Tom Sito's Animation Almanac or March 30, 2022

Birthdays:  Maimonides- Moses Ben Maimon, Anna Sewell (the author of Black Beauty), Vincent Van Gogh, Francisco Goya, John Astin, Peter Marshall, Warren Beatty is 84, Eric Clapton is 76, Arthur Lee Harrington the designer of the first Jeep, Tracey Chapman, Robby Coltrane, Paul Reiser, Celine Dion, Nora Jones is 42, Disney animator Marc Davis.

1858- The pencil eraser patented. The Eraser, or Rubber outside the U.S., was developed in 1770, but Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia first put it on the top of a pencil.

1918- Thomas Edison sold his studio and got out of the movie business. He fired W.K.L. Dickson, inventor of the movie studio set, Edwin Porter the inventor of the narrative film, and J. Stuart Blackton, the inventor of cartoon animation, for annoying him too much about filmmaking. Edison was more interested then in finding a way to extract iron ore from rocks using magnets. 

1968- In New York City’s Bowery district two children find the dead body of a homeless drug addict. He is later identified as Bobby Driscoll, 31, Walt Disney child star, and the voice of Peter Pan.

2000- Dreamworks animated feature the Road to El Dorado premiered.

2007- Disney’s Meet the Robinsons.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 29, 2022

Birthdays: President John Tyler, Sir William Walton, Eric Idle is 79, former English P.M. John Major, Bud Cort is 74, LaToya Jackson, Eugene McCarthy, Jennifer Capriati, M.C. Hammer, Walt "Clyde" Frazier, Cy Young, Christopher Lambert is 67, Jimmy Dodd, Disney animator Jack Kinney, Brendan Gleeson is 67, Lucy Lawless, Elle MacPherson, Amy Sedaris is 61

1886- COCA-COLA invented. Atlanta Pharmacist and liver pill salesman John Pemberton developed the carbonated drink, originally with Cocaine in it. His bookkeeper Francis Robinson penned the famous script logo, still in use today. Advertising for the drink claimed it cured everything from hysteria, cholic and the common cold.

1936- Republic Pictures formed.

1939- Moviestars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard marry. They had a happy marriage until Lombard was killed in a plane crash in 1942. It’s been said the first California King Size mattress, slightly larger than normal king size, was ordered custom made for Gable and Lombard for their rather exuberant assignations at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. 

1951- 'The King and I' debuts on Broadway with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, who shaved his head for the first time for the role.

1974- A Chinese farmer digging a well discovered the huge, terracotta army buried with Chinas’ first emperor at XIAN.

1989- As part of one of the silliest Oscar telecasts in history, actor Rob Lowe had to dance and sing 'Proud Mary" with Las Vegas showgirl Eileen Bowman dressed as Disney’s Snow White.  Rob Lowe had just been embarrassed by the publication of a videotape shot in a hotel room of him having sex with two teenage girls. The Walt Disney Company immediately threatened a lawsuit. The Academy apologized and replaced director Alan Carr with Gilbert Cates.

1993- At the 65th Academy Awards, Disney’s Aladdin won two Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Track. Best Animated Short was Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase by Joan Gratz.

2018- A Buzzfeed article detailed how animator John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren & Stimpy, preyed on underage girls, promising them careers at his studio.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for March 28, 202265

Birthdays: Paul Whiteman, Pearl Bailey, Freddy Bartholomew, Dirk Bogarde,

Confederate Gen.Wade Hampton, pianist Rudolph Serkin, Swifty Lazar, Marlin Perkins, Diane Weist is 74, Reba McEntire, Vince Vaughn is 52, Julia Stiles is 41, Lady Gaga is 36

1870- THE ROCK OF CHICKAMAGUA KILLED BY A NEWSPAPER. Gen. George H. Thomas, retired Union war hero had a heart attack in a St. Louis Hotel after reading an editorial saying all in all he wasn't that great a general, and all his victories were mistakes. Survivor of shot and shell, they found Thomas in his room, clutching a written rebuttal to his chest.

1881- P.T. Barnum formed a partnership with his chief competitor James Bailey to create Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. He proclaimed it the Greatest Show on Earth!

1920- Silent film stars Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford married.

1928- Via radio broadcast, the public heard the voice of Charlie Chaplin for the first time.

1929- Disney short The Opry House was released. The first short where they changed Mickey Mouses’ design to give him white gloves. 

1935- Leni Reifenstahl’s hypnotic movie paean to Nazism- Triumph of the Will, premiered.

1941- English writer Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex. Her body was never found. 

1942- Albert Hurter, Swiss designer for Walt Disney's "Snow White' and 'Pinocchio", and called the first inspirational artist in animation, died of rheumatic heart disease. He was 59.

1999- Matt Groening’s cartoon series Futurama debuted.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 27, 2022

Birthdays: French King Louis XVII –the boy during the Revolution who died in prison after his Royal parents were guillotined, Patty Smith Hill 1868- The composer of the song Happy Birthday to You, Edward Steichen, Gloria Swanson, Sarah Vaughn, Maria Schneider, Mies Van der Rohe, Snooky Lanson, Wilhelm Roentgen the discoverer of X-Rays, Nathaniel Currier of Currier & Ives, Donald Duck artist Carl Barks, cellist Mtisislav Rostropovich, Michael York is 78, Quentin Tarantino is 57, Mariah Carey is 50

1908- Bud Fisher's comic strip Mutt & Jeff debuted.

1912- Washington DC received its famous cherry trees, 3,020 in number, a gift from the Japanese government.

1940- “Rebecca,” the first Hollywood movie by Alfred Hitchcock opened.

1943- Companies in Los Angeles doing war work were forbidden to discriminate by race.

1952- U.P.A.’s cartoon “Rooty-Toot-Toot” premiered. It’s music score was by jazzman Phil Moore, the first African American to receive a screen credit for scoring a movie.

1952- “Singing in the Rain” starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor premiered.

1957- California Reverend Robert Schuller opened the first Drive-In Church.

1958- At the 30th Academy Awards, the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay went to Pierre Boule for The Bridge on the River Kwai. But Boule was not there. He wrote the novel it was based on, but the actual screenplay was written by two Blacklisted writers in exile- Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson. Boulle’s name was entered as a cover.

1973- In one of the more celebrated stunts in Hollywood history, when Marlon Brando won an Oscar for his role in The Godfather, he sent a buckskin clad model named Sashin Littlefeather to refuse the award, and deliver a protest about treatment of Indigenous Americans. 

1978- The first draft script of the film Norma Rae completed. The film dramatized the life of Christa Lee Jordan, a mill worker who was blackballed by the J.P. Stevens millworks for wanting a union. 

1989- Who Framed Roger Rabbit earned four Oscars at the Academy Awards. Sound Effects, Visual Effects, Film Editing and a special one for Richard Williams for the animation. At that same ceremony, Pixar’s Tin Toy won best animated short. The first Pixar short to win.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 26, 2022

B-Days: Robert Frost, Chico Marx, Conde Nast, Tennessee Williams, Alfred Houseman, Joseph Campbell, General William Westmorland, Erica Jong, Duncan Hines, Bob Woodward, Leonard Nimoy, Alan Arkin, James Caan is 82 Diana Ross is 78, Sandra Day-O’Connor, Martin Short, Bob Elliot of Bob & Ray, T. Hee, Michael Imperioli is 56, Keira Knightley is 37 animator John Pomeroy is 70.

1811- Poet Percy Shelley was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet that argued that God didn¹t exist.

1832- Artist George Catlin began his first trip to the West.  He traveled up the Missouri River on the American Fur Trading steamer The Yellowstone. Catlin’s portrait paintings of Plains Indians became famous.

1900- The Happy Hooligan comic strip.

1920- This Side of Paradise, the first novel published by a young Minnesota writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a descendant of Francis Scott Key, writer of the Star Spangled Banner.

