Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 31, 2022

Birthdays: Liberace, General George H. Thomas the "Rock of Chickamagua", Sebastian Sperling Kresge the founder of S.S. Kresge stores, Milton Friedman, Sherry Lansing, Geraldine Chaplin, Kurt Gowdy, Dean Cain, Leon “ Bull “Durham, Primo Levi, Fred Quimby, animator Ken Harris, Ted Cassidy who played Lurch in the Adams Family, Wesley Snipes is 60, and according to J.K. Rowling, today is the birthday of Harry Potter

1922- Ralph Samuelson invented water skis.

1930- Radio mystery show “The Shadow” premiered. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…heh, heh, heh.” Orson Welles did the voice of the crime fighting Shadow for a year in 1937 for $185 a week.

1954- Steve Allen married Jayne Meadows.

1966- Birmingham Alabama held a massed rally to burn Beatles records after John Lennon casually joked that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus.

1968- Charles Schulz introduced Franklin, the first black character into his Peanuts comic strip.

1992- Bebe’s Kids released, the first animated feature directed by an African American, Bruce W. Smith.

1992- The Robert Zemeckis’ comedy Death Becomes Her opened. With Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. It is the first film that widely used the new digital matte technique to replace traditional optical printing.

1995- The Walt Disney Company bought the ABC Network, the Discovery Channel and ESPN.

1999- Premiere of Brad Bird’s movie The Iron Giant.

2020- The Twitter accounts of famous people like former Pres Obama, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk were hacked for a sophisticated bitcoin scam. The person arrested was not a foreign agent or terrorist, but a 17 year old High School student from Tampa, Fla., named Graham Clark.

2022- George Jetson of the 1960s TV show The Jetsons was born. The show is set when George was age 40, in 2062.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 30, 2022

Birthdays: Georgio Vasari, Henry Ford, Emily Bronte', Casey Stengel, Roy Williams, Vladimir Zworykin, Arnold Schwarzenegger is 75, Ed "Kookie" Byrnes, Peter Bogdanovich, Delta Burke, Henry Moore, Anita Hill, Lawrence Fishburne is 61, Jean Reno is 73, Hilary Swank is 48, Christopher Nolan, Lisa Kudrow is 59

1889- Start of the Sherlock Holmes mystery, the Naval Treaty.

1929 -The Hollywood Bowl musicians go on strike.

1932-Walt Disney’s “Flowers and Trees” the first Technicolor Cartoon. Disney had worked out a deal with Technicolor creator Dr. Herbert Kalmus to use his technique exclusively for two years to show larger Hollywood studios its quality.

1932- The first Los Angeles hosting of the Olympic Games in their spanking new Coliseum. Gold medalists in swimming Larry Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller later became movie stars. Another medalist, the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, began to teach the Californians about a new sport- surfing!

1935- The first paperback book. Andre Maurois 'Ariel, a Life of Shelley', published in this new form by Penguin Books of London.

1936- Producer David O. Selznick buys the movie rights to the best selling book “Gone With The Wind” from an ailing Irving Thalberg. The "boy genius" Thalberg was hoping that Selznick would ruin himself in the process of making this film. Thalberg was convinced that GWTW would prove to be a massive flop because "Costume dramas are box office poison."

1948 - Professional wrestling premieres on prime-time network TV (DuMont)

1954 - Elvis Presley joins Local 71, the Memphis Federation of Musicians.

1959- Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor patented the integrated circuit.

1966 - BATMAN: THE MOVIE, and based on the 1966 BATMAN television series, opened. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson and starring Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin,

1972- John Boorman’s thriller Deliverance, with Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty.

1986- Walt Disney released “Flight of the Navigator”, featuring early photo-real CG VFX done by Canadian studio Omnibus.

1988- The last Playboy Club in America closed. It was in Lansing, Mich. In 2006 Hugh Hefner opened a Playboy Club themed casino in Las Vegas.

1999- The Blair Witch Project opened in theaters. The low-budget indy became a huge hit due to an on-line grass roots campaign claiming that the footage of teenager encountering the supernatural was genuine.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 29, 2022

Birthdays: Alex de Tocqueville, Benito Mussolini, Clara Bow, Natalie Wood, Paul Taylor, Sig Romberg, Dag Hammarskjold, Peter Jennings, Michael Spinks, Maria Ouspenskaya, Dave Stevens creator of the Rocketeer, Ken Burns is 68, Booth Tarkington, David Warner, Steven Dorff, Professor Irwin Corey, William Cameron-Menzies, Peter Jennings, William Powell, Will Wheaton

1890- Near Auvers-sur-Oise, artist Vincent Van Gogh went behind a hay bale and was shot. He lingered for two more days and died of blood poisoning. He was 37. His brother Theo was so distraught he died six months later of a brain disease and melancholia. 

100 Years Ago 1922- In Kansas City, Walt Disney released his first Laugh-o-Gram short- Little Red Riding Hood, animated by Rudy Ising.

1931- George Bernard Shaw traveled to Moscow and met Josef Stalin.

1938- Three Missing Links- a Three Stooges comedy with the boys as cave men and Ray Crash Corrigan in a gorilla suit.

1942- Orson Welles left Rio De Janiero after RKO fired him and stopped production of "It's All True". RKO also had “the Magnificent Ambersons” re-cut to a more acceptable 90 minutes and fired the executive producer first who brought him to Hollywood. On his payroll was animator Oskar Fischinger, who had left Disney after Fantasia.

1946- In Los Angeles, Jazz great Charlie Parker had learned of the death of his baby daughter back in New York. He showed up for a recording session so drunk and high his producer had to hold him up in front of the mike. Later that night he fell completely apart, ran naked down the street, set fire to his hotel room smoking in bed. The cops had to shake him violently to wake him, he fought with them and they beat him up and threw him in jail. He was committed to the Camarillo Mental Hospital. 

1948- Former Disney assistant-animator Hank Ketcham’s comic strip "Dennis the Menace," 1st appeared.

1957- Tonight with Jack Paar premiered. 

1962- The film “Dr No” premiered, introducing the world to the suave spy James Bond 007.  They first considered Cary Grant, David Niven, Patrick McGoohan, and James Mason, who all turned them down. So the producers chose young Scots actor Sean Connery. Ian Fleming wrote of the choice, “Disaster!!” Connery had just starred as the villain in a Tarzan film, and they wanted him to film the sequel. But he asked for a time off to go do “a little spy picture.”

1965 - Beatles movie "Help" had its Royal World premiere at the London Pavilion in the West End. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon in attendance. The film actually opened a month later. People said the movie was filmed “in a haze of marijuana smoke” and most people on the film didn’t know what was next as they were writing it as they went along. 

1974- Mamas and the Papa's chubby singer Mama Cass Eliot died of a stroke, not as was widely believed from choking on a sandwich. She was 32.

1987- Ice cream makers Ben & Jerry announce the flavor Cherry Garcia, named for rock singer Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Jerry is gone, but the ice cream rocks on.

1989- Miyazaki’s film Kiki’s Delivery Service premiered in Japan.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 28, 2022

Birthdays: Beatrix Potter, Jacqueline Kennedy, Richard Rogers, Ibn al’ Arabi- philosopher 1165, Marcel Duchamp, Rudy Vallee. Sally Struthers, Peter Duchin, Vida Blue, Joe E. Brown, Jim Davis the creator of Garfield, Frankie Yankovic the Polka King, Elizabeth Berkley, Earl Tupper the inventor of Tupperware, Hugo Chavez

1655- Poet, playwright and duelist Cyrano de Bergerac died in Paris. The famous play about him and his big nose was written by Edmond Rostand in 1895

1788- Master British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds visited the other master British portrait painter Sir Thomas Gainsborough, who was dying or cancer. They had been enemies for years, but now at the end they made up.  When Reynolds left him, Gainsborough said "Goodbye until we meet in the Hereafter, Van Dyck in our company."

