Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 31, 2021

Birthdays: Caligula 12AD, Commodus 161AD, Amilcare Ponchielli, Eldridge Cleaver, Buddy Hackett, James Coburn, Itshak Perleman is 74, 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 71, Chris Tucker is 48. 

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

1881- The first men’s singles competition in tennis was held in Newport Rhode Island. The winner was Richard Sears.

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. He drove himself sick designing, building and improving the device as well as the camera and studio, but Edison took all the credit. Edison wrote Edweard Muybridge at the time that he doubted the Kinetoscope would have much commercial value beyond the science lab. 

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.

1930 -Detroit radio station is 1st to broadcast a news program on the air.

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 Henry 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 marijuana 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.

1955- 1st sun-powered automobile demonstrated, Chicago, Ill.

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Augusr 30, 2021

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 78, Lewis Black is 73, Cameron Diaz is 49

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 left Southampton evacuating Americans fleeing the impending war in Europe. Among the crowd was a large contingent of Hollywood stars like Robert Montgomery, Loretta Young, 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 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.

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.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for August 29, 2021

Birthdays:Charlie Parker King James II Stuart, John Locke, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Jean Dominique Ingres, Preston Sturges, Ingrid Bergman, William Friedkin is 86, 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, Rebecca DeMornay, John McCain,Elliot Gould is 82,

1893- Whitcomb Judson & Gideon Sundback invented the ‘clasp-locker” aka the zipper. 

1925 - After a night on the town, Babe Ruth showed up late for batting practice. So Yankee manager Miller Huggins suspended Ruth & slapped a $5,000 fine on him. Whenever the Yankees were on the road and were safely winning a game, Ruth would take himself out of the lineup early so he could scout out a good bar for the team to go to later.

1953- Warner's "Cat Tails for Two" introduced Speedy Gonzales. Named for WB assistant animator Frank 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. 78 million people watched this episode.

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.

2015- Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In the emergency Animation teacher Sue Kroyer outfitted a winnebago with veterinary supplies and drove from Los Angeles to New Orleans to aid in animal rescue of domestic pets stranded by the storm.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug. 28, 2021

Birthdays: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Jack "King" Kirby. 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 52, Rita Coolidge is 60. 

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. 

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.

1934- Writer Upton Sinclair was nominated for Governor of California on the Democratic ticket by over half a million votes. This shocked the California power-elite because Sinclair was a radical whose grass roots organization EPIC (End Poverty in California) advocated socialist solutions to the Depression. Even FDR kept his distance from Sinclair.

  Powerful forces enlisted Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and other Hollywood conservatives to ensure Sinclair's defeat by creating the first modern negative media campaign. This included phony newsreels of actors dressed as hobos saying how they're going to California to sponge off the taxpayers. Walt Disney's lawyer, Gunther Lessing, demanded Ward Kimball take the "Sinclair for Governor" sign off his car window.

  Governor Frank Merriam who earlier that year had ordered troops to shoot down striking San Francisco longshoremen and their families won re-election.

1938- Northwestern University conferred an honorary degree upon the ventriloquist puppet Charlie McCarthy- Edgar Bergen’s famed dummy. The Dean of the School of Speech conferred a Master of Innuendo and Snappy Comeback upon the wooden celebrity. 

2020- Actor Chadwick Boseman, who played T’Chala in The Black Panther, died of colon cancer at age 43.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 27, 2021

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 78, Mangesuthu Buthelezi, Paul Rubens-aka Pee Wee Herman is 69

1814- in England, poet 21 year old Percy Shelley eloped with 16 year old 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 Wollenstonecrft Shelley, of course ,was the author of Frankenstein. 

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. 

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

1930- Lon Chaney Sr. died at 47 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.