1937- A statue of Popeye the Sailor unveiled at the Crystal City Texas Spinach Festival.

1955- The song The Ballad of Davey Crockett, went to number 1 in the pop charts. 

1959- Writer Dashell Hammett died.

1969- The western movie 100 Rifles premiered. It broke taboos, because it featured sexy Raquel Welch making love to sexy black hero Jim Brown.  And Burt Reynolds as the bandito Yaqui Joe Hererra.

1969- On this day a frustrated young writer named John Kennedy Toole committed suicide. When his mother went through his things she found the manuscript of a novel in an old shoebox. Seven years later she forced the manuscript upon novelist Walker Percy to read.  He was teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans. He was stunned with what he read. That lead to it being published by Louisiana State University Press. The book the"Confederacy of Dunces” went on to be a critically acclaimed bestseller and win a Pulitzer Prize.  

1973- The Young and the Restless soap opera premiered. 

1975 - The Who¹s rock opera "Tommy" premiered in London.

1976- USC sophomore Levar Burton screen tested for the role of Kunta Kinte in the landmark TV miniseries Roots. The role made him a star.

1976 - Wings release "Wings at the Speed of Sound" album .

1977 - Elvis Costello releases his first record "Less Than Zero" 

1982 - Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder release "Ebony & Ivory" in the UK

1997- Turner Animation's film 'Cat's Don't Dance", featuring the last movie work of Gene Kelly. He was a consultant on the dance sequences.

2008- Arnold Schwarzenegger fired Clint Eastwood. No, its’ not a movie plot line. The former actor, turned Republican Governor, objected to a position the actor/director and former Republican mayor took on the California State Parks Commission. 

2228 - According to Star Fleet records- James T. Kirk, captain of Federation Star Ship Enterprise (Star Trek) was born. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 25, 2022

B-Days: King Henry II Plantagenet, Joachim Murat, Gudson Borglum, David Lean, Mary Flannery-O’Connor, Arturo Toscanini, Aretha Franklin, Bela Bartok', Howard Cosell, Bonnie Bedelia, Anita Bryant, Simone Signoret, Gloria Steinem is 88, Sarah Jessica Parker is 58.

In ancient times this was the feast of Thalia, the goddess of comedy, one of the Nine Muses. In Latin she was called Hilaria.

1928- Young American composer George Gershwin first arrived in Paris.

1932- Motion Picture Academy President William DeMille, the brother of Cecil B., started a 'Squawk Forum", inviting film industry workers to air their grievances with their studio heads. (and this way they won't ask to unionize). The first boss on the hot seat was MGM's Louis B. Mayer. He was greeted with boos, insults and catcalls. The forum quickly devolved into a screaming free for all. Mayer furiously stormed out and preceded to fire all those Metro employees he could remember were there. The Squawk Forum idea was quickly abandoned.

1933- Nazis Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels offered famed director Fritz Lang a job. Fritz said he’d think about it, then immediately packed his bags for Hollywood.

1943 - "Momotaro's Divine Sea Eagles" by director Mitsuyo Seo premiered. The first Japanese anime feature.

1954- RCA began mass production and marketing of color television sets. At the time the set cost as much as an automobile, 12 inch screen and there was very little programming in color.

1955- US Customs seize a shipment of 258 copies Alan Ginsburg’s poem Howl printed in the UK on the grounds it was obscene." I saw some of the finest minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Next year when Lawrence Ferlinghetti of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore printed the poem, he was arrested.

1960- Thirty-five years after it was written and published in Europe an American judge ruled that D.H. Lawrence's novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover" was not pornography and could finally be sold in the U.S. Whaddaya think of that, John-Thomas?

1960- The Moulin Rouge Agreement. After a lot of agitation and arm twisting from Frank Sinatra, the owners of the Las Vegas casinos agreed to integrate. It was so named for the Moulin Rouge Casino, which up to then had been the only casino that allowed black and white patrons to mix freely.

1966 - Beatles pose with mutilated dolls & butchered meat for the cover of the "Yesterday & Today" album, It was later pulled.

1967 -The Who & Cream make their US debut at Murray the K's Easter Show.

1969- John Lennon and Yoko Ono began their week-long "love-in" for peace in the bed of Room 902 of the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for March 24, 2022

Birthdays: Steve McQueen, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Ub Iwerks (the first Disney animator), John Wesley Powell, Harry Houdini aka Eric Weisz, Edward Weston, Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, Clyde Barrow of Bonnie & Clyde, Bob Mackie, Robert Carradine, Jesus Alou, Laura Flynn-Boyle, Alyson Hannigan, Joe Barbera, Cal Howard, R. Lee Ermey, Peyton Manning, Kelly LeBrock, Sir Elton John is 75, Jessica Chastain is 45

1912- Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s adventure novel The Lost World, first published in magazine installments. Conan Doyle was inspired when he in 1905 he attended a lecture at the Royal Geographic Society, when an Amazon explorer described finding dinosaur bones. It was the first of the Land-of-the-Dinosaurs type stories. In 1925, Willis O'Brien made the Lost World into the first dinosaur monster movie.

1934-The Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour debuted on radio. It became a national craze to see who could be a future star. Frank Sinatra was among their finds. The show eventually moved to television and later spawned the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, Chuck Barris the Gong Show, Star Search, American Idol and The Voice.

1939- The film The Hound of the Baskervilles premiered with actors Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. They became famous interpreters of the characters, and went on to make a dozen more films.

1954- The Nash-Kelvinator Company and the Hudson Car Company merge to form American Motors Corporation or AMC automobiles.

1955- Tennessee William's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" debuts at Broadway's Marosco Theater. Barbera Bel-Geddes was the first Cat, and Burl Ives was " Big Daddy".

1958- Elvis Presley inducted into the Army. G.I. Blues!

1973- In Buffalo, a drunk fan bit singer Lou Reed on the ass.

2005- A Colorado Rockies big league baseball game was called off on account a swarm of bees. The bees were attracted by the coconut oil in the starting pitcher’s hair gel.

2006- 13 year old Miley Cyrus debuts on TV as Disney’s Hanna Montana.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for March 23, 2022

Birthdays: US Vice President Schuyler Colfax, Akira Kurosawa, Joan Crawford, Dr. Werner Von Braun, Juan Gris, Chaka Khan, Paul Grimault, Sidney Hillman, Jack Ruby, Joan Collins, Eric Fromm, Fanny Farmer, Catherine Keener is 63, Hope Davis is 58

1894- Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan-Doyle was in Davo Switzerland helping his wife recover from tuberculosis at a spa in the Alps. While there, the Swiss introduced him to a new sport that he quickly took to. This day he wrote to London enthusiastically about Ski-Running, or Skiing. Conan-Doyle predicted in the Strand Magazine “Within a generation, thousands of English people will be coming to the Alps to ski.” Today there is a statue of Sir Arthur in Davo, Switzerland.

1909- Two weeks after leaving the presidency, Teddy Roosevelt disembarked from New York, bound for a big game hunt in Africa. Banker J.P. Morgan said,” Every American hopes the African lions will do their duty.” 

1936- Ollie Johnston got his first job at the Walt Disney Studio, as Fred Moore’s assistant.

1957- Art Clokey's Gumby Show. Clokey created the green clay fellow for his USC college thesis film Gumbasia.

1971- US Congress lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

1977- The first Richard Nixon-David Frost interview. 

1987- After meeting creator Matt Groening, animators David Silverman, Wes Archer and Bill Kopp began animating the very first Simpson’s short for the Tracy Ullmann Show. 

1990- President George Bush Sr. banned broccoli from the White House. 

He joked; "Read My Lips ! I hate Broccoli !"