1841- The body of Mary Cecilia Rogers was pulled out of New York Harbor. The sensational murder of the “Beautiful Cigar Girl” inspired Edgar Allen Poe to write “ The Mystery of Marie Roget.”

1858- The French photographer Nadar went up in a balloon and took the first aerial photograph.

1882- Parsifal, the last opera of Richard Wagner was produced at Bayreuth. As a way to ensure its financial solvency Wagner left instructions to never tour Parsifal but it should forever stay at Bayreuth. This lasted a few decades. 

1932- The movie White Zombie with Bela Lugosi opened. 

1933- The first singing telegram. It was delivered to singer Rudy Valee by Western Union operator appropriately named Lucille Lipps.

1948- In honor of the death of D.W. Griffith, all Hollywood studios observed three minutes of silence.

1948- The Premiere of " Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" For you hardcore film trivia fans this film is the only other time than the original Tod Browning movie that Bela Lugosi played Count Dracula on film. 

1954- The film On The Waterfront opened. Producer Sam Spiegel originally wanted Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly as the leads. But Kelly took Hitchcock’s Rear Window instead, and Marlon Brando and Eva Marie-Saint became available, much to the annoyance of Sinatra.

1958- HAPPY LEGO DAY! Danish toymaker Gotfried Kirk Christiansen patented the interlocking plastic brick. The LEGO empire began.

1971- Photographer Diane Arbus probed increasingly darker subject matter, circus freaks, severe birth defects. This day she committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, then slitting her wrists.

1978- National Lampoons Animal House directed by John Landis opened. 

1987- Disney's Oilspot and Lipstick premiered at Siggraph Anaheim. It was an early experimental all CGI film.

1998- In Afghanistan the Taliban ordered mass destruction of television sets.  They also forbade the Internet and shaved the heads of their national soccer team for daring to wear shorts.

2061- The next predicted appearance of Halley’s Comet.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 27, 2022

Birthdays: Confucius, Alexander Dumas fils, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Norman Lear, Maureen McGovern, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Ilya Salkind, David Swift –director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap, Maya Rudolph is 50, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is 45.

1921- Two Toronto scientists, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate the hormone Insulin to treat diabetes.

1921- SHAKESPEARE & CO. opened in Paris. The English language bookshop on the Seine owned by Sylvia Beach was the most famous hangout for the U.S. expatriate intellectuals. Shakespeare & Co. championed writers like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Carlos Santayanna, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sherwood Anderson and more. 

1940- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUGS BUNNY. Tex Avery’s short-"A Wild Hare”-There were several earlier prototypes of the famous rabbit, white with a different voice, but this is the short that is generally accepted as his birthday. 

In the late 30s, a fashion among some animators in LA was to spend the weekend up in the High Sierras hunting. Most of them were terrible at it, and when they came back with nothing, got a lot of teasing from their buddies. At Looney Tunes, a few guys did gag drawings of designer Ben Hardaway fruitlessly hunting a rabbit. His nickname was Bugs, because he originated from Chicago, like gangster Bugs Moran. Being Bugs or Bugsy was also slang then for crazy. The gag drawings were of Hardaway and " Bug's Bunny". Bob Givens created the first official model sheet of the character. 

In this short Bugs says “Whats Up Doc?” for the first time, co-opting a line uttered by Clark Gable while chewing a carrot in the 1934 Frank Capra hit “It Happened One Night”. 
Interestingly, voice actor Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots, and kept a bucket nearby to spit them out after chewing. He experimented with chewing other vegetables, but he claimed nothing sounded as good as raw carrots.

1946- Writer Gertrude Stein died at age 72. Her last words to Alice B. Toklas were:" What is the Answer?" When Alice said nothing, Gertrude said:" Well then, what is the Question?"

1953- The Tonight Show debuted on NBC. Its first host was Steve Allen.

1977- John Lennon got his green card. Richard Nixon considered him a dangerous radical. Several times he was under 60-day notice to leave the country.

2007- The Simpson’s Movie debuted.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 26, 2022

 Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitzky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen,

 Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Ken Muse, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Sandra Bullock is 58, Kevin Spacey, Kate Beckinsdale, Helen Mirren is 77, Jason Statham, Mick Jagger is 79

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks.

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achievements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.

1951- Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had its world premiere in London’s Leicester Square Theatre. It opened in the U.S. two days later.

1959- KPFK, Los Angeles progressive radio of The Pacifica Network, starts up.

1970- Oh, Calcutta! Play opened in London. Oh, Calcutta had nothing at all to do with India, the show was a series of unrelated, but sex-dominated sketches featuring a totally nude cast, both male and female. The title came from a pun on the French “O quel cul t’as” meaning “what a nice bum you have”.

1984- Edward Gein died peacefully in a prison for the criminally insane. Gein was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to life for mass murder. Police found his farm in Wisconsin decorated with human body parts and heads in the freezer and in the stove, and the dried cadaver of his mother Augustina.  His story inspired "Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs".

1991 – Children’s comic Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman was arrested in Florida for masturbating in an adult movie theater. The film was Naughty Nurse Nancy. 

1995- After a year of investigation, the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Roswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. …Hmmm.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 25, 2022

Birthdays: Bishop Theitmar of Merseberg- 975AD, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Stuart K. Hine 1899 missionary who wrote the hymn "How Great Thou Art", Woody Strode, Walter Payton, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illena Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-conceived by invitro-fertilization is 44

1897- Young writer Jack London went to the Klondike to look for gold. He didn’t find much gold, but did get material for a lot of good stories.

1951- CBS conducts the first broadcast of color television. NBC made color TV popular in the mid 1960's.

1953- Chuck Jone's "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".

 

1965- Folk Music star Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Folk Festival for using an electric guitar. Alan Lomax, the great Smithsonian Folk Music historian got into a fistfight over it, and Pete Seeger threatened to pull the electric plugs.

1975 - "A Chorus Line," longest-running Broadway show (6,137), premiered.

1984- The groundbreaking CGI film The Adventures of Andre and Wally-B premiered at the Siggraph convention in Minneapolis. Directed by Alvy Ray Amith and the computer designers who would eventually form Pixar. They were aided by new hire John Lasseter, who brought his Disney animation expertise to forming credible character animation on computer.

1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS. He had collapsed in France and he made the announcement while being treated at a French clinic. He was the first major public figure to acknowledge he had the mysterious new disease.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 24, 2022

Birthdays: Simon Bolivar, Amelia Earhart, Alexander Dumas fils, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Graves, Pat Oliphant, Bela Abzug, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ruth Buzzi, Lynda Carter is 71, Chief Dan George, Robert Hays, Gus Van Sant, Anna Paquin, Patty Jenkins, J-Lo Jennifer Lopez is 52

1901- William Porter, also known as O. Henry, was released from jail after doing time for embezzlement. While in jail, he discovered he had a talent for writing.

1934- Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film Cleopatra premiered.  

1938 - Instant coffee invented.

1948- Warner's "Haredevil Hare" featuring the first Marvin the Martian.  Now where did I put my Pew Illudium Q 36 Explosive Space Modulator? 

1965- Bob Dylan released the song “Like a Rolling Stone”.

