Animation Fun Facts for Dec 19, 2020

Birthdays: King Phillip V of Spain (1683), Edith Piaf, Edwin Stanton, Tip O'Neil, Cicely Tyson, Sir Ralph Richardson, Robert Urich, Robert Sherman, Jennifer Beals is 57, David Susskind, Fritz Reiner, Mel Shaw, Alyssa Milano is 48, Jake Gyllenhaal is 40

 

 

1686- According to Daniel Defoe, this was the day Robinson Crusoe was rescued from his deserted island. 

 

1732- The Pennsylvania Gazette announced the publication of a new enterprise by Dr. Benjamin Franklin writing under the penname Richard Saunders. The work was Poor Richard’s Almanac, an international best seller that made Franklin famous.

 

1914- Earl Hurd patented animation 'cels' (celluloids) and backgrounds. Before this cartoonists tried drawing the background settings over and over again hundreds of times or slashed the paper around the character and tried not to have it walk in front of anything. By the late 1990’s, most cels & cel paint were been replaced by digital imaging.

 

1918- Robert Ripley began his "Believe It Or Not" column in the New York Globe.

 

1919- The character Olive Oyl first appeared in the comic strip The Thimble Theater. Popeye appeared ten years later.

 

1926- The U.S. government passed a law that women authors can only legally copyright their works under their husband's names.. 

 

1932- BBC Overseas Service Radio broadcasts begin.

 

1957- The musical ‘The Music Man’ starring Robert Preston first debuted. "Seventy Six Trom-bones in the Big Parade…"

 

1958- First airing of the Disneyland TV holiday special “ From All of Us, to All of You.”

 

1971- Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ premiered. Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess. In America the film received an X Rating, more for the violence than the sexual situations. The sensation over the film caused so many incidents of urban violence, that with Kubrick’s permission, it was banned in England for three decades.

 

1974- The first personal computer went on sale. The Altair 8800, named for the planet in the 1955 sci-fi movie classic Forbidden Planet. The computer came in a kit that you had to build and it cost $397. The next year, two kids at Harvard named Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a programming language for it called BASIC.

 

1997- MTV dropped airing the rap song Smack My Bitch Up, by Prodigy.

 

2001- Peter Jackson’s film ‘The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring’ first opened.