2003- Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, Beating out Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 22, 2022

Birthdays: Anthony Van Dyck, Marcel Marceau, Stephen Sondheim, Karl Malden, Werner Klemperer- Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes, George Benson, James Gavin, Allen Neuharth, Milt Kahl, Mort Drucker, Fanny Ardant is 73, Lena Olin is 67, Bruno Ganz, Reese Witherspoon is 46, Keegan Michael-Key is 51, William Shatner is 91.

1913- Jack London (White Fang, The Call of the Wild) wrote fellow writers HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, and asked them how much do they get paid? He was unsure what to charge.

1935- TV SHOWS-The first regular electronic television service began in Berlin as Deutscher Fernseh Rundfunk. Broadcasting from the Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, it used a 180-line system, and was on air for 90 minutes, three times a week. Very few receivers were ever privately owned, and viewers went instead to Fernsehstuben (television parlors). During the 1936 Summer Olympics, broadcasts, up to eight hours a day, took place in Berlin and Hamburg.

1958- Hollywood producer Mike Todd was killed in a small plane crash. He produced hit movies like Around the World in 80 Days and romanced starlets like Gypsy Rose Lee and Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor and Todd had been married for one year and she was devastated by the accident. Years and many marriages later Taylor said Mike Todd was the only man she ever really loved.

1960- Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes patented the laser beam. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation or LASER. Pussycats rejoice!

1972- Concluding a five-year study, the National Commission on Drug Abuse recommended ending all penalties and laws prohibiting marijuana. No one in authority listened to them.

1978- Karl Wallenda, 73 year old scion of the daredevil family the Flying Wallendas, fell to his death from a tightrope between two resort hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

1995- First day of shooting on that utterly classic film- Dinosaur Valley Girls!

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 17, 2022

Birthdays: Plato, Johann Sebastian Bach, Benito Juarez, Modest Mussorgsky, Fats Waller, Josef Pulitzer, Florenz Ziegfeld, Bronco Billy Anderson, Rev Ralph Abernathy, Armand Hammer, Harold Robbins, Matthew Broderick is 58, Gary Oldman is 62, James Coco, Timothy Dalton is 74, Rosie O’Donnell is 58, animator Kathy Zielinski.

1617-Pocahontas, now called Lady Rebecca Rolfe, died at Gravesend, England after being taken off the homeward bound ship, too ill with smallpox to continue. She was 21. Her children with John Rolfe became the beginnings of one of the largest families in Virginia, with many scions of the Old Dominion tracing their ancestry to Pocahontas.

1915- President Woodrow Wilson hosted a private screening of D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House. 

1917- Buster Keaton first stepped in front of a movie camera.

1952- DJ Alan Freed put on an event of the new pop music in Cleveland Ohio. Called the MoonDog Coronation Ball, it was the very first Rock Concert.

1961- The Beatles first perform at the Cavern Club in Hamburg Germany.

1988- the Screen Actor's Guild hits the bricks for the fourth time in twenty years, this time striking Hollywood for residuals for cable and videocassette income. 

2006- The first Tweet sent on the new format Twitter. Scientist Jack Dorsey tweeted his friends “Setting up my twttr…” Twitter went public that July. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 20, 2022

Birthday: Roman poet Ovid 43BC, Napoleon’s son Napoleon II "l'Aiglon" The eaglet, Henryk Ibsen, Lauritz Melchior, Ray Goulding, Mr. Rogers, Bobby Orr, , B.F. Skinner, Pat Riley, Sir Michael Redgrave, Edgar Buchanan, Holly Hunter is 65, William Hurt, Sheldon "Spike" Lee is 65, Carl Reiner, Chris Wedge is 65

1841- Edgar Allen Poe's The Murder's in the Rue Morgue first published in Graham’s Magazine. Called the first true detective novel, Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin was inspired by a real French sleuth named Jules Vinquoc who used disguises and scientific technique to solve crimes the Paris police could not handle. Dupin was the inspiration for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

1852- Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" first published. It sold one million copies within six months. Based on the story of escaped slave Josiah Henson, the book was the first to treat the horrors of slavery directly. It portrayed slave families not as dumb brutes, or happy minstrels, but victimized human beings. Because of this book, Yankee soldiers referred to Southerners as women whippers, and baby sellers. Mrs. Stowe said modestly: “I didn’t write it, God did. I just took dictation.” When she visited the White House President Lincoln met her with:”So here’s the little lady who started the big war.”

1903- Henri Matisse exhibits at the Salon des Independents in Paris.

1931- Cantors Kosher deli opened in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles.

1943-MGM's "Dumb Hounded" the first Droopy Cartoon.

1969-John Lennon married Yoko Ono on the Rock of Gibraltar.

1991- In 1955 Walt Disney recorded Peggy Lee to sing “He’s a Tramp” for the film Lady and the Tramp. For that she was paid $3,500. In 1991, a judge ordered The Walt Disney Company to pay Peggy Lee $3.8 million for the songs she wrote and performed in the film. This additional income was from videocassette sales for a re-issue of the soundtrack. 

1999- After years of attempts and failures involving millionaires like Richard Branson, Rocky Aoki and Malcolm Forbes, Dr Bertrand Picard of Switzerland and Brian Jones of the UK became the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a balloon. It was named the Breitling Orbiter 3. Dr Picard said: “I am with the Angels and completely happy.” Mr Jones said: First thing I’ll do is phone my wife, then like a good Englishman I’ll have a cup of tea.”

1999- Legoland opened in Carlsbad Cal.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 19, 2022

Birthdays: George De La Tour, Wyatt Earp, Dr. David Livingston, William Jennings Bryan, Sir Richard Burton (The African explorer), Charles M. Russell, Jacky Moms Mabley, Adolf Eichmann, Phillip Roth, Adolf Galland, Ursula Andress, Patrick McGoohan, Ornette Coleman, Bruce Willis is 67, Glenn Close is 75, animator Richard Williams 

Today is Saint Joseph’s Day, when the swallows come back to Capistrano.

1799- Franz Josef Haydn’s oratorio The Creation premiered. Haydn was inspired when he heard Handel’s The Messiah in London.

1853- Charles Dicken’s novel Bleak House first appeared in magazine installments. It is the first novel to ever mention dinosaurs-" It would be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill…"

1859- Charles Gounod's opera 'Faust" premiered. It was so popular that after a while in New York wags nicknamed the Metropolitan Opera the "Faustspeilhaus" 

1875- Mark Twain admitted in a letter to a friend that he now likes to use a typewriter, a new technology accused of ruining the art of writing.

1895- The Lumiere Brothers filmed their first movie, employees leaving their dad’s factory.

1914- A fire in the negative vaults of the Eclair Studios in New Jersey destroyed forever all the American work of pioneer French animator Emile Cohl. He had come to the U.S. to animate the first cartoon series, George McManus’ "The Newlyweds" later to be renamed in comic strip form "Life With Father".

1918- As a wartime measure, the Congress created Daylight Savings Time separate from Standard Time.

1928- the Amos & Andy radio show debuted. NBC Blue Network, WMAQ in Chicago.

1953- First T.V. broadcast of the Oscar ceremony. That utterly memorable circus film "The Greatest Show on Earth" won best picture, beating out High Noon and Ivanhoe. Ironically it was Cecil B. DeMille’s only Oscar of his career. Before TV, the Oscars ceremony included a dinner and an hour of dancing before the awards were presented.

1957- Elvis Presley purchased an estate outside Memphis Tennessee called Graceland from Ruth Moore for $100,000.

1959- Disney released The Shaggy Dog, their low budget live action comedy hit.

1962- The first Pillsbury Doughboy commercial.

1964- IBM gave the green light to plans for the 360 series. The first compatible computers.

1964- First day shooting on the James Bond film Goldfinger. 

1974- The band Jefferson Airplane changed its name to Jefferson Starship.

1979- C-Span cable channel started broadcasting live from the floor of Congress. The first Congressman to speak on camera was Al Gore.

1982- Randy Rhoads, the lead guitarist for Ozzy Ozbourne died when he playfully flew his plane buzzing the bands traveling bus and smacked into a farmhouse. 