1966- Actor Montgomery Clift died of a heart attack at age 45. When his private nurse Lorenzo James said goodnight to him at 1:00AM, he asked him if he wanted to watch his old movie The Misfits on TV. Clift’s last words were, “Absolutely Not!” 

1980- In London’s Dorchester Hotel, comedian and actor Peter Sellers died of a heart attack. He was 54.

1983- George Brett of the Kansas City Royals had a second homerun he hit nullified after Yankee manager Billy Martin complains he had too much pine tar on his bat.

1985- Walt Disney's "The Black Cauldron" premiered. Billed as Walt Disney’s greatest animation feature in decades, its first week it came in third to PeeWee’s Big Adventure, and The Care Bears Movie. It’s failure almost ended Disney animation.

1998- Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opened.

2005- American Lance Armstrong won the Tour du France bicycle race for an unprecedented 7th time, even after surviving testicular cancer that had spread to his spine and brain. Steroids or not, it was still one hell of an achievement. After he confessed to juicing (using performance enhancing drugs like steroids), all his medals were taken away.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 23, 2022

Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler,  Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse, Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Slash, Marlon Wayans, Woody Harrelson is 62, Edie McClurg, Daniel Radcliffe is 34

Happy Bluto Day! Jackson Beck the voice of Bluto, born July 23, 1912-2004.

1886- This was the day Bowery saloonkeeper Steve Brodie claimed he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and lived to talk about it. 

1904 – The Ice Cream Cone created by Charles E. Menches during the LA Purchase Expo. Also introduced there was Dr. Pepper.

1932-The Birthday of Fritos. Texas ice cream maker Elmer Doolin buys a recipe for corn chips from a Mexican fry cook for $100 dollars and started the Frito-Lay Company.

1951-Thelonius Monk recorded the seminal jazz album Straight, No Chaser.

1966- The comedy song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha, Ha!" released. The singer was Napoleon XIV.

1968- Fred Blasie won an unprecedented fifth World Wrestling Championship belt. Blasie later gained more fame for recording the comedy song "Pencil Necked Geeks" and beating up comedian Andy Kaufman in the ring for calling wrestling a hoax.

1982- Actor Vic Morrow and two children are killed by a stunt helicopter while filming "Twilight Zone, the movie". The last scripted line before his death was "I’ll Keep you safe kids, I swear to God!" The children were being worked into the early morning hours without a caretaker supervisor in defiance of the Coogan Laws. Director John Landis was investigated but exonerated. 

1984- Vanessa Williams the first black Miss America, resigned after a photo spread of her in a nude lesbian scenario in Penthouse magazine. She denied any impropriety until the photos were published widely. 

1999- The Inspector Gadget Movie starring Matthew Broderick opened.

2004- Two armed men enter the Munch Museum in Norway and steal Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream at gunpoint. It was recovered with some water damage three years later.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 21, 2022

 Birthdays: Ernest Hemingway, Issac Stern, Marshal McCluhan, Don Knotts, Janet Reno, Gary Trudeau the creator of Doonesbury, Eugen Shuftan inventor of the "Shuftan Effect", a cheap way of combining actors with miniatures by shooting through mirrors. Edward Herman, Robin Williams, Josh Harnett, Norman Jewison

365AD- The Egyptian city of Alexandria was devastated by an earthquake. The tremor may have toppled the famous Pharos lighthouse. The quake caused the waters of the harbor to recede then return with tsunami force.

1939- Disney short “The Pointer” directed by Clyde Geronimi. Mickey gets whites in his eyes. 

   

1954- The Fellowship of the Ring, first book of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, first published. Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis said the book “came forth like thunder on a summers day..”

1971, The New York Times ran an article about Taki 183 on the front page of its inside section, titled "Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals. Taki was the first graffiti tag artist. Taki was a nickname of a man named Demetrius from 183 St.  In the late 1960s-1970s his tag seemed to be everywhere. Although graffiti has been around since the Egyptians and Romans, this helped spark the modern fascination.

1980- SAG went on strike for actor's residuals from videocassette and cable TV sales.

The actors hit the bricks twice more, in 1988 and 2000.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 20, 2022

Birthdays: Petrarch, Sir Edmund Hilary, Lord Elgin, Quaker Anne Hutchinson, Natalie Wood, Theda Bara the Vamp, Diana Rigg, Dick Lucas, Carlos Santana, Lord Reith- the first Director General of the BBC. Carlos Alarzaqui, Giselle Bunchen is 42, Sandra Oh is 51, Harrison Ellenshaw is 77 

1804- Sir Richard Owen born. He was the British scientist who coined the term Dinosaur for all the big fossils being dug up. Yet he came to oppose Darwin’s theories of evolution. He believed dinosaurs were the creatures from Noah’s Flood who for some reason missed the boat.

1858 – Admission first charged to see a baseball game, 50 cents. NY beat Brooklyn 22-18.

1869- Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and in the Holy Land first published. If you ever wondered what was the most popular book in America during the 19th Century, it was not Moby Dick, War & Peace, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. The all time best selling book in America during the Victorian Era was a sappy travel diary" Tent Life in the Holy Land "by a forgotten author William Prime. Twain had taken The Grand Tour abroad that was fashionable with the American wealthy classes and thought he’d have some fun recounting his own trip” To cross the Sea of Galilee by boat, a big local man demanded eight dollars for use of his miserable conveyance. No wonder Christ preferred to walk.”

1879- Joel Chandler Harris published in the Atlanta Constitution "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus". The first Uncle Remus stories. In Georgia Harris collected the stories from interviewing African American storytellers in the slave quarters. They felt comfortable speaking with him because he was the illegitimate son of an Irish immigrant. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt said, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature." 

 

1920- On the last day of testimony at the Scopes Monkey Trial defense attorney Clarence Darrow surprised everyone by calling prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan to the witness stand. In a dramatic all day debate Darrow and Bryan grappled over the validity of the Bible vs, Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Darrow ultimately lost the case, but this debate made Bryan look foolish. The confrontation was dramatized in the 1955 stage play “Inherit the Wind”, later made into a famous movie by Stanley Kramer.

1946-Bob Clampett's cartoon"the Great Piggy Bank Robbery" with Daffy Duck as Duck Tracy. "I'm gonna rrrrrrrrrrrubbb ya out, see!"

1964 –The first surfing record to go #1-Jan & Dean's "Surf City"

1968 - Iron Butterfly's "In a-Gadda-da-Vida", reached #4 in the pop charts. Then it was called Psychedelic Rock, today it is considered the first Metal hit. The song was written as “In the Garden of Eden” but singer Doug Ingle was so drunk and stoned, In a Gadda Da Vida was all he could mumble out. 

1969- Tranquility Base- The Eagle has Landed. Apollo11’s Lunar Module the LEM first landed humans on the Moon. The astronauts stepped out onto the surface 8 hours later (The 21st)

1973- Bruce Lee died of cerebral edema one month before his last film Enter the Dragon premiered. The handsome Hong Kong movie star single-handedly made Chinese martial arts a worldwide craze, and the Chop-Socky genre film a standard genre in world movie theaters. He was buried in his Enter The Dragon costume. Bruce Lee was 33.

1976-Warner\Lambert, makers of Trident sugarless gum, comes out with their famous slogan "Sugarless gum is recommended by four out of five dentists who chew gum". When people asked what gum the fifth dentist recommended, they were brushed. 

1984 - Jim Fixx, creator of the Jogging craze through his hit book Running, died at 52 of a heart attack. Apologists for a health advocate dying so young, say Fixx would have died even younger without his physical routine. The creator of PowerBars also died in his fifties. 

