Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 31, 2022

Birthdays: Caligula 12AD, Commodus 161AD, Amilcare Ponchielli, Eldridge Cleaver, Buddy Hackett, James Coburn, Itshak Perleman is 75, Van Morrison, Arthur Godfrey, Richard Baseheart, Rocky Marciano. Alan J. Lerner, Hugh Harman, Maria Montressori (of the Montressori Method of education), William Saroyan, Richard Gere is 72, Chris Tucker is 49. 

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

1837- Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his American Scholar speech in Cambridge Mass. “Our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands is drawing to a close.” People called it an intellectual declaration of independence.

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

1887- Thomas Edison patented the plans for a Kinetoscope, his original version of Motion Pictures using George Eastman’s new celluloid roll film. Most of the actual work was done by Canadian scientist W.K.L. Dickson. He drove himself sick designing, building and improving the device as well as the camera and studio, but Edison took all the credit. Edison wrote Edweard Muybridge at the time that he doubted the Kinetoscope would have much commercial value beyond the science lab. When Dickson gave Edison too much grief about not doing more with the new invention, Edison fired him.

 

1909- A geologist named Walcott hiking in the Canadian Rockies discovered the Burgess Shale. The first fossilized proof of the period before the dinosaurs called the Cambrian Era. 

1928- In Berlin, The ThreePenny Opera premiered, music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Bertholdt Brecht with Lotte Lenya as Pirate Jenny. Mackie Messer or Mack the Knife was born.

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

1935- Disney cartoon Plutos’ Judgement Day.

1938- Walt Disney put ten thousand dollars down to buy 51 acres on Buena Vista Street in Burbank. He would build his modern air-conditioned studio there.

1939- The very first comic book from MARVEL COMICS appeared on newsstands. The Human Torch and Submariner. Publisher Martin Goodman hired his wife’s cousin Stanley Leiber as general office manager. In 1941 Leiber changed his name to Stan Lee and became Chief Editor and writer. In 1961 with The Fantastic Four, the unique Marvel style began to emerge.

1941 –The Great Gildersleeve, a spin-off of Fibber McGee & Molly debuts on NBC radio.  The voice of Gildersleeve later narrated the UPA cartoon Gerald McBoing Boing.

1946- Looney Toon short 'Walky Talky Hawky' the first Foghorn Leghorn and Henery Hawk. The Foghorn character was based on a Fred Allen radio character Senator Beauregard Claghorn, that mocked bombastic Southern congressmen.

1948- Disney's 'Melody Time' premiered.

1948- Movie star Robert Mitchum was busted for smoking marijuana with a blonde in the Hollywood Hills. This would have normally smoked his career. Mitchum was so convinced his career was over that when asked by the police to state his occupation he said, "Former actor." But the new, postwar outlaw, noir attitude was in vogue. So bad-boy Mitchum emerged from county jail more popular than ever. When asked what he thought of being in jail, he said it's not much different than being free....but you meet a better clientele of people IN jail.

1955 - 1st microwave TV station operated in Lufkin, Texas.

1964 - Ground is broken for Anaheim Stadium, future home of the California Angels.

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

1969- Former Heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano died in a plane crash in Newton Iowa. He had been hurrying home to attend a birthday party in his honor. He was 45.

1972- Russian Olga Korbut won a gold medal in gymnastics at the Olympics. She was the first of the cute little 15 year old girl gymnasts with the bright smile to catch the world’s attention.

2001- The NY Stock Exchange tries to avoid a Recession and bolster growth, by getting Michael Jackson and Jerry Lewis to ceremonially open trading sessions. Didn’t work.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 30, 2022

Birthdays: Mary Shelley, Jacques Louis David, Huey Long, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Massey, Ted Williams, John Blondell, Nancy Kulp, Timothy Bottoms, Jean-Claude Killy, Shirley Booth, John Landis, Tug McGraw, R. Crumb is 79, Lewis Black is 74, Cameron Diaz is 50 Character designer Stephen Silver.

1935- “Top Hat” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers premiered.

1936- First newspaper comic strip entirely devoted to Donald Duck.

