Animation Fun Facts for August 31, 2020

Birthdays: Caligula 12AD, Commodus 161AD, Amilcare Ponchielli, Eldridge Cleaver, Buddy Hackett, James Coburn, Itshak Perleman is 73, Van Morrison, Arthur Godfrey, Richard Baseheart, Rocky Marciano. Alan J. Lerner, Hugh Harman, Maria Montressori (of the Montressori Method of education), William Saroyan, Richard Gere is 70, Chris Tucker is 47. 

 

1829- Giaconda’s Opera Guglielmo Tell debuted in Paris. The William Tell overture was heard for the first time- Hi Ho Silver!

 

1837- Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his American Scholar speech in Cambridge Mass. “Our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands is drawing to a close.” People called it an intellectual declaration of independence.

 

1887- Thomas Edison patented the plans for a Kinetoscope, his original version of Motion Pictures using George Eastman’s new celluloid roll film. Most of the actual work was done by Canadian scientist W.K.L. Dickson. 

 

1928- In Berlin, The ThreePenny Opera premiered, music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Bertholdt Brecht with Lotte Lenya as Pirate Jenny. Mackie Messer or Mack the Knife was born.

 

1935- Disney cartoon Plutos’ Judgement Day.

 

1938- Walt Disney put ten thousand dollars down to buy 51 acres on Buena Vista Street in Burbank. He would build his modern studio there.

1939- The very first comic book from MARVEL COMICS appeared on newsstands. The Human Torch and Submariner. Publisher Martin Goodman hired his wife’s cousin Stanley Leiber as general office manager. In 1941 Leiber changed his name to Stan Lee and became Chief Editor and writer. In 1961 with The Fantastic Four, the unique Marvel style began to emerge.

1941 –The Great Gildersleeve, a spin-off of Fibber McGee & Molly debuts on NBC radio.  The voice of Gildersleeve later narrated the UPA cartoon Gerald McBoing Boing.

 

1946- Looney Toon short 'Walky Talky Hawky' the first Foghorn Leghorn and Henery Hawk. The Foghorn character was based on a Fred Allen radio character Senator Beauregard Claghorn, that mocked bombastic Southern congressmen.

 

1948- Disney's 'Melody Time' premiered.

 

1948- Movie star Robert Mitchum was busted for smoking pot with a blonde in the Hollywood Hills. This would have normally smoked his career. Mitchum was so convinced his career was over that when asked by the police to state his occupation he said, "Former actor." But the new, postwar outlaw, noir attitude was in vogue. So bad-boy Mitchum emerged from county jail more popular than ever. When asked what he thought of being in jail, he said it's not much different than being free....but you meet a better clientele of people IN jail.

 

1955 - 1st microwave TV station operated in Lufkin, Texas.

 

1964 - Ground is broken for Anaheim Stadium, future home of the California Angels.

 

1964- Young comedian Richard Pryor made his first appearance on TV. He did some of his standup on Rudy Vallee’s Broadway Tonight Show.

 

1969- Former Heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano died in a plane crash in Newton Iowa. He had been hurrying home to attend a birthday party in his honor. He was 45.

 

1972- Russian Olga Korbut won a gold medal in gymnastics at the Olympics. She was the first of the cute little 15 year old girl gymnasts with the bright smile to catch the world’s attention.

 

2001- The NY Stock Exchange tries to avoid a Recession and bolster growth, by getting Michael Jackson and Jerry Lewis to ceremonially open trading sessions. Didn’t work.

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 30, 2020

 

Birthdays: Mary Shelley, Jacques Louis David, Huey Long, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Massey, Ted Williams, John Blondell, Nancy Kulp, Timothy Bottoms, Jean-Claude Killy, Shirley Booth, John Landis, Tug McGraw, R. Crumb is 77, Lewis Black is 72, Cameron Diaz is 48

 

1873- The Royal Canadian Mounted Police- The Mounties formed. 

 

1867- At the University of Göttingen, Albert Niemann isolated the chemical elements of the Columbian coca plant and named the powdery substance Cocaine.

 

1935- “Top Hat” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers premiered.

 

1936- First newspaper comic strip entirely devoted to Donald Duck.

 

1939- The last peacetime voyage of the HMS Queen Mary evacuated Americans fleeing the impending war in Europe. Among the crowd was a large contingent of Hollywood stars like Bob Hope and Jack Warner who planned to attend the first Cannes Film Festival (postponed until 1946). The Queen Mary kept radio silence across the ocean to hide from U-Boats. This was a wise, because her sister ship HMS Athenia was torpedoed.

 

1942- Cartoonist Al Kapp premiered his comic strip “ Fearless Fosdick”, a spoof of Dick Tracy detective stories.

 

1968- The first 7-11 store opened in Palmdale California. Have a Slurpee !

 

1975- Ralph Bakshi's film "Coonskin". Bad boy Bakshi's portrayal of African-American urban violence was deemed so offensive that it caused the first ever riot at the Museum of Modern Art, and it died at the box office. The film was retitled on video "Streetfight".

When Ralph resurfaced, he turned his attention to Sword & Fantasy films.

 

1979- President Jimmy Carter claimed that while boating on vacation in Georgia he was attacked by an enraged rabbit.

 

1980- Willie Nelson released his hit song “On the Road Again.”

 

1993- The David Letterman Show premiered on CBS. Letterman was wooed away from NBC for $42 million bucks.