1994 - OJ Simpson offers $500,000 reward for evidence of ex-wife Nicole’s killer. No clues or suspects other than himself have ever been found. As David Letterman said" OJ  began to vigorously search for the real killer on all the major golf courses of the nation.”

2001- Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away premiered in Japan. The first Japanese anime films to win an Oscar.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 19, 2022

Birthdays: Edgar Degas, Col. Samuel Colt, Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Bert Kwouk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vicki Carr, Max Fleischer, Lizzie Borden, Ille Nastase, George McGovern, Brian Harold May of Queen, Atom Egoyan, Anthony Edwards, Campbell Scott, Dal McKennon- the voice of Gumby, Ben Franklin in Ben and Me, and Archie in the Archies, Benedict Cumberbatch is 46

1913 - Billboard Magazine publishes earliest known "Last Week's 10 Best Sellers among

Popular Songs" Malinda's Wedding Day is #1

1932- writer Daphne du Maurier married General Frederick Browning.

1942- Actor Stirling Holloway, who did Disney character voices like Winnie the Pooh, enlisted in the army. He was 37. They didn’t send him to fight, but used him in Special Services raising money and public relations.

1952- Several UFOs appeared on the radar of Washington DC’s National Airport (Today its Reagan Airport). So many alarming reports and phone calls came in, that the Air Force was obliged to hold a news conference to calm public fears. They explained the lights were temperature inversions. Uh, huh…

1957- The film “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” starring Michael Landon premiered. 

1966- Frank Sinatra(50) married Mia Farrow (21). Frankie’s ex Ava Gardner commented:” Hah! I always knew Frank would one day wind up in bed with a little boy. “Two years later when Mia Farrow was offered the lead role in Roman Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby” Frank gave her an ultimatum "Baby, it's either me or your career”. She took the part and he served her with a divorce papers on the set. Mia got an Oscar nomination and Frank recorded “Strangers in the Night”. 

2019- John Favreaus' remake of Disney's The Lion King premiere. Touted as the live action version, it was really photo-real rendered CGI. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 18, 2022

Birthdays: William Makepeace Thackeray, Chill Wills, Nelson Mandela, James Brolin, Elizabeth McGovern, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Hume Cronyn, Red Skelton, Hunter H. Thompson, Clifford Odets, Paul Verhoeven, John Glenn, Vin Diesel is 55

Happy Ancient Egyptian New Year! The day when Sirius the Dog Star is seen in the Southern skies, which heralds the coming of the Nile’s flood.  In modern times we call it the Dog Days of Summer.

1877- Thomas Edison first recorded sound on tin foil cylinder `Mary Had a Little Lamb'

1939- MGM tried a sneak preview of the film The Wizard of Oz. Afterward they debated cutting the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow as slowing down the story. Finally, they decided to leave it in. The film debuted in August to wild success and acclaim.

1939- RKO pictures signed Orson Welles to direct movies in Hollywood. That Hollywood signed a 24 year old radio star who never made a single film, and gave him complete freedom and final cut was an amazing deal.

1950- Walt Disney’s live action film Treaure Island Premiered, with Robert Newton as Long John Silver, Capt. Jack Sparrow’s role model. Arrrr-mateys!

1964- Bob McKimson’s "A False Hare", the last Bugs Bunny theatrical short for Warner Bros for twenty years, until 1985.

1966- Bobby Fuller who made the hit song "I fought the Law and the Law Won" was found in LA in his mothers Oldsmobile, beaten and dead from "forcible inhalation of gasoline"- huffing.

1968- Engineer Bob Noyce quit Fairchild Semiconductor and founded a new company in Santa Clara California named Intel. His partners were Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, he of Moore’s Law. It sold a new thing called microprocessors. In 1980 Intel would invent the silicon chip.

1975- Famed underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode’ experimented with breath control while doing hallucinogenic drugs. This day the creator of The Wizard of Id died of auto-asphyxiation while high. His last words were to his son, “ Mark, I’ve seen God four times, and I am going to see him again soon.” He was 33. 

1986- Aliens, the sequel directed by James Cameron, premiered. Game over, man!

1998- The movie Pokemon the First was released in Japan, stoking a Pokemon craze.

2019- A demented man set the Kyoto Animation Studio ablaze with gasoline and attacked people with a knife. 34 people died in the blaze. Many were young women for whom it was their first job.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 17, 2022

Birthdays: James Cagney, John Jacob Astor I, Hyacinth Rigaud, Bernice Abbott, Chill Wills, Brian Trottier, Phoebe Snow, Daryl Lamonica, Prof. Peter Schickele a.k.a. PDQ Bach, Earl Stanley Gardner the creator of Perry Mason, Art Linkletter, Phyllis Diller Diane Carroll, animator Willie Ito is 88, David Hasslehoff is 70, Donald Sutherland is 87

1841 - British humor magazine Punch first published.

1893- Representatives of fourteen stage unions meet to form IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical & Screen Engineers of the U.S. & Canada.

1928- Mexican President-elect Alvaro Obregon was at a large banquet for former veterans of the Mexican Revolution. Part of the party was having a cartoonist stroll about making caricatures of the guests. Obregon said to cartoonist Leon Toral: "Make sure you make me look good." Toral responded "Oh, I will.." and pulled a gun and shot the President to death. An assassin but still a professional artist, Toral actually completed the drawing before reaching for his pistol. Gotta watch them cartoonists….

1935 - Variety's famous headline "Sticks Nix Hix Pix" meaning audiences in rural areas were not attending movies with a rustic theme.

1955- DISNEYLAND dedicated- Walt Disney's dream of a perfect family amusement park, called 'The Happiest Place on Earth" was declared open with celebrities like Ronald Reagan, Art Linkletter and the Mouseketeers in attendance. It opened to the public the next day. Walt hoped to get 1,000 visitors that first day.  He got 30,000. Facilities broke down from the huge crowds and the haste with which the park was built.  Concrete pavement which was poured the night before was still soft under people's feet, there were no working water fountains and the car parking was a nightmare. To the Disneyland workers opening day was nicknamed 'Black Sunday". But despite all, Disneyland became a huge success.

1959- Singer Billie Holiday, called Lady Day, died of heart and liver failure, and cirrhosis in Metropolitan hospital in NY. Hounded by federal authorities for twenty years, Feds were trying to arrest her for drug possession even as she lay dying. She was 44.

1959- Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest premiered.

1967– The Monkees performed at Forest Hills NY, Jimi Hendrix was their opening act.

1968- The Beatles musical cartoon feature The Yellow Submarine premiered in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Look Out! It’s the Blue Meanies!!

1969- The first Vampirella comic, created by Forrest Ackerman and Trina Robbins

2004- Katsuhiro Otomo’s film Steamboy premiered. Japanese interest in the idea of SteamPunk began to spread worldwide.

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 16, 2022

Birthdays: Andrea Del Sarto, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Ginger Rogers, Pinchas Zukerman,

Orville Redenbacher, Roald Amundsen, Sunny Tufts, Barbera Stanwyck, Reuben Blades, Mary Baker-Eddy the founder of Christian Science, Phoebe Cates, Will Farrell is 56

1439 - Kissing is banned in England to stop diseases from spreading. I wonder if they knew about fist-bumping?

1769- Fra Junipero Serra founded his first Mission settlement in California- San Diego de Alcala, now the City of San Diego. The master plan was to create a string of missions from San Diego to San Francisco one days ride apart- San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Anna, San Gabriel, Santa Maria Reina de Los Angeles, etc.

