Animation Fun Facts for June 29, 2017

Birthdays: Bernard Hermann, Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, Slim Pickens, Nelson Eddy, Gary Busey, John Hench, Little Eva, Harmon Killabrew, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Anna Sophie-Mutter, Leroy Anderson, Maria Conchita Alonso, Robert Evans, Matthew Weiner, Brett McKenzie, Lion King Director Roger Allers, Ray Harryhausen

1935- Disney short Who Killed Cock Robin? Directed by Dave Hand.

1936- Pope Pius XI published an encyclical warning of the evils of Motion Pictures. “They glorify Lust and Lascivious behavior.”

1940 – ROBIN THE BOY WONDER- According to Batman Comics, this day mobsters rubbed out a circus highwire team known as the Flying Graysons, leaving their son Dick an orphan. He was taken in by millionaire Bruce Wayne, so Batman could have his Robin.

1940- First day shooting on the film Citizen Kane.

1950- The Hollywood Ten are given jail sentences for contempt of Congress.

1956- Marilyn Monroe married author Arthur Miller.

1967-Actress Jane Mansfield and her dog were killed in a car crash when their car slammed into a parked tractor-trailer. Her children including Marisa Hargitay were in the back seat but unhurt.

1968 - "Tip-Toe Thru' The Tulips With Me" by Tiny Tim peaks at #17.

1978- Actor Bob Crane, best known as the star in the television series Hogan’s Heroes, was found beaten to death with an electric cord wrapped around his neck in a Scottsdale Arizona hotel room. Around his body were a large library of his home made porno tapes.

2007- Pixar’s Ratatouille premiered, directed by Brad Bird.

Animation Fun Facts for June 28, 2017

Birthdays: King Henry VIII, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dillinger, Richard Rogers, Gilda Radner, Cartoonist George Booth is 91, Leon Panetta, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kathy Bates is 69, John Cusack is 51, Mel Brooks is 91

 

1868- Artist Claude Monet was so broke and depressed he jumped in the Seine River. After splashing around for a while, he decided its silly to drown himself so he swam to the riverbank and went for a drink. He outlived all the Impressionist painters of his generation, dying in 1926.

1928- Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines recorded West End Blues.

1955- Walt Disney sends a memo to his studio employees to please come to the grand opening day of Disneyland Park on July 17. He was concerned not enough people would show up the first day and it would look bad on the TV cameras. He shouldn’t have worried. 100,000 people came that first day.

1975- Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling died during open heart surgery. He was 50. His last movie script was called The Man, about resistance of the Washington powerful to the first black president of the United States.

Animation Fun Facts for June 27, 2017

Birthdays: Swedish King Charles XII "the Madman of the North", Helen Keller, Norma Kamali, Charles Stuart Parnell, Bob" Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan, Emma Goldman,  Marine General Chesty Puller, Walter Johnson, Ross Perot, Isabella Adjani is 61, Lauren Hill, Alice McDermott, J.J. Abrams is 51, Tony Leung Chu Wai is 55, Toby McGuire is 42. 

Katherine Beaumont the voice of Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Wendy in Peter Pan is 79.

1922 - Newberry Medal 1st presented for kids literature, the first winner was Hendrik Van Loon.

1949 - "Captain Video & His Video Rangers," debut on DUMONT-TV.

1962- Daryl F. Zanuck showed up at the quarterly meeting of the exec board of 20^th Century Fox, and in a celebrated corporate showdown, he wrested back control of the company he founded in 1935, but had lost control of.

1966- TV soap opera Dark Shadows premiered. Barnabas Collins was the first vampire to have issues with his job, and so became the ancestor of the modern romantic vampires of True Blood and Twilight.

1973- Senior White House Counsel John Dean testified to the Watergate committee that President Richard Nixon maintained an Enemies List. The list ran from Senator Ted Kennedy and journalist Daniel Shore, to June Foray and Bill Scott, who did the cartoon voices of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose.

1984- Hollywood introduced the PG-13 rating to indicate graphic violence, invented for the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

1995- Boyishly proper British actor Hugh Grant is busted for soliciting sex from a Sunset Blvd. street hooker named Divine Brown. 

2007- British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped down after ten years. His security police  nickname in office was Bambi.

2008- Pixar’s WALL-E opened in theaters.

Animation Fun Facts for June 26, 2017

Birthdays: Peter Lorre- born Laszlo Lowenstein, Pearl Buck, Abner Doubleday, Babe Deidrickson-Zacharias, Willy Messerschmidt, Claudio Abbado, Woolie Reitherman, Gregg LeMond, Vittorio Storaro, Colonel Tom Parker, Pat Morita, Chris Isaak, Derek Jeter, Chris O’Donnell, Sean Hayes is 47

1870- Atlantic City inaugurated its ocean side boardwalk; the first of it's kind in the US.

1888- Scots writer Robert Louis Stevenson embarked from San Francisco to wander the South Pacific and finally settle in Samoa.

1922- Montgomery’s Country House opened in the Los Feliz Area of LA. In 1926 it changed its name to The Tam O’ Shanter.  In the 1930s it was the nearest bar to Walt Disney’s Hyperion Studio, so animators called it “ the commissary”. It is still in business today. Walt Disney’s favorite table is marked.

1924 - The Ziegfeld Follies opened on Broadway.

1925- Charlie Chaplin has a lavish Hollywood premiere for his new film The Gold Rush.

He had edited the film in secret in an upstairs hotel room in Salt Lake City to keep away from the public and his wife’s bill collectors.