 

2012- At the Republican Presidential convention, venerable 80 year old filmmaker Clint Eastwood made a fool out of himself by improvising a rambling dialogue with an empty chair that he meant to be the absent Pres. Obama. Eastwood was supposed to introduce candidate Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech, but his bizarre performance upstaged anything Romney said. This followed the keynote speech by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who talked only about himself for 16 minutes before he ever mentioned Romney.  For this and many other reasons, Romney lost by a landslide.

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug. 29, 2020

Birthdays: King James II Stuart, John Locke, Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr., Jean Dominique Ingres, Preston Sturges, Ingrid Bergman, William Friedkin is 84, Dinah Washington, George Montgomery, Slobodan Milosevic, Robin Leach, Michael Jackson, Joel Schumacher, choreographer Mark Morris, Charles Kettering inventor of the automobile ignition, Joyce Clyde Hall the founder of Hallmark greeting cards, Richard Attenborough, Donald O’Connor, Elliot Gould is 81, Rebecca DeMornay, John McCain.

Charlie Parker would be 100 today.

 

1929- New York City was having competitions between builders for who could build the tallest office building. The Chrysler Building had recently surpassed the Bank of Manhattan Building. On this day William Ratzengauer and former Presidential candidate Al Smith announced they would build a monster building, much higher than any other. It would be on the site of the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel and they would call it the Empire State Building.

 

1953- Warner's "Cat Tails for Two" introduced Speedy Gonzales.

 

1954- San Francisco International Airport (SFO) opened.

 

1955- Mamie Van Doren married Ray Anthony.

 

1958 - George Harrison joins the Quarrymen -Lennon-McCartney and Sutcliffe. The later rename themselves the Beatles.

 

1962- The Kennedy State Department sent poet laureate Robert Frost on a goodwill tour of Soviet Russia.

 

1967- Final Episode of the television series "The Fugitive". Dr. Richard Kimble catches the one-armed-man and clears his name.

 

50 Years Ago 1970- The Chicano Moratorium- 20,000 Americans of Mexican ancestry protested the war in Vietnam. During the rioting, the Times correspondent Ruben Salazar was killed by police. The Chicano Rights movement was born. 

 

1976 - Anissa Jones, the child actress who played Buffy on the television show Family Affair), died of a drug overdose at age 18.

 

2002- Peep-O-Rama, Times Square’s last remaining peep show, closed.

  

Animation Fun Facts for August 28, 2020

Birthdays: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham- minister of James I, Sean O'Flagherty, Donald O'Connor, Charles Boyer, Karl Boehm, Bruno Bettleheim, Disney designer Ferdinand Horvath, Ben Gazzara, Janet Evans, Ron 'Louisiana Lightning' Guidry, Nancy Kulp, Daniel Stern, Shania Twain, anim historian Charles Solomon, Jack Black is 51, Rita Coolidge is 59.  Jack "King" Kirby.

 

1830 - 1st locomotive in US, "Tom Thumb," runs from Baltimore to Ellicotts Mill.

.By 1835, the B &O was exclusively a steam affair.

 

1850- Lohengrin, the first opera written by Richard Wagner, premiered in Weimar. The Third Act chorus “Treulich Gefuhrt” became famous for weddings as “Here Comes the Bride, All Dressed in White”. Wagner asked his friend Franz Liszt to produce the opera because he was in exile for his political views. Wagner himself did not see Lohengrin performed until 1861. 

 

1907- UPS small package delivery service started in Seattle.

 

1922- The first broadcast commercial on radio.  It was for a real estate firm Queensboro Realty lasting ten minutes, and cost $100 dollars. The firm selling suburban homes in Queens NY immediately did $100,000 worth of business. The business world took note of this new method of advertising.

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 27, 2002

Birthdays: Man Ray, Martha Ray, LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson), Hegel, C.S. Forester, Hannibal Hamlin- Abe Lincolns first term vice president, Barbara Bach, Theodore Dreiser, Lady Antonia Fraser, Tommy Sands, Tuesday Weld is 77, Mangesuthu Buthelezi, Paul Rubens-aka Pee Wee Herman is 68

 

 

1814-  poet Percy Shelley eloped with Mary, the only daughter of John Godwin and Mary Wollenstonecraft. Godwin had objected to Shelley’s proposal for his daughters hand because he was an opium addict, a sexual libertine, an atheist and already married with a baby daughter! Yeah, but besides all that, what’s your objection? They ran off followed by Mary’s stepsister Claire who started sleeping with Lord Byron. Mary of course was the author of Frankenstein. 

 

1910- The first radio message sent from an airplane.

 

1912- Edgar Rice Burroughs first published Tarzan of the Apes in The All-Story magazine.

 

1917- Straight Shooting, the first film directed by John Ford released. 

 

1922 – The Curly Lambeau & Green Bay Football Club formed in 1919 was granted an NFL franchise. Foreigners have pondered the Great American Mystery: Why are the Packers the only US football team not situated near a major American City? That is because at a time when professional football was in its infancy, a Green Bay meat packing company paid for the team’s uniforms.

 

1927- Warner Bros began recording the soundtrack for Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.

 

1930- Lon Chaney Sr. died of bronchial lung cancer. It was claimed then that during filming of a remake of The Unholy Three a wind machine blew an artificial gypsum snowflake into Chaney's mouth - it caused an irritation that became a tumor. He was 47.

 

1955- The first Guinness Book of World Records published.

