement: "I have a great feeling of grief. We were close friends for many years. What do you say about a longtime friend – a sense of personal loss, a fine man.”

 

1990- Disney’s The Rescuers Down Under premiered. The first traditionally animated film to be painted digitally on computer. With it was the short Mickey’s Prince and the Pauper, the last Disney theatrical done with acetate cels and paint at the Burbank ink & paint dept. 

 

1996- Warner Bros Space Jam, where Bugs Bunny met NBA star Michael Jordan.

 

2001- The film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone premiered to great fanfare and massive box office. Harry Potter’s creator J.K. Rowling had been so poor she at one time had been on the dole, now she was one of the richest women in the world. In England second only to Madonna and the Queen.

 

2002-The mysterious flu-like disease SAARS first reported in Kwantung China. The epidemic spread around the world killing hundreds but was contained by the following summer. One reason a covid 19 vaccine was developed so quickly in 2020, was because covid is similar enough to saars that scientists were able to work off the existing research.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 15, 2024

B-Days: Georgia O'Keefe, Bill Melendez, Irvin Rommel the "Desert Fox", Avrial Harriman, Daniel Barenboim, George Bolet, William Pitt the Elder, Veronica Lake, Beverly D'Angelo is 73, Mantovanni, Ed Asner, Sam Waterson is 84, Otis Armstrong, Petula Clark is 92

 .

 

1754- First use of the modern trombone. It was played at a child's funeral.

  

1828- Author Victor Hugo signed a contract with Gosselin's Publishing House to write a story about the cathedral of Notre Dame du Paris. He was paid 4,000 francs in advance; The HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME was the result. 

 

1907- The comic strip A. Mutt by Harry “Bud” Fisher debuted in the San Francisco Chronicle. The name was later changed to Mutt & Jeff. It was the first 6 day consecutive daily newspaper strip. The strip was so popular that its creator Harry “Bud “ Fisher became a celebrity, and negotiated the first large backend deal. He became the first millionaire cartoonist.

 

1926- FIRST NETWORK BROADCAST- NBC hooked up 20 cities across America and Canada for a radio program "The Steinway Hour" with Arthur Rubinstein.  It came from the Steinway building penthouse on 57th St. in Manhattan.

 

1934- Animator Bill Tytla started work at Walt Disney's on a trial basis for $150 a week. He would create Grumpy the Dwarf, The Devil in Fantasia and Dumbo.

 

1958- Movie star Tyrone Power was filming a sword duel with George Sanders on the film Solomon and Sheba. He paused and told the director “ I have to stop, I don’t feel well”. He then dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 44. His father Tyrone Power Sr. had also died on a Hollywood movie set in 1931 of a heart attack,

 

1965- Walt Disney announced he planned to build a second Disneyland, this one in Orlando Florida.

 

1977- The Bee Gees soundtrack for the film Saturday Night Fever came out. 

 

1979- ABC news announced they would broadcast a daily update of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The late night show became Nightline.

 

1989- Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid opened. 

 

1990- It was revealed that the Grammy winning pop group Milli Vanilli didn’t sing on their own album but lip-synced to the music. 

 

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov 14, 2024

Birthdays: Robert Fulton, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Claude Monet, Aaron Copeland, McClean Stevenson, Jarahwahal Nehru, Mamie Eisenhower, Brian Keith, 

Louise Brooks, Ellis Marsalis, Harrison Salisbury, Dr. Condoleeza Rice, Yanni,

 P.J. O'Rourke, George Petrovic' called KaraGeorge "Black George" Serbian nationalist 1762, Astrid Lungren the creator of Pippi Longstockings, William Stieg, Laura San Giacomo is 62, Patrick Warburton is 60, Zhang Yimou is 73, King Charles III is 76

 

 

1832- The first regular horse drawn streetcar service began in New York.

 

1851- Herman Melville's novel "Moby Dick, or the Whale” was first published in the U.S. by Harper & Row. Before petroleum products, homes were illuminated by oil from refined whale blubber. This made hunting whales a lucrative trade for New Englanders. Herman Melville was inspired by a report of an albino whale named Mocha-Dick who had sunk seven ships off the coast of Java and was reported to have " a hide white as wool.” Melville also knew of a New Bedford whaling ship Essex that was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale in 1839.