1984- I’LL BE BACK- James Cameron began shooting the film the Terminator. He first considered casting O.J. Simpson for the cyborg killer before settling on Austrian weightlifter Arnold Schwarzenegger.

1993- Monkey-cam debuted on the David Letterman Show.

2004- Brian Maxwell, the inventor of the Power Bar nutrition snack, died of a heart attack at age 51.

2004- The Florida unit of Walt Disney Feature Animation was shut down. Originally set up as an attraction at Walt Disney World theme park, they grew into a viable studio in their own right. They created hits like Trail Mixup, Muhlan, Lilo & Stitch, and Brother Bear.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 18, 2022

Birthdays: Amerigo Vespucci, John Calhoun, Nicholai Rimsky-Korsakov, Neville Chamberlain, Wilson Picket, Edgar Cayce, John Updike, Grover Cleveland, Edward Everett Horton, Vanessa Williams, F. W. DeKlerk, George Plympton, Peter Graves, Irene Cara, Luc Besson, Queen Latifah is 52

1902- BIRTHDAY OF THE RECORDING INDUSTRY. The RCA Victrola company sent its engineers to Milan to record ten discs of the young singer Enrico Caruso. He became a world celebrity and the phonograph went from being a scientific curiosity to something every home had to have.

1910- Rosie O’Neill invented the Kewpie Doll.

1924-The film “The Thief of Baghdad” starring Douglas Fairbanks released. Directed by Raoul Walsh and designs by William Cameron Menzies. It is considered one of the first great special effects blockbusters.

1942- Paramount’s “The Lost Dream” Little Audrey cartoon. The short was directed by Bill Tytla for Famous Studios. He designed Little Audrey based on his own daughter Tammy.

1965- The Rolling Stones were fined 5 English pence for urinating on a wall in Stratford at ABC recording studio Romford.

1967- The Pirates of the Caribbean ride opened at Disneyland, designed by master animator Marc Davis. In recent years political correctness disturbed the pirates fun. One diorama that portrayed a lusty buccaneer chasing a wench around a table while she giggles. It was changed to show he was only interested in her sandwich tray. An animatronic of Jack Sparrow was stuck in. 

1986- The New York Times reported that a 17-year-old student in New Jersey had tracked the launch of the new Soviet space station, Mir, before the Soviet government formally announced it. Phillip Naranjo tracked transmissions between space vessels and control centers on Earth. Just before the Russians announced Mir on February 20, the teen had picked up their Cyrillic code.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 17, 2022

Birthdays: Jim Bridger the mountain man, Nat King Cole, film composer Alfred Newman, Mercedes McCambridge, Leslie Ann Down, Patrick Duffy, Rudolph Nureyev, Gary Sinise, Kate Greenaway, John Sebastian, Ben Washam (Warner Bros. animator), Ken Anderson (Disney animator), John Wayne Gacy, Kurt Russell is 71, Rob Lowe is 58

Happy St. Patricks Day.

1845- Rubber Bands invented.

1884- To quiet the fears of New Yorkers that the Brooklyn Bridge was too dangerous to cross, circus-master P.T. Barnum led a herd of his circus elephants led by Jumbo the Elephant across the bridge safely.

1901- At a grand exhibition of his paintings at Bernheim-Jeune Palace in Paris, the world discovered the brilliance of a poor Dutch lunatic who had shot himself a few years back- Vincent Van Gogh.

1912- The Camp Fire Girls created.

1941- The National Gallery of Art opens in Washington D.C.

1949- The first car show for Porsche sportscars.

1965- Chicago began the Saint Patrick’s Day tradition of dyeing the Chicago River green.

1982- Politically conservative Hollywood actors led by Charlton Heston broke with the Screen Actor’s Guild and form a rival group called AWAG (American Working Actor’s Guild). They were angered by SAG president Ed Asner’s taking their union into national politics by publically condemning Pres. Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America, capped by the SAG board refusing Reagan (their former president) the Guild lifetime achievement award. As a result Ed Asner’s hit TV show “Lou Grant” lost sponsors and was cancelled, and Heston’s career cooled as well, beyond speaking at NRA events, and writing cranky letters to the L.A. Times that Ben Hur wasn’t gay.

1983- On trial for libel, and refusing to name sources, wheelchair bound porn publisher Larry Flynt showed up in a US Federal court wearing a diaper made from an American flag. This was calculated to mock a conservative demand for a Constitutional amendment against burning the flag..

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 16, 2022

Birthdays: James Madison, Conrad Nagel, Dr. Josef Mengele the Nazi Angel of Death, Teresa Berganza, Christa Ludwig, Pat Nixon, Alice Bonheur, Harper Goff, Gore Verbinsky, Jerry Lewis, Bernardo Bertolucci, Eric Estrada, Kate Nelligan, Isabelle Huppert is 69, Lauren Graham is 55, Flava-Flav born William Drayton Jr.

1778- In Paris, Benjamin Franklin first met Voltaire.

1850- Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter published.

1906- The Rolls-Royce Motorcar Company incorporated. Mr. Charles Rolls and Sir William Royce quickly realized that they couldn’t hope to compete with the mass produced, low-cost motorcars made by Henry Ford, so they appealed to the high end buyer with elegant hand made craftsmanship.

1898- Artist Aubrey Beardsley died of tuberculosis at 25. Having a religious conversion at the end of his life, but still the stickler for detail, his last words were:" Destroy all my erotic drawings...all the bad ones too...." Luckily for history his friends did neither.

1934- Disney’s short The Three Little Pigs won an Oscar for best animated short.

1961- Walt Disney comedy The Absent Minded Professor with Fred MacMurray premiered. 

2007- Author Michael Crichton was the author of classics like The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park. He had been called the H.G. Wells of modern times. But today he shocked the scientific community by denouncing the theory of Global Warming.

2020- Los Angeles, including Hollywood, ordered all theaters closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

2020- Agatha Christies play The Mousetrap, the longest running play in history, running continuously since 1952, was closed due to the Covid pandemic.

Answer: A) I Love Lucy. Began in 1951.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 15, 2022

Birthdays: Andrew Jackson, Lee Schubert-one of Broadways Shubert Brothers, Ry Cooder, Sly Stone, Harry James, Lightnin' Hopkins, Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, Judd Hirsch, Norm Van Brocklin, Sabu, Fabio, Reni Harlin, David Cronenburg is 79, Eva Longoria is 47, David Silverman

 

1869-The Cincinnati Red Stockings become the first professional baseball team. Players had been taking payments under the table for years to concentrate on their skills, now it was out in the open. Still some newspapers accused them of being "Shiftless young men debasing the game with their greed."

1909- Harry Gordon Selfridge, formerly manager of Chicago’s Marshal Fields, opened Selfridges, London’s first Department Store. Selfridge invented the Bargain Basement, the Annual Sale, and the motto “ The Customer is Always Right.”

1915- Universal Studios formed. Carl Laemmele bought a huge track of Burbank farmland and set up his studio. Laemmele had wooden bleachers built next to the movie sets where he charged people a nickel to come watch the filming. He used so many of his relatives in production that Ogden Nash quipped: "Carl Laemmele has a very large Faemmele." Universal actually had been operating as a film company since 1912 but the company counts today as its birthday.

1933- Young animator Chuck Jones first hired at Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes cartoon studio. He was made a director in 1938. 

1941- The daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, Katherine DeMille, had married actor Anthony Quinn. This day tragedy struck the family. On a visit to Cecil B.’s estate, the couple’s three year old son Christopher walked off into neighbor W.C. Fields yard where he fell into Fields unsupervised swimming pool and drowned. The parents were so shattered they divorced afterward. Anthony Quinn refused to talk about the rest of his long life. Fields was so depressed he had the pool filled in and landscaped so no reminder of the tragedy would remain.