 

1950- NBC and General Foods abruptly canceled the second season premiere of the television show “the Aldrich Family” when a publication called Red Channels accused Jean Muir, one of the show’s stars, of being a communist. This signaled that the Hollywood Blacklist was now turning its attention eastward towards NY theater and television.  Jean Muir’s career (1937 Midsummer Nights Dream) never fully recovered. 

 

1953- The film Roman Holiday introduced a new young actress from Holland named Audrey Hepburn. 

 

1964- The movie version of Mary Poppins premiered.

 

1967- The Beatles first manager Brian Epstein overdosed on sleeping pills. 

    

1968- Former master animator Bill Tytla's request to return to Disney was turned down. The artist who animated Grumpy the Dwarf, Dumbo and the Devil on Bald Mountain even offered to do a free "trial animation test" to show he still had it. Disney exec W.H. Anderson wrote him:" We really have only enough animation for our present staff."

Tytla died later that year.

 

1990- Guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash outside Alpine Valley Wisconsin, after an "All Stars of the Blues" show.  Stevie Ray took the last remaining seat on the helicopter, after Eric Clapton got off, claiming he'd rather take a limo back to Chicago, which was about an hour away.

 

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 26, 2020

 Birthdays:  Sir Robert Walpole the first British Prime Minister, Mother Theresa, Albert the Prince Consort, John Wilkes Booth, Guilliame Appollinaire who coined the term Surrealism, General Maxwell Taylor, Christopher Isherwood, McCauley Culkin is 38, Geraldine Ferarro, Dr. Lee DeForrest, Ben Bradlee, Barbet Schroeder, Branford Marsalis, Chris Pine is 40, Melissa McCarthy is 50

 

1498- Michelangelo gets a job. The big Florentine stonecutter was commissioned by Pope Alexander VI Borgia to carve the Pieta, Mary lamenting over the body of Jesus. 

 

1576- The artist Titian died at age 88. He outlived all the artists of the Renaissance, worked every day of his life, and might have gone on had he not caught a touch of plague.

 

1838- American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson met English writer Thomas Carlyle.

 

1846- W.A. Bartlet became first American mayor of Yerba Buena, in 1850 renamed San Francisco.

 

1868- First practical typewriter patented by Christopher Scholes. The Remington Company who were famous for making firearms took up the typewriter and mass produced it. In 1874 Mark Twain admitted to a friend that he preferred writing on it.

 

1918- 17 year old Walt Disney dropped out of high school and faked his parents signature in order to enlist to fight in World War I. Turned down for his age, he volunteered for the Red Cross. Assigned to the ambulance corps, he arrived in Europe just as the war was ending.

 

1946 - George Orwell published "Animal Farm". Orwell said he conceived the idea for the novel while watching out his window a small boy driving a huge draft horse. The horse could have easily crushed the boy had it the free will, but instead patiently endured the boys taunts and flicks with a small switch. 

 

1946- First day of shooting on Jean Cocteau’s film Belle et le Bete, Beauty & the Beast.

 

1958- First day of shooting on the Alfred Hitchcock film North By Northwest. Conceived as a story that ended in a chase across the stone faces of Mt. Rushmore. The original title of Ernst Lehman’s script was The Man Who Hung From Lincoln’s Nose.

 

1961- The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto dedicated.

 

1964- The Tokyo subway system opens. 

 

1967 – The Beatles, Mick Jagger & Marianne Faithful met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

1971- The New York Giants announced they would move from Yankee Stadium to a new complex being built in the Meadowlands of Rutherford, New Jersey.

 

1980- Director Tex Avery died after collapsing in the parking lot of Hanna-Barbera. He was 72. Two weeks before he was asked by a friend why he was working in Hanna & Barbera, Tex laughed:" Hey, Don’t you know? this is where all the elephants come to die!"

 

1997- Special effects house Boss Studios, closed. 

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Animation Fun Facts for August 25, 2020

Birthdays:  King Ludwig II the Mad of Bavaria, Walt Kelly, Bret Hart, Lola Montez (flamenco dancing mistress of Ludwig I, King of Bavaria), Alan Pinkerton, Elvis Costello is 67, Clara Bow, Ruby Keeler, Monty Hall, Van Johnson, Willis Reed, Frederick Forsythe, Wayne Shorter, Billy Ray Cyrus, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim, Rolly Fingers, Gene Simmons, Anne Archer, Tim Burton is 62, supermodel Claudia Schiffer is 50, Leonard Bernstein, Sir Sean Connery is 90

 

1835- The New York Sun newspaper ran a story that British astronomer Sir William Herschel, the discoverer of Neptune, had observed little men living on the surface of the Moon!  The story proved false, but it boosted the sales of the paper.

 

1916- President Woodrow Wilson created the National Parks Service out of 35 separate departments.

 

1967 – In Mississippi George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of American Nazi Party, was blown off the speaker’s platform by a shotgun. Although not as significant as the Martin Luther King or the Kennedy’s assassinations, it was another incident in the violent 1960’s. George Lincoln Rockwell was also a distant cousin of Norman Rockwell, although the famed artist was embarrassed to admit it.

 

1970- A young singer named Elton John did his first US tour, opening at the Troubadour in LA.

 

1980- The premiere of the Broadway musical version of the classic movie musical 42nd Street. In a moment of Broadway drama, producer David Merrick came out on stage and startled the cast and audience by announcing that the director of the play Gower Champion had died that very day. 42nd Street went on to be a smash hit. The play itself is about a Broadway director who works himself to death creating a hit musical.