1932- Cecil B. DeMille shot the scene in his film Sign of the Cross where Claudette Colbert took a bath in asses milk. Legend has it that DeMille insisted on real milk in the bath and that by the second day the hot studio lights had curdled it to a smelly cheese. But production notes show the scene was all shot in one day. 

1951- J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" published.

1954- Groundbreaking for the construction of Disneyland.

1956 –The Last time Ringling Bros, Barnum & Bailey Circus performed under a canvas circus tent.

1963- Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space aboard Vostok 6. 

1969- Congress passed Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It makes it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their spacecraft.

1969- Apollo 11 blasted off for the Moon.

1988- Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic film Akira premiered in Tokyo. It opened in America a year later. It was the first Japanese Anime film to go beyond the domestic and niche genre fan base, to appeal to a global audience. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 15, 2022

Birthdays: Rembrandt van Rijn, Inigo Jones, Sir Thomas Bullfinch, Mother Cabrini, Rev. Clemont Moore, Julian Bream, Linda Rondstadt is 76, Alex Karras, Jan Michael Vincent, Lola Davidovich, Forrest Whitaker is 61, Brigette Neilsen, Jesse Ventura, Terry O’ Quinn is 70

 

863 St. Swithun's Day in England. St. Swithun is regarded as one of the saints to whom one should pray in the event of drought. He is a patron saint of Umbrella makers.

  

 

1938- Max Fleischer Popeye cartoon "With the Jeep" introduced Eugene the Jeep. The character was created in the Thimble Theater comic strip two years earlier. The funny little character later gave its name to the army’s new General Purpose Vehicle, the G.P. or Jeep.

 

1941- President Franklin Roosevelt sent federal mediator Stanley White to try and solve the labor strike between Walt Disney and his cartoonists.

 

1953- The film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes premiered starring Marylyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

 

 

1971- Producer Steve Krantz announced the production of the first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat, based on the popular underground comic by Robert Crumb. It would be directed by Ralph Bakshi.

 

 

1982-Coca-Cola introduced Diet Coke. Coke officials are proud of the fact that within a year it's sales top that of Tab, but Tab was owned by Coke as well. (duh..?)

 

1994- James Cameron’s movie True Lies opens. With Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.

 

1996- MSNBC channel went on the air. 

1997- Famed clothing designer Gianni Versace was murdered outside his Miami mansion by a deranged serial killer on a spree since leaving Minnesota.  The killer, Andrew Cunanan, was later found in a houseboat with a self-inflicted bullet in his head.

 

2011- Disney’s last hand-drawn feature film Winnie the Pooh, and short the Ballad of Nessie opened in theaters. Two years later CEO Bob Iger said there were no more 2-D projects in development and laid off most traditional artists.

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 14, 2022

Birthdays: Issac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Maytag, inventor of the electronic washing machine-1857, Emiline Pankhurst, Woody Guthrie, Gerald Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Jerry Rubin, Scott Rudin, Rosie Grier, Harry Dean Stanton, Polly Bergen, Gustav Klimt, Terry Thomas, Jimmy Hoffa, Dave Fleischer, Bill Hanna, Walt Stanchfield, Joel Silver, Vincent (Big Pussy) Pastore

1908- The Adventures of Dollie premiered, the first movie of D.W. Griffith.

1917- Buster Keaton made his film debut in the Fatty Arbuckle comedy The Butcher Boy. 

1933- Well Blow Me Down!- Max Fleischer's first "Popeye the Sailor" cartoon debuted. The character was first created by Elzie Segar for his Thimble Theater comic strip. Based on a eccentric old neighbor who smoked a pipe and liked to get into fights. Vaudevillian Red Pepper Sam provided his salty mumbles throughout the post-sync track. Fleischer soon realized the improvised mumbling was funnier than the written dialogue. When Sam asked for more money than Max Fleischer thought he was worth, he replaced him with assistant animator Jack Mercer, who remained his voice until his death in 1984.

1944- T.S. Elliott, then working for the London publisher Faber & Faber, wrote George Orwell a letter rejecting the manuscript of his book “Animal Farm” for publication. He said although the writing style was good and the most intriguing use of allegory since Swift’s Gulliver, its politics were too Trotskyite to be representative of their company. Orwell found another publisher.

1946 – Dr. Benjamin Spock's "Common Sense Book of Baby & Child Care" published

1951 - 1st color telecast of a sporting event (CBS-horse race)

1951 –Triple Crown Winner Citation becomes 1st horse to win $1,000,000 in races.

1958- The last King of Iraq, Feisal II was overthrown and killed by a coup of army officers led by General Kassim. Feisals family was Jordanian, they were placed in Iraq by the British in the 1920’s to make up for losing the Hejaz (Saudi Arabia) to the house of Ibn Saud.

1967 - The new band called The Who began a US tour as the opening act for Herman’s Hermits.

1969- The movie Easy Rider premiered.

1997- Johnny Bravo premiered on TV.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 13, 2022

 

Birthdays: French Admiral Bailly de Suffren, Cheech Marin, Father Flannagan, Bob Crane, Cameron Crowe, Woye Solenka, Dave Garroway, Chef Paul Prudhomme, Michael Spinks, Film special effects artist Jim Danforth, Dr. Erno Rubik inventor of the Rubik’s Cube, Patrick Stewart is 82, Harrison Ford is 80, Tom Kenny the voice of Spongebob Squarepants is 61, Mike Ploog is 80

1798- Poet William Wordsworth visited Tinturn Abbey and was inspired to write his famous elegy on the ruins.

1865- P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City burned down in a spectacular fire. Barnum rebuilt, but after that one burned as well, he got the idea of getting into the circus business. In his American Museum, more a sitting menagerie and sideshow, than a museum as we know, Barnum invented the idea of advanced hype and created kiddie matinees. 

1898- Giuseppe Marconi patented wireless transmissions, the Radio. Marconi believed that sound never dies, it just grows fainter. In his old age he was trying to invent a machine that could pick up the traces of the voice of Jesus.

1923- While digging in the Gobi Desert, paleontologist George Olsen discovered the first fossilized dinosaur eggs.

1925- Walt Disney and Lillian Bounds marry. Lillian was one of the first female animation ink & paint artists.

1930 – David Sarnoff the head of the NBC radio network said in the NY Times," The new invention of Television would be a theater in every home". Sounded crazy back then. Critics said it would require one room of the house be darkened, and they doubted people would just sit still that long.

1939- Frank Sinatra recorded his first album, this one with the Harry James Orchestra.

1949- Hollywood Studio exec David O. Selznick left his first wife Esther, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, to marry actress Jennifer Jones.

1953- Chuck Jones first day at the Disney Studio. Warner Bros laid him off with most of the animation staff when they attempted to go into all 3D production. Walt Disney hired Jones and this day showed him around the studio. Walt asked him, “ Well, where do you see yourself fitting in?” Chuck replied, “Well to be honest, the only job here I would really like is yours.” Walt laughed,” Well, that’s taken.” Chuck worked in story for 4 months, then returned to Warners when they realized their mistake and reconstituted their team. 

1981- Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits opened.

1984- The film The Last Starfighter with Robert Preston opened. Pitched as “ The MusicMan in Outer Space” because it was Robert Preston’s last film. The first movie where all the spaceships and effects were done with CGI, instead of miniatures and models. Their computers had a combined memory of 25 MGB.