1942- Cartoonist Al Kapp premiered his comic strip “Fearless Fosdick”, a spoof of Dick Tracy detective stories.

1968- The first 7-11 store opened in Palmdale California. Have a Slurpee!

1975- Ralph Bakshi's film "Coonskin". Bad boy Bakshi's portrayal of African-American urban violence was deemed so offensive that it caused the first ever riot at the Museum of Modern Art, and it died at the box office. The film was retitled on video "Streetfight". When Ralph resurfaced, he turned his attention to Sword & Fantasy films.

1980- Willie Nelson released his hit song “On the Road Again.”

1993- The David Letterman Show premiered on CBS. Letterman was wooed away from NBC for $42 million bucks.

Tom Sito's ANimation Almanac for Aug 28, 2022

Birthdays: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Jack "King" Kirby. George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham- minister of James I, Sean O'Flagherty, Donald O'Connor, Charles Boyer, Karl Boehm, Bruno Bettleheim, Disney designer Ferdinand Horvath, Ben Gazzara, Janet Evans, Ron 'Louisiana Lightning' Guidry, Nancy Kulp, Daniel Stern, Shania Twain, anim historian Charles Solomon, Jack Black is 53, Rita Coolidge is 61. 

1837 - Pharmacists John Leah & William Perrin invented Worcestershire Sauce. A gentleman returning from the Raj asked them to recreate a favorite Indian condiment from a recipe he gave them. The initial result proved inedible. The bottles lay forgotten in their cellar for a few years. Upon rediscovery, it proved to have matured into the wonderful comestible that we enjoy today.

1907- UPS small package delivery service started in Seattle.

1922- The first broadcast commercial on radio.  It was for a real estate firm Queensboro Realty lasting ten minutes, and cost $100 dollars. The firm selling suburban homes in Queens NY immediately did $100,000 worth of business. The business world took note of this new method of advertising.

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

1951- Robert Walker was a boyishly handsome actor who had played in a number of successful Hollywood movies like The Clock, Bataan, See Here Private Hargrove and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. This day a combination of amobarbital and alcohol caused him to suddenly collapse and stop breathing. He was 32. Accounts differ as to his mental state at the time, and whether his psychiatrist compelled him to take the injection of the sedative that brought about his seizure. His son Robert Walker Jr went on to a successful acting career on things like Star Trek. He died in 2019 of natural causes.

1963- Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the climax of the first ' Poor People's March 'on Washington”. Organizer A. Phillip Randolph conceived a poor people’s march taking weeks not unlike the Bonus Marchers of 1929. The sympathetic John F. Kennedy administration prevailed upon them to keep it to one day to reduce the chance of violence and maximize media exposure.  They had planned for 100,000 but they got 400,000. Movie stars like Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, James Garner, Paul Newman and Charlton Heston attended.

1968- THE CHICAGO DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION- While thousands of anti-war hippie and yippie protestors battled the Chicago Police in Grant Park, the Democrats nominated Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the "Happy Warrior" their candidate to replace the assassinated Bobby Kennedy. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the Yippie and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) leaders tried to get a live 100 pound pig into the convention and get it nominated for President. The Chairman of the DNC decried Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's "Gestapo Tactics" from the rostrum.  Ironically Boss Daley opposed the Vietnam War, but he would not tolerate kids making him look bad on national TV. 

Newsman Dan Rather was gut-punched by a Chicago cop on camera on the convention floor. My friend animation writer John Culhane was clubbed down by police despite wearing all his press credentials and a baby blue army helmet with Newsweek painted on it. While the police and demonstrators battled, poet Alan Ginsburg and Timothy Leary grabbed a loudspeaker and chanted the Buddhist "Ohhhmmmmm" to calm people down. The student leaders -the Chicago 7 in reality 8, were put on trial for incitement to riot but after a yearlong media circus all the charges were overturned. Republican Richard Nixon won the election. The Democrats wouldn't go near Chicago again for thirty years.