 

1991- At the Emmy ceremony, comic Gilbert Gottfried upset the audience by a flood of masturbation jokes about Pee Wee Herman. Fox Network apologized the next day.

 

2001-Beautiful 22 year old R&B singer Alleiya was killed, when her overloaded chartered plane crashed on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.

 

 

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 24, 2020

Birthdays: Jorge Luis Borges, William Wilberforce, Marlee Matlin, Yasir Arafat, Max Beerbom, Cal Ripken Jr, Joshua Lionel Cowan the inventor of Lionel toy electric trains, Kenny Baker-C3PO in Star Wars, Stephen Fry is 63, Durward Kirby- 1960s T.V. announcer, Duke Kahanamoku-1890- Olympic medalist who popularized Surfing, Kirk Wise, Dave Chappelle is 47, Steve Guttenberg is 62

 

1847 - Charlotte Bronte finished the manuscript of her novel "Jane Eyre".

 

1939- Mr. Leslie Mitchell became the first British Television announcer.

1942- Walt Disney’s film Saludos Amigos received its world premiere in Rio De Janiero.

 

1951- Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. The film won the Grand Prize and first showed the world that Japanese Cinema was a new creative force in the film world.

 

1966- The effects fantasy Fantastic Voyage directed by Richard Fleischer opened. The submarine in the film was designed by Harper Goff, who designed the Nautilus for Walt Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, also directed by Richard Fleischer, the son of Max Fleischer.

 

1973- One month after Bruce Lee’s death, his last film Enter The Dragon opened in the US to wild acclaim. It renewed interest in the late star and helped spawn the Chinese Martial Arts craze in the US. 

1993- LAPD announced an investigation of pop star Michael Jackson for possible child molestation. The investigation never led to any indictments but the publicity tarnished his image. Equally damaging to his public image were revelations of his eccentric lifestyle, like his keeping chimps and mannequins around the house to talk to, and all the tap water and showers of his mansion spouting Evian water. Jackson was tried and acquitted of all charges in 2005.

 

1995- Microsoft's Windows 95 introduced.

 

1997- According to the 1984 James Cameron film The Terminator this was the day the Skynet computer system became self aware, and began the War of the Day of Judgement.

2010- Japanese animation director Satoshi Kon died.

 

2011- Washington D.C. and much of the east coast was shaken by an earthquake. The first in 121 years. Californians were told not to laugh too hard.

 

2011- Steve Jobs announced he was resigning his positions at Apple, Pixar and Disney due to his failing health.

Animation Fun Facts for August 23, 2020

Birthdays: French King Louis XVI, Gene Kelly, Keith Moon, Rick Springfield, Sonny Jurgensen, Alphonse Mucha, Vera Miles, River Phoenix, Queen Noor of Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Ed Benedict the designer of the Flintstones, Barbara Eden is 84, Shelley Long is 70, Nik Ranieri, Oscar Grillo

 

1617- The invention of the One Way Street (London).                                                                                                                                                                                                         

 

1634- Spain’s greatest playwright Lope De Vega wrote his last poem “El Siglo de Oro” – the Golden Age. He died the next day at age 73. A duelist, and sailor on the Spanish Armada, Voltaire ranked him with Shakespeare.  His work was so popular, the Holy Office of the Inquisition got angry when people sang a blasphemous doggerel that began “We believe in One Lope, the Poet Almighty…”

 

1750- 37 year old Swiss writer Jean Jacques Rousseau published his first mature work- Discourse on the Arts & Sciences. In it he breaks with the other French philosophers like Votlaire and Diderot and began his theory of the Noble Savage- that Civilization is the problem and we were all a lot happier when we were primitives. Voltaire laughed “the pamphlet made me want to get down on all fours and live among the bears of Canada!”

 

1872- The first commercial ship ever sent from Japan arrived in San Francisco carrying tea.

 

1926- Screen idol Rudolph Valentino died in a New York hospital of an infection due to a burst appendix and bleeding ulcer. He was only 30. Today his condition could be controlled by anti-biotics, but they weren’t invented yet. Women around the world went mad with grief. From L.A. to Budapest, women committed suicide before his picture. In Japan two women jumped into a volcano shouting his name.

 

1937- At the urging of the Stanford Dean of engineering Fred Terman, graduate Bill Hewlett had his first meeting with David Packard. They called their company started out of their Palo Alto garage the Engineering Service Company. The Hewlett-Packard Company would one day be one of the biggest names in computers and their garage hailed as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

 

1947-President Truman’s daughter Margaret gave her first public singing concert. President Truman spent the following day personally telephoning music critics and threatening any who dared to give her harsh reviews.  

1953- David Mullany of Shelton Conn. invented the Whiffle Ball. He did it to help his son who was lousy at throwing a curve ball. 

 

1964- Twist and Shout! The Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl. 

 

1994- Jeffrey Katzenburg announced he was leaving Disney.

2007- Open source advocate Paul Messina created the hashtag for Twitter.

