Animation Fun Facts for Aug 18, 2012, Sat.

Birthdays: Shelly Winters, Coco Channel, Roman Polanski is 79, Patrick Swayze, Madeleine Stowe, Christian Slater, Edward Norton is 42, Martin Mull, Denis Leary who did a voice in Finding Nemo, Ice Age and Bugs Life is 55, Robert Redford, born Charles Robert Redford Jr, is 76 1933 Mickey Mouse short " The Chain Gang", was one of the first cartoons to have the dog Pluto. 1939- The movie the Wizard of Oz released and made a star of Judy Garland. Frank Morgan, the actor playing the Wizard, needed to wear a shabby old coat so a studio costume designer went through some L.A. thrift stores until she found the good candidate. When Morgan looked in the lining he discovered the coat was previously owned by L.Frank Baum, writer of the Oz stories. Morgan was first president of the Screen Actor's Guild, but stepped down when he was considered 'too left'y to work with the Roosevelt administration. Lyricist Yip Harburg ( Somewhere over the Rainbow ) was later blacklisted as a communist. "And yer little dog ,too!!" 1947- Hewlett-Packard file papers to incorporate their electronics company. They began doing business in 1937, their first client was Walt Disney. Walt bought oscillators for his Fantasound sound system. 1974- The Xerox Company decided not to seriously market the Alto, the first personal computer that had a graphic window interface, ethernet and mouse, long before anyone else. Xerox decided to stick with copying machines and let go of many of their Palo Alto development team Xerox PARC. Most of their breakthroughs wound up in other computers like the Macintosh and the IBM PC.