1944- The DeHAVILAND CASE- A judge ruled actress Olivia DeHaviland free of her exclusive seven year personal contract to Warner Bros. For years movie stars like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and James Cagney had been fighting in court the system of exclusive contracts the studios used to keep them under control. They had no choice in the type of films they did, no residuals, and studios could lend them out to other studios for higher fees, and keep the money.  

If the actor complained they were put on disciplinary leave by the studio, without pay, and the penalty time added onto the end of their contract. Garbo called it the closest thing to White Slavery. Some contracts even ordered some stars not to get married for fear it would erode their sex appeal. The DeHaviland Case broke that system and allowed actors to make their own deals. Olivia DeHaviland died in 2020 at age 104.

1956- Lerner & Lowe’s musical "My Fair Lady" premiered. 

1956- The film Forbidden Planet premiered in theaters. Considered the granddaddy of Sci-Fiction blockbusters

1964- Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton, for the first time.

1964- The book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan first published. The first major book to point out women were unhappy with their second class roles. And it coined the term Feminist. 

1969- Two young heirs to the Polydent false Teeth Company and two hippy promoters announced a rock festival would be held that summer in the farm community of Woodstock New York.

1977- Television sitcom Threes Company debuted.

1985- Symbolic.com is assigned the first registered private domain site on the Internet. 

Twenty Years Ago 2002- Blue Sky’s hit animated film Ice Age premiered. The studio was being scaled down to be actioned off when the film was a massive hit. Out doing the Best Picture Oscar winner A Beautiful Mind. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 14, 2022

Birthdays: Georg Phillip Telemann, Johann Strauss Sr., Albert Einstein, Casey Jones, Quincy Jones is 88, astronaut Frank Borman, Les Brown, Hank Ketcham, Wolfgang Petersen, Diane Arbus, Chris Klein, Michael Cain born Maurice Mickelwhite is 89, Billy Crystal is 74

1883- Karl Marx died in London. Marx's last words were:" Get out of Here!

Last words are for fools who haven't said enough already!"

1885- Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado premiered in London.

1903- President Teddy Roosevelt established Pelican Island as the first Federal Wildlife Preserve. 

1932- Inventor GEORGE EASTMAN shot himself- The inventor of the Roll-film camera, who named his celluloid strips 'film' and founded Eastman/Kodak. He had been suffering from a long painful spinal illness and left the note: " To my friends: The End is near, why wait? " He was 77.

1941- Xavier Cugat and his orchestra recorded "Babalu".

1943- Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" premiered. George Szell conducting.   

1991- Lyricist Howard Ashman (Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast) died of HIV/AIDS.

1992- The official Soviet newspaper Pravda- Truth, ceased publication. 

1998- The epic disaster movie Titanic surpassed Star Wars and Jurassic Park as the greatest money earning film (until Avatar). It cost over $200 million to make but it earned at least $1 billion in box office alone. Quote director James Cameron: I’m King of the World!!

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 13, 2022

Birthdays: Hugh Walpole, Charles 2nd Earl Grey 1764- English Prime Minister whom the tea blend 'Earl Grey Tea " is named for, Pope Innocent XII (1615), Abigail Powers Filmore- First Lady of Millard Filmore, Hugo Wolf, Ted Sears, Sammy Kaye, Danny Kaye, Neil Sedaka, L. Ron Hubbard, William Macy is 71, Dick Katz, Annabell Gish, Joe Ranft

1639- Richard Burbage died. Burbage was the famed Elizabethan actor and friend of William Shakespeare. On his tombstone was a simple epitaph- EXIT BURBAGE.

1928- In New York City, Walt Disney sent a telegram to his brother Roy back in California, informing him of his disastrous meeting with producer Charles Mintz. That Mintz had exercised a clause in their contract to take the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit away from them. He cabled “ Leaving Tonight, stopping over KC. Arrive Sunday Morning. Don’t Worry. All Will be Well.” Later on the train home, Walt with Ub Iwerks, Les Clark and his wife Lillian came up with a new character named Mickey Mouse.

1939- Hollywood recognized the Screen Director’s Guild, later called he DGA. After a nasty battle lasting several years Guild President Frank Capra signed the contracts representing 80% of movie directors. They also contractually ensured the custom of the director’s credit being the last one seen at the opening title sequence of a film. 

1943- Radio station WNYC goes on the air.

1944- Abbot & Costello copyrighted their baseball routine ‘Who’s on First?"

1947- MGM Tom & Jerry’s Cat Concerto won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

1965- Guitarist Eric Clapton quit the band The Yardbirds. 

1969- Disney’s comedy about a Volkswagen beetle,"The Love Bug" premiered. The reason the Volkswagen has the race car number 53 painted on it was because producer Bill Walsh was a big fan of LA Dodger hitter Don Drysdale. His player number was 53.

1983- The Larry King Show debuted on HBO, later moving to CNN. King retired that show in 2010, but kept doing cable shows until his death from covid in 2020.

1986- Microsoft made its first public stock offering. A share went for $21.

1987- Raising Arizona, directed by the Cohen Bros opened.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 12, 2022

Birthdays: Jack Kerouac, Billy "Buckwheat "Thomas, Darryl Strawberry, Edward Albee, Andrew Young, Joan Kennedy, Eugene Ormandy, Gordon McCrae, Liza Minelli is 78, Courtenay Vance, James Taylor, Frank Welker, Al Jareau, Maurice Evans, Barbara Feldon- agent 99 in Get Smart is 89, DeWitt Bodeen- writer of the 1942 film Cat People. Aaron Eckart is 54

1932- Disney short "Mickey’s Revue" featuring Dippy Dog, now turned into a new character named "the Goof" or Goofy.

1933-THE FIRESIDE CHATS- Just 8 days after taking office President Franklin Roosevelt began a series of national radio broadcasts detailing his plans to fight the economic problems of the country, called by newsman Robert Trout his Fireside Chats. FDR amazed the American public by speaking quietly and candidly, instead of using the bombastic political oratory of the day.

1945- Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15.

Her father discovered her diary after the war.

1951- Former Disney assistant animator Hank Ketcham was trying his hand as a print cartoonist. He had some success selling gags to the New Yorker Magazine. His baby son Dennis was a precocious infant. Once after she caught the child smearing the contents of his diaper around the house, his mother exclaimed to Hank-“ Your son is a Menace!” That gave Ketcham an idea. Today the first Dennis the Menace comic strip was published.

1955- BIRD DIED- Innovative Jazz great Charlie "Bird" Parker had a chemical addiction since getting out of the army. After the death of his infant daughter earlier that year, his drug use spiraled out of control. He was sleeping on the couch in the NY apartment of the Baroness du Rothschild-Konigswarter, a jazz supporter. He awoke to watch TV. While laughing at a juggler on the Dorsey Brothers Variety Show, he died. The coroner said death was by heart failure, cirrhosis and pneumonia. He estimated Parker’s age at 65. He was really 34. 

1969- Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson –a song written by two young folk singers named Simon & Garfunkel, won a Grammy award.

1969- Paul and Linda McCartney married.

1989- Tim Berners-Lee flicked a switch and the World Wide Web became operational, connecting several regional web systems into a global network.

1992- Warren Beatty married Annette Benning.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for March 11, 2022

Birthdays: Torquato Tasso, Marius Pretipa, Raoul Walsh, Charlie Ruggles, Lawrence Welk, Samuel “Shemp” Howard, British PM Harold Wilson, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Bobby McFerrin, Sam Donaldson, Antonin Scalia, Jerry Zucker, Vannevar Bush- MIT scientist who in 1945 predicted personal computers. Jules Engel, Douglas Adams, Rupert Murdoch is 91, Rob Paulsen is 66, Terence Howard is 53

1851- Guisseppi Verdi's grand opera" Rigoletto "debuts. Considered Verdi's first mature work, it made him an international star. Based on Victor Hugo's "L'roi's amuse", originally about the lustful abominations of King Francois I of France, Verdi changed it to the Duke of Mantua and steered away from the class politics to a family melodrama. Victor Hugo didn't like it. 