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Animation Fun Facts for August 22, 2020

Birthdays: George Herriman the creator of Krazy Kat, Dorothy Parker, Claude DeBussy, Johnny Lee Hooker, Denis Papin 1647 inventor of the Pressure Cooker, Leni Reifenstahl, General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, Paul Molitor, Bill Parcells, Max Vilander, Carl “Big Yaz”Yazstremski, Dyanna Nyad, Deng Xiao Ping, Henry Cartier Bresson, Valerie Harper, Cindy Williams, Ray Bradbury would be 100, Kristen Wiig is 47

 

1806- elderly French painter Jean Fragonard died of a cerebral seizure after eating a large fruit ice on a hot day.

 

1882- American showman P.T. Barnum bought the largest elephant in the London Zoo. He created a new name for the beast- he called it JUMBO. It was the highlight of his circus for years. After Jumbo was hit by a freight train and killed, PT Barnum had its bones bleached and charged people admission to come look at its skeleton.

1906 - 1st Victor Victrola manufactured, using Emile Berliners flat record turntable system. The Victrola was so cheap and easy to use it became standard in many homes and finished off any competition from Thomas Edison’s rival talking cylinder system.

 

1929- Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony The Skeleton Dance premiered. The tight dancing synch inspired a generation of animators.  The idea of skeletons was suggested by composer Carl Stalling, a Kansas City movie theater organist that Walt befriended.

 

1935- Father Charles Coughlin, “the Radio Priest” addressed ten thousand in Madison Square Gardens. At the height of his popularity almost one third the American public tuned into his weekly radio address. But as his influence waned after the 1936 presidential elections. He turned increasingly to racist Anti-Semitic hate mongering and soon faded away.

1942- Tex Avery’s first cartoon for MGM, The Blitz Wolf.

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 21, 2020

Birthdays: Christopher Robin Milne-1920, King Phillip II Augustus of France- 1165, King William IV of England- 1765, Aubrey Beardsley, Count Basie*, Wilt (Wilt the Stilt) Chamberlain, Friz Freleng, Kenny Rogers, Princess Margaret, Matthew Broderick, Vance Gerry, Basil Poliodouris, Steve Hillenberg the creator of Spongebob Squarepants, Peter Weir is 76, Kim Catrall is 64, Carrie Anne Moss is 53

 

1887- Mighty (Dan) Casey struck out at his last at bat with the NY Giants. The poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer was written many years later.

 

1911- Café waiter Vincenzo Perugia walked into the Louvre and stole the Mona Lisa.  After trying to fence it for two years, he tried to ransom it back. He was arrested and the painting recovered.

 

1921- On his first birthday, Christopher Robin Milne was given a Farrell teddy bear from Harrods. His parents first called it Edward, but when he could speak Christopher Robin named it Winnie, after Winnipeg, his favorite bear he saw at the zoo. The child would also mention the name of a swan there he liked named Pooh. This gave his dad A.A. Milne a neat idea for a new book.

 

1929- Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo marry.

 

1931- Pardon Us, the first feature length film starring Laurel & Hardy. In 1926, Hal Roach director Leo McCarey noticed the Briton Stan Laurel and Georgia born singer Oliver Hardy looked funny together, and put them in a series of shorts. Laurel & Hardy became one of the greatest comedy teams in film history. 

 

1935- Big band leader Benny Goodman was having a tough time. His band lost its radio gig when the show Let’s Dance was canceled. So he and his musicians drove across the country in a small caravan of cars playing various venues on the road. They were told in small towns to stop playing that newfangled Swing music and stick to old standards. One manager in Denver told him:” Don’t you guys know any waltzes? ” By the time they arrived in Los Angeles this day they were thoroughly demoralized. But today when they set up in the Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood the crowd was immense! And these kids wanted to jitterbug to the new Swing music! So hit it, Jackson, Awl Reet, Awl Reet!  

 

1944- Moviestar James Cagney, star of Yankee Doodle Dandy, was cleared of charges of Communism. The accusations probably had less to do with Cagney's politics and more to do with his actor’s union activism, and his fighting in court the restrictive personal contracts studios put their stars under. 

 

1972 - Grace Slick was sprayed with mace by police after one of her band called the cops pigs.

1987- The movie Dirty Dancing opened.

 

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 20, 2020

Birthdays: President Benjamin Harrison, Sukenoba Nishikawa, Bernardo O’Higgins, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, H.P. Lovecraft, Art Tatum, Issac Hayes, Connie Chung, Jacqueline Susanne, Rajiv Ghandi, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Joan Allen is 64, Fred Durst, Alan Reed -the original voice of Fred Flintstone, Slobodan Milosovic’, Amy Adams is 46 

 

1882 -Peter Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" premiered in Moscow. The composer said of all his works the two pieces he liked the least were the 1812 Overture and the Nutcracker Suite. Overture 1812 was Richard Nixon’s favorite classical piece. 

 

1971. FBI documents prove this day the Nixon White House began to covertly investigate journalist Daniel Schorr because of his anti-war editorials. President Richard Nixon kept an enemies list of people he imagined to be opponents to his administration. It began with obvious liberals like George McGovern and Ted Kennedy, then expanded as far as June Foray the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

 

1972- Star Hollywood directors Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin announced a partnership in a new production company called "The Director's Company". Young punks Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were also involved. The partnership lasted two years then collapsed.

 

1982- Ralph Bakshi's film Hey Good Lookin'.

 

1989- George and Joy Adamson, the naturalists who inspired the book Born Free, were murdered by Somali poachers with machetes in Kampi Ya Simba, .

 

1994- Studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg resigned from the Walt Disney Company.