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

.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 27,2022

Birthdays: Man Ray, Martha Ray, LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson), Hegel, C.S. Forester, Hannibal Hamlin- Abe Lincolns first term vice president, Barbara Bach, Theodore Dreiser, Lady Antonia Fraser, Tommy Sands, Tuesday Weld is 79, Mangesuthu Buthelezi, Paul Rubens-aka Pee Wee Herman is 70

1912- Edgar Rice Burroughs first published Tarzan of the Apes in The All-Story magazine.

1917- Straight Shooting, the first film directed by John Ford released. 

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

1930- Lon Chaney Sr. died at 47 of bronchial lung cancer. It was claimed then that during filming of a remake of The Unholy Three a wind machine blew an artificial gypsum snowflake into Chaney's mouth - it caused an irritation that became a tumor.

1955- The first Guinness Book of World Records published.

1950- NBC and General Foods abruptly canceled the second season of the television show “the Aldrich Family” when a publication called Red Channels accused Jean Muir, one of the show’s stars, of being a communist. It seems that studio execs hated her for being one of the founding members of SAG and being a member of The Congress of American Women.  This signaled that the Hollywood Blacklist was now turning its attention eastward towards NY theater and television.  Jean Muir’s career (1937 Midsummer Nights Dream) never fully recovered. 

1953- The film Roman Holiday introduced a new young actress from Holland named Audrey Hepburn. 

1964- The movie version of Mary Poppins premiered.

1967- The Beatles first manager Brian Epstein overdosed on sleeping pills. 

    

1968- Former master animator Bill Tytla's request to return to Disney was turned down. The artist who animated Grumpy the Dwarf, Dumbo and the Devil on Bald Mountain even offered to do a free "trial animation test" to show he still had it. Disney exec W.H. Anderson wrote him:" We really have only enough animation for our present staff." Tytla died soon after.

1990- Guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash outside Alpine Valley Wisconsin, after an "All Stars of the Blues" show.  Stevie Ray took the last remaining seat on the helicopter, after Eric Clapton got off, claiming he'd rather take a limo back to Chicago, which was about an hour away.

2022- George Jetson of The Jetson’s was born today. The show takes place in 2062 when he was 40, and Jane was 33. 

=====================================================

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 26, 2022

 Birthdays:  Sir Robert Walpole the first British Prime Minister, Mother Theresa, Albert the Prince Consort, John Wilkes Booth, Guilliame Appollinaire, General Maxwell Taylor, Christopher Isherwood, McCauley Culkin is 42, Geraldine Ferarro, Dr. Lee DeForrest, Ben Bradlee, Barbet Schroeder, Branford Marsalis, Chris Pine is 42, Melissa McCarthy is 52

1498- Michelangelo gets a job in Rome. The big Florentine stonecutter was commissioned by Pope Alexander VI Borgia to carve the Pieta, Mary lamenting over the body of Jesus. 

1576- The artist Titian died at age 88. He outlived all the artists of the Renaissance, worked every day of his life, and might have gone on had he not caught a touch of plague.

1838- American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson met English writer Thomas Carlyle.

1846- W.A. Bartlet became first American mayor of Yerba Buena, in 1850 renamed San Francisco.

1868- First practical typewriter patented by Christopher Scholes. The Remington Company who were famous for making firearms took up the typewriter and mass produced it. In 1874 Mark Twain admitted to a friend that he preferred writing on it

1918- 17 year old Walt Disney dropped out of high school and faked his birthdate in order to enlist to fight in World War I. Turned down for his age, he volunteered for the Red Cross. Assigned to the ambulance corps, he arrived in Europe just as the war was ending.

1929- The giant German dirigible Graf Zeppelin landed in Los Angeles at a remote place called Mines Fields, that would one day become Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). In ten years the Graf Zeppelin made 590 flights around the world without a single problem. It had a perfect safety record. Back then, lighter than air ships were considered much safer than airplanes.

1939- In preparation for the impending war with Germany, the Tower of London was closed to tourists and the English Crown Jewels smuggled out and hidden. 

1946 - George Orwell published "Animal Farm". Orwell said he conceived the idea for the novel while watching out his window a small boy driving a huge draft horse. The horse could have easily crushed the boy had it the free will, but instead patiently endured the boys taunts and flicks with a small switch. 