1985- Boomtown Rats vocalist Bob Geldorf organized a massive live concert called LIVE AID. Televised and seen by 1.5 billion people, it raised money for African famine relief. Madonna, Santanna, Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys and reunions of Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Who and Led Zeppelin.

Animation Almanac for July 12, 2022

Birthdays: Gaius Julius Caesar, Henry David Thoreau, Impressionist painter Eugene Boudin, Oscar Hammerstein, Kirsten Flagstad, Andrew Wyeth, Pablo Neruda, George Eastman, Milton Berle, Cheryl Ladd, Van Cliburn, Buckminster Fuller, George Washington Carver, Josiah Wedgewood- of Wedgewood china and pottery, Michelle Rodriguez, Richard Simmons, Krysty Yamaguchi, Bill Cosby is 85, Ben Burt- George Lucas’ sound effects guru who created the sounds of Darth Vader and R2D2, is 74.

1562- Spanish monks burn hundreds of priceless books and scrolls of the ancient Mayan Civilization as works of the Devil. 

1870- Celluloid film patented. The inventor had been trying to find a substitute for ivory billiard balls. Inventor George Eastman later perfected the sprocket and hole system of roll film for cameras, replacing the large glass plates. Celluloid film would be the standard for photographs and movies until the Digital Revolution of the 1990s.

1876- Gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok arrived in Deadwood South Dakota to prospect for gold, see some old friends like Calamity Jane, and play a little poker. 

1901 – Baseball pitcher Cy Young wins his 300th game.

1928 - 1st televised tennis match.

1960: The first Etch-a-Sketch goes on sale.  Frenchman Andre’ Cassagnes, invented it. He was the son of a Parisian baker born allergic to flour. Getting a job as an electrician, he noticed the properties of aluminum powder sticking to a glass. (he called it Telecran’, or L’Ecran Magique, or “The Magic Screen”). His first corporate sponsor had their accountant Arthur Granjean do the paperwork for the invention. Granjean wrote his own name in instead of Cassagnes, so in many books he gets the credit as the inventor. After failing to get some of the bigger toy companies to bite, They sold the invention to the Ohio Art Company.

1962 – The Rolling Stones 1st performance at the Marquee Club, London. One band member named Elmo Lewis, changed his name to Brian Jones.

1979- Disco Demolition Night. Disc jockey Steve Dahl of WLUP created an event where 

Chicago fans could get into Comisky Park for 98 cents if they each brought a Disco record to burn. Instead of the usual crowd of 5,000, they got 50,000 who rushed the field. Thousands of records were thrown at the players like Frisbees while they were trying to play, and the field torn up when they dropped a crate of records on the pitcher’s mound. The Chicago White Sox were forced to forfeit the game to the Detroit Tigers. 

1990- TV series Northern Exposure premiered.

Tom Sito Animation Almanac for July 11, 2022

Birthdays: Robert the Bruce, John Quincy Adams, Sir Thomas Bowdler, E.B. White, Yul Brynner- born Tadjhe Khan, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leon Spinks, Tab Hunter, Giorgio Armani, Sela Ward, Kimberly “Little Kim’ Jones, Stephen Lang is 70

1855- An earthquake knocked down Los Angeles -again.

1906- Nordisk Films in Copenhagen founded. 

1922- The first regular concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The natural amphitheater in Bolton Canyon called Daisy Dell, had been used for Easter morning services and some concerts before, but now on a regular basis.  Dr. Alfred Hertz conducted several symphonies, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino were in the audience. It was then a wooden stage at the bottom of a grassy knoll. Frank Lloyd Wright’s bandshell was built in 1927.

1937- George Gershwin died of a brain tumor at age 38.

1938- The radio show The Mercury Theater of the Air with Orson Welles and John Houseman premiered.

1952- LA’s Randy’s Donuts, with its iconic giant donut sign on its roof, opened.

1962-The Tellstar I satellite transmitted the first television images from France to USA.

1969 – The Rolling Stones release "Honky Tonk Woman".

1970- “Mama Told Me Not to Come” by Three Dog Night hits #1 in the pop charts. The song was written by young composer Randy Newman. 

1975- Chinese archaeologists excavating at the ancient site of XIAN discover an entire army of 6,000 terra cotta statues buried in formation with their chariots and cavalry. Each life-sized statue was an individual portrait. They were buried in 221 BC to protect the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shiwang, whose name is where the name China came from.

1991- Disney announced it would enter into a deal with a bay area digital offshoot of Lucasfilm named PIXAR. Hit films including Toy Story, Monsters Inc. Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Coco were the result.

1997- A lunatic named Jonathan Norman was arrested for trying to break into Steven Spielberg’s home. He believed Spielberg “wanted to be raped”, and had on him chloroform, duct tape and S&M paraphernalia.

2016- Nintendo released the Pokemon Go app for smart phones and it caused a sensation.

Tom Sito Animation Almanac for July 10, 2022

Birthdays: John Calvin, Marcel Proust, James McNeill Whistler, Nicholas Tesla, Carl Orff, Camille Pissarro, Adolphus Busch the founder of Budweiser, George DiChirico, Jacky "Legs" Diamond, Arlo Guthrie, Jake LaMotta, Joe Shuster- one of the creators of Superman, Fred Gywnne, David Brinkley, Arthur Ashe, Camilla Parker Bowles, Jessica Simpson is 42

1040 - Lady Godiva (Godgifu) goes for a ride on horseback in the nude through the streets of Coventry to embarrass her husband, Leofric, the Earl of Mercia, to lower taxes on the poor.

1099- The magical-mystical knight of Spain, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, called El Cid, died at the castle of Valencia. 

1873 - French poet Paul Verlaine wounded Arthur Rimbaud in a pistol duel.

1892 - 1st concrete-paved street built in Bellefontaine, Ohio.

1932- In a baseball game against the Philadelphia Athletics, Cleveland Indian pitcher Eddie Rommel perfects the knuckleball pitch.

 1941- Jazz great Jelly Roll Morton died at 50 in Los Angeles from complications of asthma. 

1950 - "Your Hit Parade" premieres on NBC (later CBS) TV.

1985 - Coca-Cola Co admits New Coke was a big mistake and announced it would resume selling old formula Coke. 

1987- The Brave Little Toaster premiered in theaters. Directed by Jerry Rees. 

1979 - Chuck Berry sentenced to 4 months for $200,000 in tax evasion. The old rocker said:” It never fails, every ten years I wind up in jail for something.”

1985- “ We Don’t Need Another Evil. “ Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome opened in theaters.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 9, 2022

Birthdays: Schopenhauer, Elias Howe, Ottorino Respighi, David Hockney, Samuel Elliot Morrison, Sir Edward Heath, Kelly McGillis, Barbera Cartland, J. Paul Getty II, H.V. Kaltenborn, Daniel Guggenheim, John Tesch, Fred Savage, Chris Cooper, O.J. Simpson, Courtenay Love is 62, Debbie Sludge is 72, Brian Dennehy, Tom Hanks is 66, Sofia Vegara is 49

1918- Depressed after his sweetheart Estelle married another man, writer William Faulkner left his Oxford Mississippi home to go to Canada and enlist in the RAF. He never saw combat, because World War I ended as his training was completed.

1937- A fire at the Fox Studio film vaults destroyed thousands of stored nitrate prints. Entire careers were erased from film history. Stars like Theda Bara and William Farnum had most of their work destroyed. A tragedy to film history.

1955 - "Rock Around Clock", arguably the first Rock & Roll song, hits #1 on Top 100 chart

1956 - Dick Clark's 1st appearance as host of American Bandstand.