 

1998- THE WAG THE DOG ATTACKS- After the Al Qaeda terrorist organization bombed US embassies in Africa, the Clinton Administration looked for an opportunity to hit back. This day the CIA got word that senior Al Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden were gathered in a remote Afghan camp for a meeting. President Clinton ordered a spread of cruise missiles launched to kill them. The missiles hit their target, but Osama got away. In Washington, the hostile Conservative press had a field day accusing Clinton of making the strikes only to distract public attention from the Monica Lewinsky Sex Scandal. It alluded to a popular movie out at the time called Wag the Dog, where a scandal ridden president rigs a phoney crisis to distract public attention. 

Bill Clinton was stymied in any further efforts, and Osama bin Laden lived on to plan 9-11.

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Animation Fun Facts for Aug 19, 2020

B-Days: Roman Emperor Probus (232AD), Orville Wright, Ring Lardner, Ogden Nash, Alfred Lunt, George Enesco, jockey Willie Shoemaker, Malcolm Forbes, Tipper Gore, Gene Roddenberry, Colleen Moore the It Girl, Jill St. John, Ginger Baker, Dawn Steel, John Stamos, Peter Gallagher is 64, Kyra Sedgwick is 55, Matthew Perry, Jonathan Frakes is 68, Bill Clinton is 74

 

1886- Joseph Conrad got his British citizenship. The author of Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim was born in Poland as Jozef Konrad Korzenieowski, but he went into exile when his nationalist father was arrested by the Czars police and sent to Siberia.

 

1929-  the Amos and Andy show premiered on radio.

 

1955 - WINS radio, announces it will not play "copy" white cover versions of black R&B.  DJs must play Fats Domino's "Ain't It A Shame," not Pat Boone's. In 1957 Little Richards “Tuttie-Fruitie” never got higher than 17^th in the Billboard Charts while Pat Boones version, by his own admission awful, went to number one.

 

1957- The NY Giants baseball team voted to move to San Francisco.

 

1973 - Kris Kristofferson wed Rita Coolidge.

 

1977- Groucho Marx, the last surviving Marx Brother, died at age 86. In his final years Groucho had rewrote his will in favor of his young personal secretary Erin Fleming. This spawned a furious legal battle between Fleming and the Marx family.

 

2004- Google stock first went public on the stock market.

 

2012- Director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Days of Thunder) jumped to his death off a bridge in Los Angeles. He was 68.

 

2335 – According to Star Trek the Next Generation, this is the birthday of William T Riker, in Valdez Alaska, first officer of the Enterprise.

Animation Fun Facts for Aug. 18, 2020

 Birthdays: Meriwether Lewis, Austrian Emperor Franz Josef II, Leo Slezak, Shelly Winters, Roberto Clemente, Rafer Johnson, Enoch Light, Coco Channel, Roman Polanski is 86, Patrick Swayze, Madeleine Stowe, Christian Slater, Edward Norton is 52, Martin Mull, Denis Leary is 63, Robert Redford, born Charles Robert Redford Jr, is 84

 

1939- The movie The Wizard of Oz released and made a star of Judy Garland. 

 

1953- The first MacDonalds franchise restaurant opened in Downey California. 

 

1955- Folksinger Pete Seeger appeared before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. He refused to cooperate, and was blacklisted. But he still managed to have a successful career on the folk scene, and appeared on TV in 1967. 

 

1956- Actress Vivien Leigh suffered a mental breakdown after a miscarriage.

 

1958 - "Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov, published. The novel was rejected by four publishers before Putnam picked it up. It became a best seller and allowed Nabokov to quit teaching and focus on writing.

 

1958 – The TV Game Show Scandal investigation starts. Allegations that popular quiz shows like 21 were rigged turned out to be true.

 

1962 - Peter, Paul & Mary release their famous folk song "If I Had a Hammer".

 

1966- HAPPY BIRTHDAY SLURPEE!  The Ice Slurpee was invented by two Dallas engineers for a failing Oklahoma ice cream store.

 

1969- Woody Allen’s first movie “ Take the Money and Run”, opened. 

 

1969- The closing day of the Woodstock Rock Concert, Jimmy Hendrix did his famous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Of the original 500,000 attendees, many were already headed home. Only 30,000 stragglers were left to hear him. Originally scheduled instead of Hendrix , was old cowboy Roy Rogers, to sing his signature tune “ Happy Trails to You..”

 

1974- The Xerox Company decided not to seriously market the Alto, the first personal computer that had a GUI, 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 Lisa, Macintosh and the IBM PC.

 

1977- The rock band the Police make their debut in a Birmingham nightclub. The lead singer Gordon Sumner started to get the nickname Sting, from the black & yellow striped shirt he habitually wore.

 

1990- 510 animators pay tribute to Betty Boop creator Grim Natwick on his 100^th Birthday. It was the last big gathering of the Golden Age artists of Hollywood Animation. Chuck Jones, Walter Lantz, Disney’s Nine Old Men, Friz Freleng. 

 

1999- TV psychic Kriswell predicted that day would be the End of the World. 

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 17, 2020

Birthdays: Davy Crocket, Mae West, Marcus Garvey, Sam Goldwyn- born Schmuel Gelbfisz, Harry Hopkins, Monte Wooley, Boog Powell, Belinda Carlisle, Guillermo Vilas, V.S. Naipul, Jim Courier, Donnie Wahlberg, Belinda Carlisle, Maureen O’Hara, Sean Penn is 59, Martha Coolidge is 74, Robert DeNiro is 76

 

1876- Richard Wagner’s 4 hour opera Gotterdamerung- the Twilight of the Gods, premiered.