1946- First day of shooting on Jean Cocteau’s film Belle et le Bete, Beauty & the Beast.

1958- First day of shooting on the Alfred Hitchcock film North By Northwest. Conceived as a story that ended in a chase across the stone faces of Mt. Rushmore. The working title of Ernst Lehman’s script was The Man Who Hung from Lincoln’s Nose.

1961- The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto dedicated.

1964- The Tokyo subway system opens. 

1967 – The Beatles, Mick Jagger & Marianne Faithful met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

1971- The New York Giants announced they would move from Yankee Stadium to a new complex being built in the Meadowlands of Rutherford, New Jersey.

1980- Director Tex Avery died after collapsing in the parking lot of Hanna-Barbera. He was 72. Two weeks before he was asked by a friend why he was working in Hanna & Barbera, Tex laughed:" Hey, Don’t you know? this is where all the elephants come to die!"

1997- Special effects house Boss Studios, closed. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 25, 2022

Birthdays:  King Ludwig II the Mad of Bavaria, Walt Kelly, Bret Hart, Lola Montez (flamenco dancing mistress of Ludwig I, King of Bavaria), Alan Pinkerton, Clara Bow, Ruby Keeler, Monty Hall, Van Johnson, Willis Reed, Frederick Forsythe, Wayne Shorter, Billy Ray Cyrus, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim, Leonard Bernstein, Sir Sean Connery, Gene Simmons, Anne Archer, Elvis Costello is 69, Tim Burton is 65, Claudia Schiffer is 53

1835- The New York Sun newspaper ran a story that British astronomer Sir William Herschel, the discoverer of Neptune, had observed little men living on the surface of the Moon!  The story proved false, but it really boosted the sales of the paper.

1970- A young singer named Elton John did his first US tour, opening at the Troubadour in LA.

1980- The premiere of the Broadway musical version of the classic movie musical 42nd Street. In a moment of Broadway drama, producer David Merrick came out on stage and startled the cast and audience by announcing that the director of the play Gower Champion had died that very day. 42nd Street went on to be a smash hit. The play itself is about a Broadway director who works himself to death creating a hit musical.

1989- The Voyager 2 probe left Neptune and shot off into deep space, completing its mission, a reconnaissance of the outer planets of our solar system. It discovered the rings of Jupiter and Neptune, the additional moons of these planets, and the volcanoes of the Jovian moon Io, and the ice of Europa. Today, you have ten times more computing power in your phone than in the Voyager spacecraft, yet all these years later it continues to transmit signals back to Earth. By 2012 Voyager I and Voyager 2 have both left the Heliosheath, the outer perimeter of our personal solar system, and today are deep in interstellar space. Voyager 1 with its Chuck Berry recording, should reach the next neighboring solar system in about 40,000 years. 

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/

 

1991- At the Emmy Awards, comic Gilbert Gottfried upset the audience with a torrent of masturbation jokes about Pee Wee Herman. Fox Network actually apologized the next day.

2001-Beautiful 22-year-old R&B singer Alleiya was killed, when her overloaded chartered plane crashed on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 24, 2022

Birthdays: Jorge Luis Borges, William Wilberforce, Marlee Matlin, Yasir Arafat, Max Beerbom, Cal Ripken Jr, Joshua Lionel Cowan the inventor of Lionel toy electric trains, Kenny Baker-C3PO in Star Wars, Stephen Fry is 65, Durward Kirby- 1960s T.V. announcer, Duke Kahanamoku-1890- Olympic champion who popularized Surfing, Kirk Wise, Dave Chappelle is 50, Steve Guttenberg is 65

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

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

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

1939- Mr. Leslie Mitchell became the first British Television announcer. Ten days later WWII broke out and British television shut down for six years.

1942- Walt Disney’s film Saludos Amigos received its world premiere in Rio De Janeiro. Introduced Joe Carioca.

1951- Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. The film won the Grand Prize and first showed the world that Japanese Cinema was a new creative force in the film world.