1972- David Bowie first appeared as his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust.

1981 - Walt Disney's the "Fox & The Hound," released. The first animated feature Walt Disney had no input on. Although the film has brief screen credits, it marks the torch being passed from the Nine Old Men golden age generation to the boomer generation. A complete personnel roster would include Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Tim Burton, John Lasseter, Bill Kroyer, Don Bluth, Lorna Cook, Henry Selick, Brad, Bird, John Pomeroy, Dan Haskett, Steve Hulett, John Musker, Jerry Rees, Rebecca Rees, Randy Cartwright, Glen Keane and many more.

1983- The Police’s single "Every Breath You Take" goes to #1.

1993- Industrial Light & Magic completed its transition to digital technology by shutting down its Howard Anderson Optical Printer. The Optical Printer system of mattes had been the way Motion Picture visual effects had been done since Georg Melies in 1909, but the Digital Revolution had changed everything.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 8, 2022

B-Dazes: Jean de LaFontaine, John D. Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller, Kathe Kollwitz, Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, Louis Jordan, Billy Eckstine, Steve Lawrence, Percy Grainger, Cynthia Gregory, Phillip Johnson, Kim Darby, Marty Feldman, Roone Arledge, Kevin Bacon is 64, Billy Crudup,  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Angelica Huston, Raffi , Jeffrey Tambor

1822- Poet Percy Shelley drowned when a storm sank his yacht The Simon Bolivar, off Leghorn, Italy. His body was cremated but his heart was embalmed in lead and presented to his wife Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley. Lord Byron swam offshore during the cremation so they could observe Shelley's spirit rising to Heaven.

1881- Soda fountain owner Ed Berners of Two Falls, Wisconsin first drizzled chocolate sauce on vanilla ice cream and invented the Ice Cream Sundae. It cost a nickel. It was called that because he only served it on Sundays as a treat after attending Church.

1889- The Wall Street Journal first published.

1907-The First Ziegfield Follies, staged on the roof of the New York Theater, now called the New Amsterdam Theater.

1911- Burbank incorporated as a city. 

1922- Horn player Louis Armstrong first left his hometown of New Orleans to go to Chicago and play in King Oliver’s Jazz band.

1932- Tod Brownings disturbing movie "Freaks" about a family of circus sideshow performers, premiered. One of Us, One of Us!

1969 - Thor Heyerdahl and his raft Ra II landed in Barbados, 57 days from Morocco. He was trying to prove ancient mariners could have traveled from Africa to the Americas using a ship made from papyrus reeds. It also may explain the phenomenon that some Egyptian mummies have been found to have traces of tobacco and chocolate in their stomachs.

1982- Walt Disney's TRON- the first film featuring computer graphics premiered. It only was about 20 minutes of actual CGI, and the computer images were still printed onto traditional animation cells and painted by hand, but it was a significant achievement. Remember in 1981 there were no off-the-shelf graphics software. The big deal at the time was that MAGI had just solved the "hidden Line" problem. 

1998- An original 1477 William Caxton copy of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"

became the world's most expensive book when it was sold for £4,621,500 to

billionaire oil heir Paul Getty.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 7, 2022

Birthdays: Joseph Jacquard- of the Jacquard Loom 1752, Gustav Mahler, Satchel Page, Ringo Starr is 82, Doc Severinsen, Robert Heinlein, William Kuntsler, Gian Carlo Menotti, Ken Harris, Shelley Duval is 73, Ted Cassidy-Lurch in the Adams Family, Michelle Kwan, David McCullough, Pierre Cardin, and according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this is the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. John Watson.

1814- Sir Walter Scott published his first novel Waverly. He wrote it under a pseudonym because he worried novel-writing would damage his reputation as a poet.

1895-THE FIRST SUNDAY COMICS - The first modern comic strip, Hogan’s Alley featuring "The Yellow Kid" by Richard Felton Outcault, debuts in the Sunday edition of Josef Pulitzer's New York World. The strip was so popular it gave the name "Yellow Journalism" to the sensationalist tabloid press. Newspaper comics at this time were the mass media of the day. For people who couldn’t afford a theater ticket and couldn’t yet speak English, the little characters in the penny papers were extremely popular and made celebrities out of cartoonists like Outcault, Bud Selig, George McManus, and Winsor McCay. Richard Outcault later invented the backend deal, when he asked for a percentage of all sales from his new comic strip "Buster Brown and his dog Tige”.

1936 - RCA shows the first true US TV program: dancing, a short film on locomotives, a Bonwit Teller fashion show & monologue from the Tobacco Road radio comedy show. 

1946- After the War, the BBC television service resumes and an announcer says:" Well now, where were we?"  They continued the Mickey cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premier from where it was interrupted in 1939 when TV service was stopped for the duration. World War II probably held back for a decade the development of television.

1946- Millionaire aviator Howard Hughes crashed an experimental airplane into four homes in Beverly Hills. Hughes had crashed planes before without much injury, but this crash left him near death. His slow recuperation left him with a lifetime addiction to morphine and codeine. 

1947- THE ROSWELL INCIDENT- An official news report from the USAF 509th bomber command -the same unit that dropped the Hiroshima bomb- stated they had recovered the wreckage of a UFO in the New Mexico desert near Roswell and were examining it. The next day the commanding general of the 8th Air Force arrived in Roswell. He announced to the press that the earlier report was an error, and it was only a downed weather balloon. The wreckage was removed under heavy-armed guard. 

Complete secrecy was then imposed. The communications officer Major Jesse Marcey, who posed for an official photo showing him with the balloon wreckage, later told his son the photo was faked. Marcey, who died in 1967 and his adjutant Lt. Haut still stick to the original version of their story. Lt. Haut also claimed the base commander Col. William Blanchard thought it was UFO debris. This report coming only two weeks after the first modern sighting of "flying saucers" over Mt. Reynier in Oregon sparked the Flying Saucer craze that gripped America throughout the 1950’s.

1949- "I’m Friday"- The program Dragnet first debuted on radio. It later became a hit on TV as well. Jack Webb conceived, wrote, directed and starred in the show. His hardest job was urging actors "not to act" but to speak the lines normally like the average person does.

1957- Former MGM animation directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera filed papers to incorporate their new company, Hanna - Barbera Enterprises, Inc. 

1958- Al and Jerry Lapin opened the first International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant in Toluca Lake California. 

1960- First demonstration of a practical laser beam. In Russia it had been theorized since 1951. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or LASER.

1967- Vivien Leigh, the actress who played Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, collapsed and died from recurrent tuberculosis. She was 53.

1967 - Beatles' "All You Need is Love" is released. Queen Elizabeth II said it was one of her favorite songs.

1967 – The Doors' "Light My Fire" hits #1.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac or July 6, 2022

Birthdays: John Paul Jones, Czar Nicholas Ist, Frida Kahlo, Della Reese, Bill Haley,

Nancy Reagan, Sylvester Stallone is 76, Merv Griffin, Janet Leigh, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sebastian Cabot, James Bodrero, The Dalai Lama, LaVerne Andrews of the Andrews Sisters, Geoffrey Rush is 71, Ned Beatty, President George W. Bush is 76, Fifty Cent is 47, Jennifer Saunders is 64.

1886 - Horlick's of Wisconsin offers the first malted milk to public. It began as an attempt to create a new type of baby formula.

1895- A businessman named William Sydney Porter returned from Honduras where he had fled after being indicted for embezzlement. He had returned because he had learned of the illness of his wife.  Porter was sent to prison, and while there began writing little stories which he later published under the name O. Henry. 

