Friday, August 13, 2021

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 13, 2021


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

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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. 


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."


1967- Bonnie & Clyde with Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway opened in theaters. “They're Young. They're in Love. And They Kill People”


1981- At his California ranch in a dense morning fog, Pres Ronald Reagan signed the Kemp-Roth Economic Recovery Act of 1981, the first of massive tax cuts for the rich that would slowly destroy the American Middle Class and shift the massive income tax burden from the rich to the poor. The wealthy saw their tax rate drop from 70% to 14% and estate taxes eliminated. The tax rate on corporations dropped by half. Tax incentives were given to companies who moved their factory jobs overseas and banked their assets in the Cayman Islands or other tax shelters. 


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



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