1966- The effects fantasy Fantastic Voyage directed by Richard Fleischer opened. The submarine in the film was designed by Harper Goff, who designed the Nautilus for Walt Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, also directed by Richard Fleischer, the son of Max Fleischer.

1973- One month after Bruce Lee’s death, his last film Enter The Dragon opened in the US to wild acclaim. It renewed interest in the late star and helped spawn the Chinese Martial Arts craze in the US. 

1993- LAPD announced an investigation of pop star Michael Jackson for possible child molestation. The investigation never led to any indictments, but the publicity tarnished his image. Equally damaging to his public image were revelations of his eccentric lifestyle, like his keeping chimps and mannequins around the house to talk to, and all the tap water and showers of his mansion spouting Evian water. Jackson was tried and acquitted of all charges in 2005.

1995- Microsoft's Windows 95 introduced.

1997- According to the 1984 James Cameron film The Terminator this was the day the Skynet computer system became self aware, and began the War of the Day of Judgement.

2004- Swiss scientist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the Five Stages of Dying, died. She was 78. The day before she told a local newsperson, “When I meet God, I will tell him he is a damned procrastinator!”

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 23, 2022

History for 8/23/2021
Birthdays: French King Louis XVI, Gene Kelly, Keith Moon, Rick Springfield, Sonny Jurgensen, Alphonse Mucha, River Phoenix, Queen Noor of Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Ed Benedict the designer of the Flintstones, Barbara Eden is 91, Vera Miles is 93, Shelley Long is 72, Nik Ranieri, Oscar Grillo

1634- Spain’s greatest playwright Lope De Vega wrote his last poem “El Siglo de Oro” – the Golden Age. He died the next day at age 73. A duelist and sailor on the Spanish Armada, Voltaire ranked him alongside Shakespeare. His work was so popular, the Holy Office of the Inquisition got angry when people sang a blasphemous doggerel that began “We believe in One Lope, the Poet Almighty…”

1750- 37-year-old Swiss writer Jean Jacques Rousseau published his first mature work- Discourse on the Arts & Sciences. In it he breaks with the other French philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot and began his theory of the Noble Savage- that Civilization is the problem and we were all a lot happier when we were primitives. Voltaire laughed “the pamphlet made me want to get down on all fours and live among the bears of Canada!”

1872- The first commercial ship ever sent from Japan arrived in San Francisco carrying tea.

1926- Screen idol Rudolph Valentino died in a New York hospital of an infection due to a burst appendix and bleeding ulcer. He was only 30. Today his condition could be controlled by antibiotics, but they weren’t invented yet. Women around the world went mad with grief. From L.A. to Budapest, women committed suicide before his picture. In Japan two women jumped into a volcano shouting his name.

1937- At the urging of the Stanford Dean of engineering Fred Terman, graduate Bill Hewlett had his first meeting with David Packard. They called their company started out of their Palo Alto garage the Engineering Service Company. The Hewlett-Packard Company would one day be one of the biggest names in computers and their garage hailed as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

1953- David Mullany of Shelton Conn. invented the Whiffle Ball. He did it to help his son who was lousy at throwing a curve ball. 

1964- Twist and Shout! The Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl. 

1994- Jeffrey Katzenburg announced he was leaving Disney.

2007- Open-source advocate Paul Messina created the hashtag for Twitter.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 22, 2022

Birthdays: George Herriman the creator of Krazy Kat, Dorothy Parker, Claude DeBussy, Johnny Lee Hooker, Denis Papin 1647 inventor of the Pressure Cooker, Leni Reifenstahl, General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, Paul Molitor, Bill Parcells, Max Vilander, Carl “Big Yaz”Yazstremski, Dyanna Nyad, Deng Xiao Ping, Henry Cartier Bresson, Valerie Harper, Ray Bradbury, Cindy Williams, Kristen Wiig is 49

565AD – St. Columba reported seeing a sea monster in Loch Ness. 

1806- elderly French painter Jean Fragonard died of a cerebral seizure after eating a large fruit ice on a hot day.

