tom sito's animation almanac for April 7, 2025

Birthdays St. Francis Xavier, William Wordsworth, Mongo Santamaria, Walter Winchell, David Frost, Percy Faith, Daniel Ellsberg, Jerry Brown, Alan Pakula, Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Irene Castle, Wayne Rogers, Stan Winston, James Garner, Olkirk Christenson- the inventor of Lego toys, Francis Ford Coppola is 86, Russell Crowe is 61, Jacky Chan (born Chan Kong Shang) is 71

 

 

1891- Showman P.T. Barnum died of old age. The man who invented kiddie matinees, the Greatest Show on Earth, and coined the word “Jumbo” and “ There’s a sucker born every minute.” His last words were "How were the box office receipts today?"

 

1927- Abel Gance’s classic film Napoleon premiered at the Paris Opera. Gances active camera and editing were years ahead of their time, climaxed by a triptych of large images on three movie screens linked by synchronized projectors. One American man in the audience, Walter Wallin, was inspired to develop the Panavision wide screen lens, used in many movies.

 

 

1939-"The Ugly Duckling" the last Disney Silly Symphony short cartoon.

 

1939- At the Philadelphia Academy of Music, recording sessions began for the music of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. They would continue for 42 more days. Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Philharmonic.

 

1949- The Musical "South Pacific" debuted. Some Enchanted Evening…

 

1950- SILLY PUTTY- In 1943 chemist James Wright was looking for a substitute synthetic rubber to help the allied war effort. He failed in that, but what he made was a sticky silicon goo that was malleable and did not stain. In 1950 he showed it to a friend named Peter Hodgson who was a toy manufacturer. Hodgson thought this was a great idea for a kids toy and packaged it in a plastic Easter egg to take advantage of the upcoming Easter holiday. This day Silly Putty was announced at the NY Toy Fair and became a sensation. Astronauts even took it to space to stick small objects down so they wouldn’t float around in zero gravity.

 

1970- The film Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and John Voight won the Best Picture Oscar. The only x-rated (NC-17) film ever to do so. Walt Disney’s It’s Tough to be a Bird” won best animated short.

 

1990- The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center opened a show of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC cancelled. Mapplethorpe’s explicit depictions of gay and s/m lifestyles shocked neoconservative critics of the national endowments for the arts. A media debate on whether government should subsidize or censor art raged, and Dennis Barry the museum director was tried for obscenity. His acquittal was seen as a victory for free expression, but the argument cast a pall on future funding of controversial art.

 

30^th Anniv 1995- A Goofy Movie opened theaters. Directed by Kevin Lima. A lot of the animation was done at Disney’s Paris animation studio.

 

30^th Anniv 1995- Frank & Ollie premiered, a documentary written and directed by Frank Thomas’ son, Ted Thomas.

 

1998- Pop star George Michael was busted after exposing himself to an undercover policeman in a public park men’s room in Beverly Hills.

 

1998- Lead singer for the punk band The Plasmatics, Wendy O. Williams, committed suicide with a shotgun. The outrageously mohawked punk rocker was known for stunts on stage like destroying her amplifiers with a chainsaw, skydiving in the nude, autoeroticism with a sledgehammer, and crashing a burning school bus into a wall of television sets.

 

2155- According to the show Babylon 5 today marked the first contact between humans and the Centauri Alliance.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 6, 2025

Birthdays: Raphael of Urbino, Sacajawea, Ram Dass, Butch Cassidy, Gustav Moreau, Lowell Thomas, Merle Haggard, Billy Dee Williams, George Reeves, Michelle Phillips, Andre Previn, Barry Levinson, Roy Thinnes, John Ratzenberger, Gheorghe Zamfir, Paul Rudd is 56, Zach Braff is 50.

  

 

1520- Renaissance artist RAPHAEL of Urbino, died on his 37th birthday. Vasari wrote of the great artist: " He pursued pleasures and love affairs without moderation. On one occasion he went to excess, and returned home with a violent fever, whereof he died soon after." 

 

1853- The town of Portland Oregon founded.

 

1896- The first OLYMPIC GAMES of the modern era opened in Athens Greece. The last was closed by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius in 391A.D along with all the other pagan festivals. The Olympics were revived as the idea of Baron Pierre Coubertin, who became the first president of the IOC. These games also saw the first modern Marathon race. Appropriately it was won by a Greek- Spyridion Louis. 

 

1906 – Working for Edison cartoonist James Stuart Blackton released his film The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.Today it is considered the first animated film. Blackton made a fortune, lost it, and was hit by a bus on Pico Blvd. in 1940. But his animated antics paved the way for Mickey, Bugs, Bart, and Ariel. 

 

 

1931- The Little Orphan Annie radio show premiered. “Who's the little chatterbox?
The one with pretty auburn locks. Who can it be, It's Little Orphan Annie…”

 

1933- the Screen Writer's Guild, later the WGA, formed. 