For the famous author of Typee and Billy Budd, Moby Dick was a critical and financial disaster. What's now considered one of the greatest works of American literature was ridiculed in its time. Melville, broken in spirit, sank into obscurity and finished his life as a customs agent for the Port of New York. When he died, he was so forgotten the New York Times misspelled his name in it's obituary. 

 

1883- Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island, or, the Mutiny on the Hispaniola, first published. He wrote a friend,” It's quite silly and horrid fun – and what I want is the best book about Buccaneers that can be had"  Stevenson gave us our image of a typical pirate of the Spanish Main. His book told us about peg legs, pet parrots, skull and crossbones flag, treasure maps, and the song “ Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of rum…”  

 

1883- London’s World newspaper printed an exchange of telegrams between writer Oscar Wilde and painter James MacNeil Whistler. “ When you and I are together we never talk about anything but ourselves.”-Wilde. Whistler:” No, no, Oscar. When you and I are together we never talk about anything except me.”

 

1889- Inspired by Jules Verne's book Around the World in Eighty Days, New York World reporter Nellie Bly, real name Elizabeth Cochrane, set out to travel the world in the declared time. She did it in 72 days. 

Nellie Bly was considered by Victorian society scandalously independent. She was a war correspondent, she had herself committed to a lunatic asylum to report on mistreatment of the mentally ill, she went up in a balloon and was the first woman to descend to the bottom of the sea in a diving bell- bathysphere.

 

1921- Winston Churchill told his political constituents that so far the "Twentieth Century has been a terrible disappointment." Just wait, Winnie, you ain't see nothing yet.

 

1922- Happy Birthday B.B.C. the British Broadcasting Companies first regular radio service 2LO goes on the air with general election results. 

 

1935- At Walt’s invitation USC film professor Boris Morkovin began lectures to the Walt Disney animators about humor. “The Technique and Psychology of the Animated Cartoon”. Attending animator Shamus Culhane later recalled, “ We didn’t understand anything he said!”

 

1936- Disney short Mother Pluto, directed by Dave Hand.

 

1937- SPAM introduced! Shoulder-Pork And haM.

 

 

1943- When Bruno Walter was too ill to conduct the New York Philharmonic, 24 year old Leonard Bernstein was asked to assume the baton. Bernstein became an overnight sensation.

 

 

1957- The Supreme Court refused to review the challenge to government obscenity laws brought by Irving Klaw and his wife, producers of the Betty Page kinky pinup photos.

 

1959- In Holcomb Kansas, two men broke into a farm home and murdered four people. The subsequent trial and execution were attended by writer Truman Capote, who wrote the book “In Cold Blood”.

 

1960- Anthony Mann began shooting the film El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren.

 

1963- Volcanoes push up out of the sea the island of Circe, now part of Iceland.

 

1967- Jack Warner, the last surviving Warner Brother, sold his stake of Warner Bros and it’s huge film library to a Canadian company called Seven Arts. 

 

1968- Frank Sinatra announced that the smog and air pollution in Los Angeles had gotten so bad that he was moving out to the desert in Palm Springs. 

 

1980- Raging Bull, directed by Martin Scorcese opened in theaters.

 

 

1991- At ILM, the creation of the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park were going to be done in traditional stop motion animation, like Ray Harryhausen used to do. Two CGI animators, Steve “Spaz” Williams and Mark Dippe’ did a quick test of a moving T-Rex on their own time and this day left it out for review as Spielberg’s producers chanced by. They loved the test and showed it to Steven who declared it all had to be done in CGI. The resultant success of Jurassic Park was the turning point in the digital revolution in modern media.

 

1998- Pixar’s A Bugs Life Premiered.

 

1998- Colorful and eccentric NBA basketball star Dennis Rodman married beautiful supermodel Carmen Electra. There was some doubt at first as to the validity of the story as Rodman admitted he was blind drunk throughout and didn’t remember the ceremony. They divorced shortly after.

 

2003- Looney Tunes Back in Action opened in theaters. Directed by Joe Dante, animation directed by Eric Goldberg.

 

2016- Disney’s Moana premiered.