1889- The California Legislature splits Orange County from LA County.

1927- The first Roxy Theater opens at 50th st. & Seventh Ave. in New York. Roxy was a nickname of theater owner Samuel L. Rothaphel who pioneered the movie palace and is called the father of De-Luxe presentation.

1943- The Broadway musical team of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein opened their first collaboration “Away We Go!”

1971- Philo Farnsworth died of pneumonia at 64. The young Utah native in 1922 had invented the television set, but by the 1960’s he was forgotten, broke and addicted to painkillers. The only recognition he got was as a contestant on the quiz show I Got a Secret. He won an $80 check and a carton of Winston cigarettes. Today Farnsworth is considered one of the true inventors of Television, along with John Logie-Baird.

1971- THX 1138- Frances Ford Coppola convinced Warner Bros to release a fleshed out feature version of a college thesis film by a young guy named George Lucas.

1977- Film director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown) was arrested for having sex with a 13 year old girl in Jack Nicholson’s home after he got her stoned on quaaludes. Polanski was charged with statutory rape. He jumped bail and fled Hollywood for exile in Paris. LA courts have been trying unsuccessfully to get him extradited ever since. Today even in his late 80s, Polanski is still filing appeals and lawsuits to try and return.

1984 - NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND, adapted and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, was released in Japan. When the Walt Disney company agreed to distribute the film, they released it in Europe with time cuts, about ten minutes. Miyazaki later send the studio a beautiful samurai sword. On the blade was engraved , “ No Cuts”.

2011- FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI- The northern coast of Japan was struck by one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. The quake sent a tsunami wave that erased whole towns and killed 20,000. A ripple wave went across the Pacific and sank boats in harbor at Santa Cruz, California and Oregon. The tsunami also damaged 5 reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, sending clouds of radioactive steam into the atmosphere and water. No one seems to be clear about just how badly polluted the Pacific is now with radiation. 

2020- The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus covid 19 a global pandemic.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 10, 2022

Birthdays: Lorenzo da Ponte -librettist of Mozart's operas, Barry Fitzgerald, Claire Booth Luce, Heywoud Hale Broun, James Herriot, Pablo de Sarrasate, Osama Bin Laden,  Robert Abel, Chuck Norris is 82, Shannon Tweed, Sharon Stone is 64, John Hamm is 51

1935- The First Smokey Stover comic strip (notary sojac).

1947- Ronald Reagan becomes President of the Screen Actor's Guild after President George Montgomery and V.P. Franchot Tone resigned to become independent producers. In the violent gangster-ridden atmosphere of Hollywood unions Reagan took to wearing a .32 Smith & Wesson in a shoulder holster under his coat.

1948- Zelda Fitzgerald, the socialite wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, died in a fire at the mental hospital where she had been committed for more than a decade. 

1954- In a letter to studio heads director Elias Kazan worried that young actor James Dean was “too odd” and unpredictable to star in his movie “Rebel Without a Cause”.

1954- First day of shooting on Stage 3 of the Giant Squid battle on Walt Disney’s production of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The director was Richard Fleischer, the son of Walt Disney’s onetime competitor Max Fleischer.

1969- The Godfather, a novel by Mario Puzo was first published. The book about a NY mafia family was a huge hit and spawned three successful movies.

1972- Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern and directed by Douglas Trumble opened.

1988- Andy Gibb of the BeeGees died at age 30. It was reported he died of a drug overdose, but he actually died of heart failure brought on by years of heavy drug abuse.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 9, 2022

Question: Who was Baby Snooks?

Yesterdays Question answered below: What is a Chautauqua?

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History for 3/9/2022 

Birthdays: Amerigo Vespucci, Eddie Foy, Yuri Gargarin, Samuel Barber, chess master Bobby Fischer, Mickey Spillane, Vita Sackville-West, Raul Julia, Vacheslav Molotov, Juliet Binoche is 58, Linda Fiorentino is 64, Lil’ Bow-Wow is 35

1888- While strolling through his garden, writer Jules Verne was shot by an emotional deranged nephew Gaston.  He recovered, but walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

1907- Former Edison animator J. Stuart Blackton started "Moving Picture World" an early movie fanzine.

1913- Virginia Woolf completed her first novel The Voyage Out.

1954- Edgar R. Murrow does his "See It Now" television broadcast detailing the life of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the commie-chaser. The obvious contradictions and gross opportunism in McCarthy's record when laid out before a nationwide audience, destroyed his career and took the steam out of the "Red Scare" of the 50's. It is probably television journalism's finest moment. For the lowest? Well, what's on tonight? 

1955- Actor James Dean’s last film, East of Eden, premiered today,

1959-The first "Clutch Cargo" show. 

1984- Roy E. Disney Jr., Walt’s nephew, resigned from the central board of the Walt Disney Company, setting in motion a series of takeover bids and maneuvering that by August would wrest control of the company from Ron Miller, Walt’s son-in-law.

1984- Touchstone pictures Splash premiered, featuring Tom Hanks, John Candy and a tastefully topless Daryl Hannah.

1989- Artist-photographer Robert Maplethorpe died of AIDS.

1997- Gangsta-rap singer Christopher Wallace, who was known as the Notorious B.I.G. and also called Biggie Smalls, was shot and killed by a gangsta-style drive by. His last album was entitled Life After Death. Notorious BIG could never shake the accusation that he was involved in the similar murder of singer Tupac Shakur.

2007- Zack Snyder’s film “300” opened. This is Sparta!

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 8, 2022

Birthdays: Sophocles, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, Hannah Hoes Van Beuren- the First Lady for Martin Van Beuren, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Alan Hovhannes, Kenneth Grahame the author of the Wind in the Willows, Cyd Charisse, Charlie Pride, Mickey Dolenz, Alan Hale Jr., Jim Rice, Aiden Quinn is 63, Freddy Prinze Jr is 48, Jim Bouton- baseball player, author, inventor of Big League Chew bubble gum, animator Don Hall

1886- A Scottish doctor in Portsmouth England, named Arthur Conan-Doyle had been trying his hand at writing fiction. He sold a few stories to magazines and tried to publish a historical novel about an insurance company, “The Firm of Girdlestone”, with lackluster results.  This day he began a new novel “A Tangled Skein” which had a new character named at first Sheridan Hope, then Sheringford Holmes. By the time he finished his story, month later, he had changed the title to “A Study in Scarlet” and the main protagonist name had become SHERLOCK HOLMES. 

1933- As a result of President Roosevelt's Nationwide Bank shutdown, Hollywood Studios go into a cash panic. MGM, RKO and the others ask for 30-50% salary cuts from their stars and artists. At one point they announced the salary cuts at the Oscar banquet ( betchya that made for a real fun party!) 

1941- Writer and playwright Sherwood Anderson dies from periarteritis- internal bleeding- after swallowing a toothpick at a cocktail party.

1941- The National Television System Committee set up by the FCC to standardize television technology recommended an industry standard of 525 scan lines at 30 frames a second- what we now call after their name- NTSC. England later adopted the PAL (Phase Alernation Line) of 625 lines, 25 frames per second and France the SECAM System (Systeme Electronique Couleur Avec Memoire), which is also a 625 line, 25fps system.  This is why British TV shows like The Prisoner always looked so grainy on American sets and American shows look so garish on British sets. By garish I mean the color, not the content. 

It also speeds up the film during video from 24 frames to 25fps (i.e. 4%)...which is why in England and the rest of Europe, all Hollywood movies are 4% shorter and the voices of the actors all sound a little squeaky. The way to remember NTSC is "Never-The-Same-Color'. DVD and BluRay went to a thousand- scan lines. The invention of digital screens made most of this irrelevant.