 

1936- Episode One of the Flash Gordon series of movie serials premiered. This introduced Flash, Dale, and Emperor Ming the Merciless of the Planet Mongo.  It made a moviestar out of Olympic gold medalist Larry “Buster” Crabbe.

1946- WB short “Daffy Doodles” Bob McKimson’s first directorial effort. Daffy as a graffiti artist bedevils Officer Porky.

 

1951- Happy Birthday AstroBoy! According to the 1951 manga comic book by Osamu Tezuka, today Professor Elephant completed the little boy with the suction cup feet and pointed hairdo. Originally called Tetsuwan Atomo, he was named Astro Boy when Mushi Prod released the animated version in the US in 1961. 

 

1956- Elvis Presley signed his first movie deal with Paramount Pictures.

 

1956- The iconic round Capitol Records Building in Hollywood opened for business. Its recording studios were used by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Les Paul to create their classic albums.

 

1970- Sean Flynn was the only child of Errol Flynn and Lili Damita. He became a freelance war photographer who specialized in going to the most dangerous war zones. This day he was arrested by the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the Cambodian jungle. He was never seen again. His mother had him declared legally dead in 1984. Sean Flynn was 28.

 

1974- ABBA, a new disco phenomenon from Sweden is introduced to the world when they win a Eurovision song contest. Mama Mia!

 

1991- The first episode of Darkwing Duck premiered.

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 5, 2025

Birthdays: Plato, Swinburne, Booker T. Washington, Josef Lister, Bette Davis, Nadar, Jean Fragonard, animator Hicks Lokey, Nguyen Van Thieu, historian Robert Bloch, Gale Storm, Washington Atlee-Burpee the mail order seed king, Spencer Tracy, Frank Gorshin, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Nigel Hawthorne, Peter Greenway, Gregory Peck,  Colin Powell, Mary Costa, the voice of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Roger Corman, Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA is 75, Pharrell Williams is 52.

 

1874- Johann Strauss Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus (the Bat) premiered in Vienna. 

 

1913- Ebbets Field opened in Flatbush. The Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Highlanders (Yankees) 3-2.

 

1915- Jess Willard knocked down Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion in a title fight in Havana Cuba. The older Johnson retired after the fight. Jess Willard wouldn’t hold the title long though, on July 4^th Willard lost to new kid Jack Dempsey.

 

1923- Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band took a train from Chicago to Richmond Indiana to record Chimes Blues. Satchmo’s first record.

 

1930 -James Dewar invented the Twinkie. He said he got the name when he drove by a billboard advertising "Twinkle-Toe Shoes" and modified it to Twinkie. Dewar ate two every day of his life, and called them, “The best darn-tootin idea I ever had!” 

 

1931- Fox Film Company dropped their option on young star John Wayne as a dud not going anywhere. Wayne eked out an existence doing cheap westerns for Republic and Monogram until John Ford of RKO made him a star in 1939’s Stagecoach.

 

 

1940- Disney short Donald’s Dog Laundry.

 

1945- The first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon.

 

1956- At Disneyland, The Bathroom of the Future opened at Tomorrowland.

 

1963- The Lava Lamp invented by Dr. Edward Craven Walker.

 

1965- Julie Andrews had created the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway. But when filming the movie version old studio head Jack Warner decided she was not a big enough star, so he used Audrey Hepburn with a dubbed singing voice. But Andrews had her revenge. At the Academy Awards this night My Fair Lady won Best Picture, but Julie Andrews won the best actress Oscar for Mary Poppins. She famously said, "I would like to thank Jack Warner for making this award possible!"

 

1975- The Best Animated Short Oscar went to Closed Mondays, claymation from Portland based Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton. In 2005 the Will Vinton Studio was renamed Laika.

 

1976- Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes died at age 76. Hughes had inherited his fathers oil rig tool company at 17, and built the mighty Hughes aircraft empire, and ran RKO pictures. He was a well-known Hollywood playboy and romanced beautiful stars like Jane Russell. But after surviving several test plane crashes, he became addicted to pain killers and became increasing paranoid and withdrawn from the world. He died a strange shut in, long haired and living on a diet of drugs, and saving his urine in mason jars.

 

1985- Singer David Lee Roth quit the rock band Van Halen to pursue a solo career.

 

1987- The young Fox TV network premiered The Tracey Ullman Show. She was an English sketch comedy actor who did clever impressions. But a highlight of the show was the unique animated interstitials before commercials. One in particular was a take on a family done by Matt Groening entitled The Simpsons. The Tracey Ullman Show eventually ended, but The Simpsons spun off into a regular TV show in 1989. It became one of the most famous, longest running TV series in history. Tracy Ullman later complained, “I played midwife to the Simpsons.”

 

1994- Grunge rock star Kurt Kobain shot himself. His body wasn’t discovered until two days later.

 

2063- FIRST CONTACT- According to Star Trek, this is the day Professor Zephram Cochran adapted an old-World War III missile and invented the Warp Drive, enabling the Earth to begin deep space exploration, and during whose maiden flight he made the first contact with an alien race- from the planet Vulcan.  

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.

 . 

 

 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.