1917 As Lowell Thomas’ newsreel cameras rolled, Lawrence of Arabia and Bedouin Sheik Ouda Abu-Tai captured the Red Sea Port of Aqaba from Turkish troops. The battle was dramatized in the 1962 David Lean epic Lawrence of Arabia.

1925, Walt and Roy Disney place a $400 deposit ($5,750.00 in modern money) on a lot located at 2719 Hyperion Avenue, in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their aim is to build a big new studio. 

1928- The film "The Lights of New York" premiered at the Strand theater on Broadway. 1927's the Jazz Singer popularized sound movies while still being half silent. This film was the first with an all dialogue track. 

1944- A fire broke out in the main tent of Ringling Bros Circus during a children’s matinee in Hartford Connecticut. The big top had been waterproofed with a paraffin solution thinned with gasoline and now that mixture engulfed the tent in flames. 168 died and 682 more were injured, mostly children. In 1950 a mad arsonist named Robert Segee admitted he started the Hartford Circus Fire. 

1957- Chuck Jones short "What’s Opera, Doc?" debuted. “Kill da wa-bitt, kill da wa-bitt..."

1957-16 year old John Lennon first met 15 year old Paul McCartney at a church picnic near Woolton, England. Lennon invited McCartney to join his first band called the Quarrymen, but McCartney missed their first engagement because of a boy scout trip.

1964 - Beatles' film "Hard Day's Night" premieres in London. The bands iconoclastic, antics portrayed by Richard Lester’s surreal free style direction set the style for the music videos of the future.

1965- TV sitcom F-Troop premiered. Shortly after the series began production it was learned that lead actress Melody Patterson (Wrangler Jane) fibbed on her paperwork and was actually underage, she was 16 years old. She kept the part, but the writers had to tone down any sexual innuendo in the scripts. The show did well, but is rarely show today because of the racially insensitive humor towards indigenous people. 

1965 - Rock group Jefferson Airplane formed.

1974- The first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keilor’s ode to small town life in Minnesota. Brought to you by Powdermilk Biscuits. His last broadcast was in 2016, and was forced to leave his company in 2017 due to Me-To allegations of sexual misconduct with his employees.

1996- Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump opened in theaters.

1998- French workers at Disneyland Paris theme park went on strike for better pay and not having to smile constantly like Americans do. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 5, 2022

Birthdays: P.T. Barnum, Beatrix Potter, Mrs. Sarah Siddons, Jean Cocteau, Admiral David Farragut, Len Lye, George Pompidou, Shirley Knight, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Milburn Stone (Doc on Gunsmoke), Warren Oates, Henry Cabot Lodge IV, Eva Green is 43, Huey Lewis is 72, Edie Falco is 59

1910- Writer O. Henry died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis at 47. His last words were "Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark." He became a writer while serving a jail term for embezzlement.

1930- The Fox Midland Theater held the first meeting of a Mickey Mouse Club. It soon had chapters across the country and became a TV show in the 1950s.

1935- The Wagner Act passed congress, decreeing all American workers have the right to collective bargaining and to form unions.

1943- Betty Grable married bandleader Harry James.

1954- Elvis Presley recorded "That’s All Right" at Sun Records in Memphis. Some call it the first true Rock & Roll song, but that is disputed by Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Ike Turners Delta 88 and many other R&B hits. “That’s All Right” was written by black bluesman Arthur Big-Boy Crudup, who never profited from the song’s success and died living in a shack.

1954- Tomoyuki Tanaka announced the beginning of production on the movie Godzilla.

1975- Tennis player Arthur Ashe became the first African-American to win Wimbledon.

1989- The first episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld.

1994- In Bellevue, Washington, a man named Jeff Bezos started a company named Cadabra. Shortly after he changed its name to Amazon. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 4, 2022

Birthdays: Jean Pierre Blanchard the balloonist-1753, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Calvin Coolidge, Rube Goldberg, Louis Armstrong*, Edward Walker the inventor of the Lava Lamp, Mayer Lansky, Tokyo Rose, Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Emerson Boozer, Neil Simon, Mitch Miller, Eva Marie Saint is 98, Gina Lollobrigida is 95, George Steinbrenner, Ann Landers, Ron Kovic, Geraldo Rivera, Victoria Abril is 63, Pam Shriver, Rene Laloux, Gloria Stuart, Malia Obama 

• Louis Armstrong always claimed his birthday was July 4th 1900, although records show his birth was August 4th 1901.

1855- Henry Davis Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. He was the first U.S. writer to describe nature as a thing of beauty instead of a mortal enemy to be conquered. This date is considered the birth of the American Conservation Movement.

1855- Walt Whitman published his quarto of poems The Leaves of Grass. Many people were shocked at its frank description of sexual desire. Whitman’s mother said: ”Walt is a good boy, but strange.”

1862- Oxford mathematics professor Charles Dodgson rowed ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sister up the Thames in a small punt. The little girls begged him for a story, so Dodgson made up fantastic tales of March Hares, Mad Hatters and the Queen of Hearts.

Dodgson later wrote them down and published them in 1865 as Alice in Wonderland. He used the pen name Lewis Carroll, which was a joke on the fact that Renaissance scholars adopted big stuffy Latin names like Ludovicus Carolus Magnus.

1883- Buffalo Bill staged his first Wild West Show in North Platte Nebraska. Bill and his partners took the show all over the US and played for the crowned heads of Europe until 1916.

1905- Los Angeles developer Abbott Kinney had broken with his partners over the Santa Monica Pleasure Pier. He moved down the coast to some marshy wetlands and built a new community with canals, lagoons and gondolas. The town of VENICE California was dedicated this day. In 1925, the City of LA got rid of most of the canals and gondolas. Venice went on to be a seaside mecca for Beatniks, Hippies and weightlifters like young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

1911- The first rollercoaster on the Pacific Coast opened on Santa Monica Pier.

1914- First day of filming on D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”

1915- Heavyweight Champion Jess Willard who had taken the championship from Jack Johnson was himself beaten by a new kid named Jack Dempsey, the Manassas Mauler. 

1926- Hungarian film director Mano Mikhali Kertesz arrived in Hollywood. He changed his name to the more manageable Michael Curtiz and directed great classic films like Captain Blood and Casablanca. 

1927-Walt Disney’s Trolley Troubles with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit premiered.

1956- MIT’s TX-1 Whirlwind computer added an adapted typewriter keyboard to enter data. The first computer keyboard.

1966- President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act.

1968- “The Green Berets” premiered. John Wayne financed and produced this attempt to counter the antiwar sentiment sweeping America by creating a pro-war WWII style movie about the Vietnam conflict. 

1969-“ Give Peace a Chance.” released by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.

1976- What’s Love Got to Do With It?  Singer Tina Turner left Ike Turner.

1976- The Ramones first arrived in England for a tour. They greatly inspired future bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols. When playing at the Palladium the Sex Pistols said they couldn’t get tickets to get in so the Ramones pulled them in through the men’s room window. Hey, Ho, Lets Go!

1981- UPA producer Steve Bosustow passed away.

1982- Jimmy Connors defeated John McEnroe for his final Wimbledon Championship.

1982- Ozzie Ozbourne married Sharon Ozbourne. 

1990- 2 Live Crew released the song Banned in the USA.

1997- NASA landed Pathfinder on Mars and deployed Sojourner, the first ever autonomous robotic rover.  Expected to function for only two months, the rover collected data on the Red Planet for the next ten years.