1961-The Frito Company merges with potato chip makers H.L. Lay to form Frito-Lay. The recipe for Fritos corn chips was bought by milkshake salesman Elmer Doolin from a Mexican fry cook in South Texas.

1973- Paul McCartney was fined 100 pounds for growing marijuana on his farm Mull of Kintyre.

1977- Ralph Bakshi’s film Wizards premiered.

1994- Don Ku invented the ubiquitous little rolling wheeled black suitcase with collapsible handle that bumps into your legs at airports today.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 7, 2022

Birthdays: Maurice Ravel, Piet Mondrian, Roman Emperor Geta, Luther Burbank, Tammy Fae Baker, Willard Scott, Lynn Swann, Franco Harris, Daniel D. Travanti, Rachel Weisz is 50, Michael Eisner is 79, Wanda Sykes is 57, Peter Saarsgard is 50, Bryan Cranston is 65.

1945- Tom & Jerry short Quiet Please won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

 

1955- The first Emmy Awards to be televised. Steve Allen hosted.

1988- 300 pound female impersonator Harris Milstead, better known as Divine in the John Waters films, died of sleep apnea. He was 42.

1999- Film director Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack in his sleep, just five days after screening his final film Eyes Wide Shut. He was 71.

2010- The Pixar film UP won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 6, 2022

Birthdays: Michelangelo Buonarotti, Cyrano De Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Phil Sheridan, Lou Costello, Ivan Boesky, Ring Lardner, Gabriele Garcia-Marquez, Valentina Tereschkova the first woman in space, Tom Arnold, Kiri Te Kanawa, Rob Reiner is 74, Alan Greenspan, DC Mayor Marion Barry, Stephen Schwartz is 74, Ed McMahon, Shaquille O’Neal is 50

1850- Gustav Flaubert was the French writer who was once tried for pornography for writing Madame Bovary. This day while in Egypt he kept an appointment with the countries most famous belly dancing prostitute, Kuchuk Hanem.

1853-  Giusseppi Verdi’s classic opera La Traviata premiered at Teatro alla Fenice in Venice. It was based on Dumas novel Le Dame Aux Camelias. Verdi wrote in his diary about the premiere:" The evening was a disaster! Was it my fault or the fault of the singers? Only time will tell..."

1921- The film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse premiered. The first Hollywood film to earn over one million dollars, and it made a major star out of Rudolf Valentino.

1936- Mr. Clarence Birdseye introduced frozen vegetables.

1978- Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt was shot and crippled by a lunatic. 

1979- The film The China Syndrome premiered. It was about an accident at an American nuclear power plant. Three weeks later the real Three Mile Island accident occurred, boosting the box office. " It's spooky, it's enough to make you religious" said star Michael Douglas.

1981- CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite retired.  Dan Rather succeeded him after CBS learned ABC was offering Rather big bux to jump networks. Roger Mudd, who was thought to be the real successor to Cronkite, left the network to anchor the History Channel. Dan Rather was the CBS anchor until 2004.

1989- Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to become Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world. They were bought by AOL in 2000 but AOL proved to be dead weight and they resumed control as TimeWarner in 2003.

1992- The film The Lawnmower Man premiered. It featured early motion-capture CGI imagery, and claimed to have the first virtual reality sex scene. 

1998- The Big Lebowski opened in theaters. The Dude Abides…

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 4, 2022

Birthdays: King Henry II Plantagenet, Antonio Vivaldi, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, Count Pulaski, Miriam Makeba, Nancy Wilson, Bernard Haittink, John Garfield, Knute Rockne, Chastity Bono, Ray “Boom-Boom” Mancini, Patsy Kensit, Katherine O’Hara is 69, James Ellroy, Mykleti Williamson. Ward Kimball, Ken Duncan

1887- William Randolph Hearst bought the little San Francisco Examiner and began to build the Hearst newspaper empire. Hearst’s father was part owner of the famed Comstock Mine, and thought his son crazy for wasting his time with the penny-paper business. Hearst died in 1951 at age 88, leaving an estate of $160 million. Today Hearst publications are still 15 magazines and broadcast networks.

1902- AAA the Auto Club founded.

100 Years ago 1922- F.W. Murnau’s classic film Nosferatu, the Vampire, opened in Berlin.

1924- The song “Happy Birthday to You” copyrighted by Claydon Sunny.

1936- Screenwriter Dudley Nichols publicly refuses the Best Screenplay Oscar for John Ford’s “The Informer” as a protest in support of the struggling Writer’s Guild.

1946- Alex Raymond's comic strip 'Rip Kirby" premiered.

1952- Ronald Reagan married Nancy Davis at the Little Red Church on Coldwater Canyon Blvd. in L.A. William Holden was their best man.

1952- Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher:" I've completed a new novel. I think it's my best one to date." The Old Man and the Sea.

1956- Burger King introduced their signature hamburger the Whopper.

1960- American opera baritone Leonard Warren dropped dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in the 2nd act of Verdi's La Forza Del Destino.

1961- In the early stages of filming Cleopatra in London, actress Elizabeth Taylor developed pneumonia and slipped into a coma. She would have died, had not doctors at a convention at London’s Dorchester Hotel performed and emergency tracheotomy. When you seen the film today you can still see the tracheotomy scar at the base of her throat.

1976- Due to the intervention of San Francisco mayor George Moscone, the Giants baseball team would stay in city by the bay. In a last minute deal, the Stoneham family sells the team to Bob Lurie and Bud Herseth instead of the Labbatt's Brewery, which had planned to move the Giants to Canada. 

1994- Basketball legend Michael Jordan went to bat for the first time in a Chicago White Sox Baseball uniform. Jordan gave up baseball after one season and returned to the NBA. 

1991- During the Gulf War, US troops destroyed an Iraqi bunker concealing tons of deadly sarin nerve gas. Estimates are up to 24,000 troops were exposed to the toxic release.

1994- 375 pound comedian John Candy died of apnea in his sleep. He was 43.

2000- The Japanese launch of Sony Playstation 2. It was designed to compete with Segas Dreamcast and Nintendo’s Cube. The Playstation 2 was the most anticipated videogame launch in history. 600,000 units were sold. One store in Tokyo’s Ginza had 4,000 people lined up at their door.  It remained hot for 13 years.

2004- A New York court convicted interior decorating guru Martha Stewart of four counts of stock fraud. This was for dumping her stock in a pharmaceutical firm called InClone after getting an inside tip that their cancer cure didn’t actually work.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 3, 2022

B-Dayz: George Pullman of Pullman Railroad cars, General Matthew Ridgeway, Jean Harlow, Diana Barrymore, Akira Ifukube the composer of the music scores to movies like Godzilla, Tone Loc,  Jacky Joyner-Kersee, James Doohan, Ronald Searle, animator Bruno Bozzetto, Bobby Driscoll, Herschel Walker, George Miller, Miranda Richardson 

1783- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed his Symphony #35 the Hafner in Vienna with the Austrian Emperor Joseph II in attendance. 

1842- Massachusetts created a law trying to limit the workday for children under twelve to only twelve hours a day, but opponents considered it too lefty-liberal to be enforced.

1925- The Warner Bros started up their radio station, KFWB. It was Sam Warner’s idea, and their father Ben had coined the letters to mean Keep Fighting, Warner Bros, because of their constant bickering. It went through several hands, and was a newsradio station for a long time. In 2016, it was bought by a Bollywood music company who changed its letters. 

1931- President Hoover signed an act of Congress that made the "Star Spangled Banner" officially the U.S. national anthem. The 1814 Francis Scott Key poem set to the English beer hall song "To Anacreon in Heaven" was sung since the 1850's, but this day it became official. 

1938- The skies over Los Angeles finally clear after two huge Pacific storms ravaged the region, causing massive flooding from Long Beach to Glendale. The destruction and flooding caused Los Angeles to cover the Los Angeles and Burbank Rivers in concrete, creating the distinctive flood basin the Terminator raced motorcycles and trucks through.