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.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 26, 2021

 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 41, Geraldine Ferarro, Dr. Lee DeForrest, Ben Bradlee, Barbet Schroeder, Branford Marsalis, Chris Pine is 41, Melissa McCarthy is 51

580AD- An ancient Chinese inventory of the household of a nobleman made the first recorded reference to toilet paper. Meanwhile in Europe, the ancient Romans used a sponge tied to a small stick. You were expected to rinse it out afterwards for use by the next person.

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. Wear your mask!

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.

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- Richard Edlunds Special effects house Boss Studios, closed. 

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 24, 2021

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 64, Durward Kirby- 1960s T.V. announcer, Duke Kahanamoku-1890- Olympic champion who popularized Surfing, Kirk Wise, Dave Chappelle is 48, Steve Guttenberg is 63

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

1853 – Saratoga Springs hotel resort chef George Crum invented Potato Chips, or crisps.

1913- Congress okayed the creation of the Parcel Post system- UPS.

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. 

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.

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

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 22, 2021

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, Ray Bradbury, Cindy Williams, Kristen Wiig is 48

1611- Galileo made a group of Venetian senators and noblemen climb to the top of Saint Marks Basilica in Venice with him to demonstrate to them his new invention, the telescope.

1715 – Handel’s "Watermusic" premiered on the Thames River to mark celebrations of the Peace ending the 15 year long War of Spanish Succession. 

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.

1902- Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in an automobile.

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. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 21, 2021

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 77, Kim Catrall is 65, Carrie Anne Moss is 54

*Count Basie's first name was William. When working in a swing band he'd often get to work late. This would make the band's director ask, “Where is that no-account Basie? “ which in his colloquial slang came out: "Where dat no' Count Basie!?" Hence the nickname.  

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 starting with Putting Pants on Phillip (1927). Pardon Us was their first Sound film. Laurel & Hardy became one of the iconic 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.

1989- The Voyager II space probe flew by the planet Neptune. It was discovered Neptune had a faint ring like Saturn and rotated on its side- south-north instead of west to east. Scientists speculated the atmospheric pressure to be so great that it could actually rain diamonds.

1995- Bill Gates announced Microsoft Windows 95.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 20, 2021

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 65, Fred Durst, Alan Reed -the original voice of Fred Flintstone, Slobodan Milosovic’, Amy Adams is 47

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'.

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug. 19, 2021

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 65, Kyra Sedgwick is 56, Matthew Perry, Jonathan Frakes is 69, Bill Clinton is 75

1692- Salem Mass, The pilgrims executed four people as witches. One was a senile old woman who just looked scary like a witch, and another was a Caribbean servant named Tituba who liked to tell children ghost stories. Another, Rev George Burroughs, was a distant ancestor of Walt Disney.

1848- The New York Herald published a story that President Polk confirmed that gold had indeed been discovered in California.

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.

1909- The Brickyard is born. The first Indianapolis 500 autorace.

1929-  the Amos and Andy show premiered on radio.

1933- Disney Silly Symphony "Lullaby Land."

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.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 18, 2021

 Quiz: Why you Old Buckaroo! What IS a buckaroo anyway?

Yesterday’s Question answered below:Quiz: Whats in a name?

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HISTORY FOR 8/18/2021

 Birthdays: Meriwether Lewis, Austrian Emperor Franz Josef II, Leo Slezak, Shelly Winters, Roberto Clemente, Rafer Johnson, Enoch Light, Coco Channel, Roman Polanski is 87, Patrick Swayze, Madeleine Stowe, Christian Slater, Edward Norton is 53, Martin Mull, Denis Leary is 64, 

Robert Redford is 85. In 1951 he applied to UPA Studios to be an assistant animator. He was turned down.

1850- Honore' Balzac died after drinking too much coffee. He was overweight, seldom bathed and picked his nose in public, but they said women still found him irresistible.

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, creator of the Oz stories. 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. 

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

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 began. 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..” But Roy never made it there.

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 jumper 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 artists of the Golden Age Hollywood Animation. Chuck Jones, June Foray, Walter Lantz, Disney’s Nine Old Men, Mae Questel, Friz Freleng. 

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