1882- American showman P.T. Barnum bought the largest elephant in the London Zoo. He created a new name for the beast- he called it JUMBO. It was the highlight of his circus for years. After Jumbo was hit by a freight train and killed, PT Barnum had its bones bleached and charged people admission to come look at its skeleton.

1906 - 1st Victor Victrola manufactured, using Emile Berliners flat record turntable system. The Victrola was so cheap and easy to use it became standard in many homes and finished off any competition from Thomas Edison’s rival talking cylinder system.

1927- Walt Disney’s last Alice in Cartoonland short, Alice in The Big Leagues is released.

1929- Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony The Skeleton Dance premiered. The tight dancing synch inspired a generation of animators.  The idea of skeletons was suggested by composer Carl Stalling, a Kansas City movie theater organist that Walt befriended.

1942- Tex Avery’s first cartoon for MGM, The Blitz Wolf. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 21, 2022

Birthdays: Christopher Robin Milne-1920, King Phillip II Augustus of France- 1165, King William IV of England- 1765, Aubrey Beardsley, Count Basie, Wilt (Wilt the Stilt) Chamberlain, Friz Freleng, Kenny Rogers, Princess Margaret, Matthew Broderick, Vance Gerry, Basil Poliodouris, Steve Hillenberg the creator of Spongebob Squarepants, Peter Weir is 78, Kim Catrall is 66, Carrie Anne Moss is 55

1887- Mighty (Dan) Casey struck out at his last at bat with the NY Giants. The poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer was written many years later.

1911- Café waiter Vincenzo Perugia walked into the Louvre and stole the Mona Lisa.  Paris Police arrested Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, thinking the theft was some kind of statement by modernist movement artists.  For two years Vincenzo Perugia tried to fence the painting with no luck. Finally while trying to claim a ransom for it, he was arrested and the painting recovered.

1912- Arthur Eldred of Oceanside New York became the first Eagle scout. 

1921- On his first birthday, Christopher Robin Milne was given a Farrell teddy bear from Harrods. His parents first called it Edward, but when he could speak Christopher Robin named it Winnie, after Winnipeg, his favorite bear he saw at the zoo. The child would also mention the name of a swan there he liked named Pooh. This gave his dad A.A. Milne a neat idea for a new book.

1929- Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo marry.

1931- Pardon Us, the first feature length film starring Laurel & Hardy. In 1926, Hal Roach director Leo McCarey noticed the Briton Stan Laurel and Georgia born singer Oliver Hardy looked funny together and put them in a series of shorts starting with Putting Pants on Phillip (1927). Pardon Us was their first Sound film. Laurel & Hardy became one of the iconic comedy teams in film history. 

1944- Movie star James Cagney, star of Yankee Doodle Dandy, was cleared of charges of Communism. The accusations probably had less to do with Cagney's politics and more to do with his actor’s union activism, and his fighting in court the restrictive personal contracts studios put their stars under. 

1959- Hawaii became the 50th state.

1967 –New York Mets second baseman Ken Harrelson became the first free agent.  

 

1972 - Grace Slick was sprayed with mace by police after one of her band called the cops pigs.

1981- John Landis’ “American Werewolf in London” opened.

. 

1987- The movie Dirty Dancing opened.

1995- Bill Gates announced Microsoft Windows 95.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 20, 2022

Birthdays: President Benjamin Harrison, Sukenoba Nishikawa, Bernardo O’Higgins, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, H.P. Lovecraft, Art Tatum, Issac Hayes, Connie Chung, Jacqueline Susanne, Rajiv Ghandi, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Joan Allen is 66, Fred Durst, Alan Reed -the original voice of Fred Flintstone, Slobodan Milosovic’, Amy Adams is 48

1882 -Peter Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" premiered in Moscow. 

1972- Top Hollywood directors Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin announced a partnership in a new production company called "The Director's Company". Youngsters Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were also signatories. The partnership lasted two years then collapsed.

1982- Ralph Bakshi's film Hey Good Lookin'.

1989- George Adamson, who with his wife Joy were the naturalists who inspired the book Born Free, was murdered by Somali poachers with machetes in Kampi Ya Simba, game preserve. Joy Adamson had been murdered in 1980. 