 

1908- D.W. Griffith signed a contract to begin directing movies for Biograph Pictures. He was paid $50 dollars a week plus royalties.  

 

1908- The premiere of the first fully animated film, Emile Cohl's "Fantasmagorie".

  

 

1941- EL GRUPO- Walt Disney and his artists arrive in Rio on a ten week goodwill tour of South America, underwritten by a $70,000 government grant.  President Franklin Roosevelt was worried that some South American countries might be sympathetic to the Nazis, forcing the U.S. to worry about her backdoor. So FDR sent Nelson Rockefeller to give the Latin American countries whatever they wanted to keep them out of the world war. One of the things they wanted was Donald Duck. Back in LA the federal mediator Stanley White had worked out with Roy Disney that if they got Walt out of town, they could settle the Disney animators strike. The name comes from hotel footmen in Buenos Aires paging the artists as “ El Grupo Disney! Your bus is here.”  The Three Caballeros and Saludos Amigos result.

 

1962- The Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. One of the reason’s they decided on Ringo was that he came with his own car.

 

1984- The Walt Disney Company informed its chairman Ron Miller that they wanted his resignation. Disney had fallen to 14th in film box office by then. Miller had been Walt’s son-in-law and he was he was once a tight end for the LA Rams. Within two years of Michael Eisner taking power Disney was number one. 

 

1986- Pixar short Luxo Jr, premiered at Siggraph’86 Dallas.

 

1992- Famed film director Woody Allen admitted he was having an affair with Soon Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his long time lover Mia Farrow. He was 60 and she was 21. But as the unrepentant Allen states: “The Heart wants what it wants.” They’ve been together ever since.

 

 1994 The Great Baseball Players Strike- canceled out the season and the 1994 World Series. It was the longest strike in sports history until the NBA lockout of 1998.

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 16, 2020

Birthdays: Fess Parker, Karl Stockhausen, George Meany, Charles Bukowski, Menachim Begin, Otto Mesmer the creator of Felix the Cat, Myron Grim Natwick the creator of Betty Boop, Hal Foster the creator of Prince Valiant, Kathie Lee Gifford, Eydie Gorme, Bill Evans, Leslie Ann Warren, Angela Bassett is 62, Julie Numar is 87, Robert Culp, James Cameron is 65, Bruce Beresford, Steve Carrell is 59, Madonna, aka Louise Ciccone of Bay City Michigan, is 62

 

1938- In Three Forks Mississippi, Blues legend Robert Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband.

1942- Happy Birthday Mighty Mouse. Terrytoon's short: "The Mouse of Tomorrow".

 

1954- First issue of Sports Illustrated.

 

1965- The AFL, American Football League offered it’s first expansion franchise to a new team called the Miami Dolphins. The AFL merged with the NFL in the 80s.

 

1974- The Ramones play their first gig at the NY club CBGBs. Hey-Ho, Lets Go!

1977- E-DAY in Memphis. Elvis Presley, donuts and Pizza Hut box in hand, died of a heart attack while sitting on the toilet. He was reading a book-the Historic Search for the Face of Jesus. He was 42.

 

1985- On her birthday, Madonna married Sean Penn. They divorced shortly after.

 

1991- The original Shamu the Whale died of respiratory failure at age 16.

 

2005- Top Pixar story-artist Joe Ranft was killed in an auto accident. He was 42.

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 15, 2020

Birthdays: Napoleon Bonaparte, Leon Theremin- inventor of that weird electronic musical instrument that is in all those 1950s flying saucer movies, Samuel Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia 1685, Lawrence of Arabia, Ethel Barrymore, Huntz Hall, Bill Baird, Edna Ferber, Sir Robert Bolt, Rose-Marie, Linda Ellerbee, Gene Upshaw, Oscar Peterson, Shimon Peres, Mike “Mannix” Connors, Nicholas Roeg, Animator Dick Lundy, Anthony Andrews, Ben Afleck is 47, Debra Messing is 51, Julia Child, Jennifer Lawrence is 29. 

1457 – The earliest dated bound book, The "Mainz Psalter," completed.

 

1843- Tivoli Gardens opened in Copenhagen. One of the oldest amusement parks in the world. King Christian said “ When people are amused, they don’t worry about politics.”

Hans Christian Andersen was a frequent visitor. One hundred years later, Walt Disney visited to get inspiration for his Disneyland.

1885- Sir Richard Burton completed his translation from medieval Persian of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. There had been earlier attempts like a French edition in 1809, but Burton’s edition introduced the west to Aladdin and his magic lamp, Sinbad the sailor and Scheherazade.

1935- Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Pictures merge to become Twentieth Century Fox. Disney just ended the name Fox three days ago.

 

1935- Humorist writer Will Rogers and his pilot Wiley Post were killed when their small plane crashed in Barrow, Alaska. 

 

1936- Disney animator Ward Kimball married painter Betty Lawyer-Kimball.

1946- Disney’s Make Mine Music, featuring Blue Bayou, All the Cats Join In, and Willie the Operatic Whale.

 

1958 - Buddy Holly weds Maria Santiago.

 

1965- The Beatles play their largest U.S. concert yet, at New York's Shea Stadium.

 

1968- The pirate radio station Radio Free London began transmitting.