1925- From his Soho London flat, John Logie Baird invented an early form of television. The Boob Tube has no one single Tom Edison-like inventor but many claimants. The Englishman joined the ranks of others who claimed to have invented TV first, including Philo Farnsworth, Bell Labs, Vladimir Zworkin, and Dr. Lee DeForrest.

1959- Disney short Donald in Mathmagic Land premiered with the film Darbie O’Gill and the Little People.

1964 - Beatles release "A Hard Day's Night" album.

1965-"Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man " by the Byrds hits number one on the US pop charts. Bob Dylan wrote the lyrics. William Shatners version became the most well known.

1977 - Elvis Presley does his last public performance, in Indianapolis.

1984- Campy singer Tiny Tim married Miss Vicky on the Johnny Carson show during a live broadcast.

Animation Fun Facts for June 25, 2017

Birthday: George Orwell, Marc Charpentier, Lord Louis Mountbatten, General Hap Arnold, Cajun musician Clifton Chenier, Sidney Lumet, Walter Brennan, Willis Reed, George Abbott, Carly Simon, June Lockhart, Alex Toth, Peyo (the creator of the Smurfs), Jimmy Dyne-o-Mite Walker, George Michaels, Mike Myers is 54, Ricky Gervais is 56.

1835- Antoine Baron Gros was a celebrated painter under Napoleon and a friend of David and Ingres. But politics and tastes change. In a royalist postwar France dominated by Delacroix and Gericault, Baron Gros lived on forgotten and melancholy. This day the 64 year old artist drowned himself in the Seine.

1857- Writer Gustav Flaubert went on trial for pornography for his first novel Madame Bovary. He was acquitted, and went on to write his next book Salammbo the Carthaginian princess who strangled herself with her own hair. Don’t try this at home ladies!

1870- Toi Yo ta Hoooo! Richard Wagner's opera Die Walkure premiered in Munich.

1910- First performance of Stravinsky's ballet "Firebird" by Diagheilev and his Ballet Russe.  Stravinsky used to refer to the dancers as "A bunch of knock-kneed Lolitas".

1934- Milt Kahl's first day at the Walt Disney Studios. It was said he was the first artist to ever show Walt a real portfolio of drawings to get hired.

1940- Young actor, and liberal labor activist Ronald Reagan married his first wife, actress Jane Wyman.

1949- Chuck Jones Bugs Bunny short “ Longhaired Hare” premiered.

1951- After losing a power struggle to Dory Schary, Louis B. Mayer announced he was stepping down as head of MGM. Mayer in his time was the most powerful man in Hollywood. He kept an all white office modeled after Mussolini’s in Rome.

1951 - 1st color TV broadcast-CBS' Arthur Godfrey from NYC to 4 cities.

1967- The "Our World" Beatles concert, the first television event to attempt a worldwide satellite linkup. They sing and record "All You Need is Love" live in front of an audience of 400.

1981- Bill Gates and Paul Allen file papers to incorporate their company Microsoft.

1982- Ridley Scott’s sci-fi film Blade Runner opened.

1980- Disney’s film Herbie Goes Bananas, premiered.

1997- Disney's animated film Hercules opened in theaters.

2009- Michael Jackson, called the King of Pop, died after his personal physician Dr. Conrad Murray administered a powerful sedative named Propofol to help him sleep and stopped his heart instead. He was 50 and been performing on stage since the age of 5.

Animation Fun Facts for June 24, 2017

Birthdays: Earl Kitchener, the Sirdar of Omdurman, Roy O. Disney, E.I. Dupont, Ambrose Bierce, Jack Dempsey, John Ciardi, Mick Fleetwood, Phil Harris- singer and voice of Baloo in Disney’s Jungle Book, Billy Casper, Michelle Lee, Claude Chabrol, Chief Dan George, Pete Hamill, Peter Weller, Sherry Springfield

1901- The first exhibit in a Paris salon on the Rue Lafitte of a Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso.

1945- Meet the Press debuted on radio. Two years later it moved to television and it remains TV’s longest running program.

1949 - "Hopalong Cassidy" becomes the1st network western on television-NBC.

1963 - 1st demonstration of a home video recorder, at BBC Studios, London

1970 – The movie "Catch 22" opened in movie theaters.

1997- Brian Keith, actor (Family Affair, Dirty Dingus McGee), shot himself at 75. He was suffering from incurable cancer and tired of the pain fighting the disease.

Animation Fun Facts for June 23, 2017

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Augustus, Josephine Bonaparte, Alan Turing, Bob Fosse, James Levine, Dan Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather, Joss Whedon, Dr Alfred Kinsey the sex researcher, Edward VIII, aka the Duke of Windsor, Selma Blair, Justice Clarence Thomas, Frances MacDormand is 60

1868- Christopher Latham Scholes patents the typewriter. In 1873, he sold his patent to the Remington Company who had made rifles.  In 1874 Mark Twain secretly admitted to a friend that he enjoyed writing on the newfangled technology.

1944- Franklin Roosevelt's last fireside chat on the radio.

 1963- In Disneyland the Enchanted Tiki Room opened with the first animatronics (the birds).

  

1976- Work completed on Toronto’s CN Tower. Called the world’s tallest free-standing structure.

1979- The Knack released the single My Sharona.

1989- Tim Burton’s film " Batman" opened.

1989- Disney’s Honey I Shrank the Kids opened with the Roger Rabbit short Tummy Trouble.