1950- Paramount's "Quack-a-Doodle-Doo" The first Baby Huey cartoon.

1950- Don Herbert teaches millions of kids about science as televisions Mr. Wizard.

1952- The Supreme Court ruled that school teachers could be fired if they were Communists.

1959- Lou Costello, the loveable pudgy comedian of the team Abbott & Costello, died of a heart attack three days before his 53 birthday. A recurrence of childhood rheumatic fever and the death of his infant son darkened his last years. The team of Abbott and Costello broke up in 1957. His last words were to a hospital nurse,” That was the best strawberry soda I ever had…”

1966- William Frawley, the bald, gravel-voiced neighbor Fred Murtz on I Love Lucy, had just seen the movie Inside Daisy Clover on Hollywood Blvd. He was outside the Knickerbocker Hotel when he lit a cigar, then dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 79. When his TV partner Vivian Vance heard the news, she said “Champagne for everyone!” They never liked each other much. Vivian died in 1979.

1975- First meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in a garage in Menlo Park Ca., Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were members.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 2, 2022

Birthdays: Sam Houston, Alexander Graham Bell, Kurt Weill, Desi Arnaz (Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III), Ted Geisel aka Dr. Suess, Mikhail Gorbachov, Willis O'Brian, Moe Berg, Karen Carpenter, Lou Reed, Jennifer Jones, John Cullum, John Irving, Tom Wolfe, Jon Bon Jovi is 60, Daniel Craig is 54, animator Stephen Chiodo

1818- It had been thought that the Pyramids in Egypt were solid monuments with no chambers. This day Italian archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni discovered the long lost entrance to the Great Pyramid of Giza and explored it’s inner corridors and burial chambers. 

1923- THE FIRST TIME MAGAZINE. Founders Henry Luce and Claire Booth Luce were among the more powerful of the nation’s cultural elite. Conservative to the core -to the end of their days they thought Franklin Roosevelt and Civil Rights were big mistakes, they still experimented with LSD when it was thought by Harvard professors to be mind expanding. In the late 1980's the Time merged with Warner Communications to form Time-Warner, the world's largest media conglomerate.

1933- "KING KONG"s exclusive premiere at the new Radio City Music Hall in New York. It opened in the rest of the country in April. “Twas Beauty killed the Beast.”

1935- The Looney Tune Cartoon "I haven’t Got a Hat" premiered. This cartoon gave birth to the first permanent Warner Bros. Cartoon star- Porky Pig. 

1940- SEABISCUIT. The small ungainly racehorse Seabiscuit had lost the Santa Anita Handicap Stakes twice before. Now at 7 years old, with ligament tears, he was considered all washed up. But he was entered one more time to try to win this race. The jockey Red Pollard was an alcoholic who had broken his leg and collarbone and was told he couldn’t walk, much less ever ride again. 

Today this unlikely duo raced one more time against odds more like a Hollywood movie than a stakes race. The Biscuit not only won his last race, but set a track record, the second fastest time ever, and the richest win for that time. It’s called one of the greatest comeback stories in sports history.

When discussing the Sports Legends of the Twentieth Century- Ali, Ruth, Michael Jordan, Seabiscuit and Secretariat are the only non-humans.

1947- Crusading Hollywood union organizer Herb Sorrell was plucked off the street in Glendale by gangsters posing as police. They may not have been just posing, many movie studios at the time hired off-duty LAPD at double time rates to “take care” of troublesome employees. They drove Herb up to Mulholland and worked him over, leaving him by the side of the road. Shortly after leaving the hospital, Sorrell was jailed for disturbing public peace. 

1960- Wilt Chamberlain ("Wilt the Stilt") scored 100 points in one game for the Philadelphia Warriors. Wilt averaged a phenomenal 55 points per game that year and the NBA instituted a number of anti-Wilt regulations to ensure guys under 6'2 could get back in the game, like offensive goal tending, etc. Wilt also claimed to have put his off the court time to good use. He claims to have had sex with 3,000 women. 

1961- Pablo Picasso married his second wife Jacqueline. He was 80, she was 35. Jacqueline cared for the increasingly reclusive artist and kept even his family at a distance. When Picasso died in 1973, she turned away many family members from the funeral. Jacqueline committed suicide in 1986.

1962- The classic Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man first episode. It’s a Cookbook!

1965- The movie The Sound of Music opened at the Rivoli theater in Manhattan. 

1971- Charles Engelhard died, a venture capitalist whose wild investments and grand lifestyle made him the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s villain Auric Goldfinger.

1972- Pioneer 10 space probe launched. The first satellite to the outer planets, it sent back the first closeup photos of Jupiter in 1973 and left our solar system in 1983. It carries a plaque with a representation of men and women, a map of the Earth and Richard Nixon’s signature on it. It is in deep space now and will reach the star Ross 246 in the constellation Taurus in the year 34,600 A.D.  Boy, I can hardly wait!

1973- The Women in Film organization founded.

1976- Francis Ford Coppola began shooting his epic film “Apocalypse Now” in the Philippines. The film was plagued by cost overruns, a typhoon and his Philippine Army helicopters frequently flying off to fight real guerrillas, but somehow it all got done. Today it is considered a classic.

1982- Science Fiction writer Philip K. Dick died of a stroke in Santa Ana, California. He was 53. The author of stories the movies Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall were based. Dick said he was at times possessed by a superalien who appeared in his mind in a beam of pink light. His autobiography was titled “I am alive and you are dead.”

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for March 1, 2022

Birthdays: Frederic Chopin, Augustus Saint Gaudens, Glen Miller, David Niven, Oskar Kokoschka, Roger Daltry, Robert Conrad, Deke Slayton, Yitschak Rabin. Catherine Bach, Timothy Daly, Ron Howard is 68, Javier Bardem is 53, Zack Snyder is 56, Harry Belafonte is 95, Lupita Nyongo.

Happy Mardi Gras - Fat Tuesday- The day before Ash Wednesday ushering in the Catholic season of Lent is the cause for wild parties in many cultures- Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Venice, Quebec and other cities. Carne-Vale is Latin for Goodbye to Meat, the Lenten fast.  The Mardi Gras custom in America started in Mobile Alabama around 1708 then went to New Orleans. It died out in more somber Victorian times but was renewed after the Civil War- so-' Lesse Le Bon Temps Roller’! “Let the Good Times Roll!” 

1872- Congress okayed the creation of Yellowstone National Park.  

1930- Disney animator Ub Iwerks, the animator/designer of Mickey Mouse, quit the studio to set up his own place. Iwerks partner was Pat Powers, who’s Powers Cinephone was the process used to put sound on “Steamboat Willie”. Powers engineered the break between Ub and Walt when Disney refused to let Powers buy into a co-partnership in Disney Studio. Walt was stunned by the loss of one of his first employees and closest friends. Iwerks studio produced Flip the Frog Cartoons, but it eventually failed, and he'll return to Disney to invent the xerox process. 

 1932- Museum of Modern Art in New York has first major retrospective of the style of architecture called "THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE" Steel girder frames with large windows for walls and no ornamentation. This style pioneered by Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Phillip Johnson. Called by critics "vertical ice cube trays" they now dominate the skylines around the world, making Moscow and Shanghai equally unrecognizable from Pretoria, or Newark, New Jersey.

1941- The first Captain America comic book by Marvel Comics published. 

1946- The National Cartoonists Society formed.

1961-The Ken Doll introduced. 

1978- Unemployed auto mechanics Gatchko Ganas and Roman Wardas broke into the tomb of Charlie Chaplin in Vevey Switzerland and stole his remains. They tried to hold it for ransom. The body was recovered and the two losers were soon arrested. They were trying to make enough money to open a car repair garage in France.

1988- Apple introduced the first commercially available CD-ROM drive for your personal computer.