1969- WOODSTOCK-Three Days of Peace and Music- The rock concert of the 20^th Century opened. The promoters, one of whom was heir to the Polident Denture Cream fortune, were hoping to host 50,000 people and launch a recording studio in the quiet New York farming town. What they got was 500,000 young fans and the social phenomenon that defined an age. At one point the more conservative elements of the community got a court order to block the land to be used, but farmer Max Yasgur offered his cow farm for the site.

 Richie Havens was the first act to play, he did six sets and kept stalling because the crowd was so immense they had to bring in the other bands by helicopter. When he ran out of songs to sing, Havens started riffing any thing he could think of. This way Havens created his most famous tune “Freedom” with added in spirituals like “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child”.  After his death in 2013, his ashes were scattered at the Woodstock site.

 

1977- THE WOW SIGNAL- Project SETI- Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence- heard something.  It sounds like static to us, but it was a strong electromagnetic signal on a regular narrow band AM radio frequency emanating from deep space.  So far, it has never been explained away or repeated. SETI scientist Jerry Ehmen noted in his log for that night “….wow!”

 

1979- Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now” opened. Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, young Harrison Ford and even younger Lawrence Fishburne.

 

1984- “ The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension” premiered.

  

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 14, 2020

Birthdays: Gary Larson, Erwin "Magic" Johnson, Lina Wertmuller, David Crosby, Alice Ghostly, Buddy Greco, Nehemiah Persoff, The 20's Parisian nightclub singer Bricktop, Dick Lundy, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, C.S. Watson, James Horner, Wim Wenders, Emmanuele Beart, Halle Berry is 54, Mila Kunis, Steve Martin is 75

 

1928 - Ben Hecht & Charles McArthur's play" The Front Page," premiered in NYC. They later went on to become top comedy writers in Hollywood. McArthur is the one who sent Hecht the famous telegram- "Hecht, some quick, fortunes to be made and your competition are idiots!" 

 

1935- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Social Security Act. Considered the most successful US Federal social program ever.

 

1939 - 1st night games at Comiskey Park -White Sox 5, Browns 2

 

1956- The Marilyn Monroe movie "Bus Stop" premiered.

 

1965 - Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" hits #1.

 

1980- Dorothy Stratton was a beautiful Playboy model whose acting career was beginning to take off, as well as a relationship with top Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich. She was encouraged by Hugh Hefner among others, to shed her old loser boyfriend Paul Snider, who kept hanging around her. Today Dorothy Stratton was found shot to death by Snider, who then turned the gun on himself. She was age 20.

 

1995- Super-agent Michael Ovitz of CAA was named President of the Walt Disney Company under Michael Eisner. After 14 fruitless months he left. 

 

2003- Another blackout shut down the power again in the Northeast, from New York to Toronto to Detroit.

 

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 13, 2020

B-Dayz: Annie Oakley, Alfred Hitchcock, Don Ho, Buddy Rogers, Bert Lahr, Ben Hogan, Richard Baseheart, Saul Steinberg, Regis Toomey, Johann Christoph Denner (1655)- inventor of the clarinet. Danny Bonaduce, John Logie Baird one of the inventors of television, Hockey great Bobby Clarke, Daniel Schorr, Bombay movie star Viyayanthimala, Fidel Castro

 

 

1846- Commodore Stockton and Colonel Freemont with a contingent of U.S. Marines marched up from their ships in San Pedro Harbor to Ciudad Los Angeles. They interrupted a local fiesta to inform the startled inhabitants that they were now part of the United States, whether they liked it or not. 

 

1934- First Little Abner comic strip by Al Capp. Dogpatch, Mammy Yokum, Daisy Mae, Kickapoo Joy Juice, Jubilation T. Cornpone and the Schmoo are born. Al Capp was a hard drinking old curmudgeon of a cartoonist who lost one leg when as a child he fell off an ice truck and it was severed by a streetcar. 

 

1937- The Japanese army reopened its’ campaign to conquer China by mass daylight bombing of Shanghai.

 

1941- James Stuart Blackton certainly had an interesting career. The English born artist became a top newspaper cartoonist, a vaudevillian drag act as Mademoiselle Stuart, the first American animator, founder of the Vitagraph Company, the movie fanzine Motion Picture World. He even successfully faked a newsreel of the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 by using toy boats, sparklers and cigar smoke. He made fortunes and lost them just as quickly. On this day, a poor freelance artist for low budget Republic Pictures, he died after was struck and killed by an auto on Pico Blvd.

 

1942-  Disney's Bambi opened in theaters nationwide. Today the film looks quaint but in its time artists felt it was as realistic as artists could attain. Designer Rico LeBrun had a hunter friend bring in a real deer he shot in the Sierras. LeBrun set up drawing and anatomy sessions to study the dead animal. But LeBrun was so inspired by the opportunity he refused to dispose of the carcass even after several days it began to smell badly and attract flies. Finally the other animators waited until LeBrun had left for lunch and tossed the rancid thing.

 

1946- MGM cartoon Northwest Hounded Police, the short in which Tex Avery perfected the 'Tex Avery Take" - used since in films like Mask, Roger Rabbit and Casper.

 

1955- Shooting wrapped on Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. He was remaking the film he had done as a silent movie in 1925. One wag said: DeMille has done God one better, because he has now parted the Red Sea twice."

 

1991- Jack Ryan died. The Toymaker was the inventor of Hot Wheels toy cars, and helped launch the doll Barbie.