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 18, 2022

 Birthdays: Meriwether Lewis, Austrian Emperor Franz Josef II, Leo Slezak, Shelly Winters, Roberto Clemente, Rafer Johnson, Enoch Light, Coco Channel, Roman Polanski is 88, Patrick Swayze, Madeleine Stowe, Christian Slater, Edward Norton is 54, Martin Mull, Denis Leary is 65, Robert Redford, born Charles Robert Redford Jr, is 86

1939- The movie The Wizard of Oz released and made a star of Judy Garland. 

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

1955- Folksinger Pete Seeger appeared before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. He refused to cooperate and was blacklisted. But he still managed to have a successful career on the folk scene and appeared on TV in 1967. 

1956- Actress Vivien Leigh suffered a mental breakdown after a miscarriage.

1958 - "Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov, published. The novel was rejected by four publishers before Putnam picked it up. It became a best seller and allowed Nabokov to quit teaching and focus on writing.

1958 – The TV Game Show Scandal investigation began. Allegations that popular quiz shows like 21 were rigged turned out to be true.

1962 - Peter, Paul & Mary release their folk song "If I Had a Hammer".

1966- HAPPY BIRTHDAY SLURPEE!  The Icee was invented by two Dallas engineers for a failing Oklahoma ice cream store. When licensed to 7-Eleven it was changed to Slurpee.

1969- Woody Allen’s first movie “Take the Money and Run”, opened. 

1969- The closing day of the Woodstock Rock Concert, Jimmy Hendrix did his famous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Of the original 500,000 attendees, many were already headed home. Only 30,000 stragglers were left to hear him. Originally scheduled instead of Hendrix , was old cowboy Roy Rogers, to sing his signature tune “ Happy Trails to You..” But Roy never made it there.

1974- The Xerox Company decided not to seriously market the Alto, the first personal computer that had a GUI, ethernet and mouse, color graphics, long before anyone else. Xerox decided to stick with copying machines and let go of many of their Palo Alto development team Xerox PARC. Most of their breakthroughs wound up in other computers like Apple’s Lisa, Macintosh and the IBM PC.

1977- The rock band the Police make their debut in a Birmingham nightclub. The lead singer Gordon Sumner started to get the nickname Sting, from the black & yellow striped jumper he habitually wore.

1989- Publishing Tycoon Malcolm Forbes flew 800 guests to Tangiers to celebrate his birthday. His birthday party cost $2 million. The soiree' came to symbolize 1980's wealth excess.

1990- 510 animators pay tribute to Betty Boop creator Grim Natwick on his 100th Birthday. It was the last big gathering of the artists of the Golden Age Hollywood Animation. Chuck Jones, June Foray, Walter Lantz, Disney’s Nine Old Men, Mae Questel, Friz Freleng. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 17, 2022

Birthdays: Davy Crocket, Mae West, Marcus Garvey, Sam Goldwyn- born Schmuel Gelbfisz, Harry Hopkins, Monte Wooley, Boog Powell, Belinda Carlisle, Guillermo Vilas, V.S. Naipul, Jim Courier, Donnie Wahlberg, Belinda Carlisle, Maureen O’Hara, Sean Penn is 62, Martha Coolidge is 77, Robert DeNiro is 79

1876- Richard Wagner’s 4 hour opera Gotterdammerung- the Twilight of the Gods, premiered.

1877- Billy the Kid killed his first man.

1908- D.W. Griffith signed a contract to begin directing movies for Biograph Pictures. He was paid $50 dollars a week plus royalties.  

1908- The premiere of the first fully animated film, Emile Cohl's "Fantasmagorie". 

1941- EL GRUPO- Walt Disney and his artists arrive in Rio on a ten-week goodwill tour of South America, underwritten by a $70,000 government grant.  President Franklin Roosevelt was worried that some South American countries might be sympathetic to the Nazis, forcing the U.S. to worry about her backdoor. So FDR sent Nelson Rockefeller to give the Latin American countries whatever they wanted to keep them out of the world war. One of the things they wanted was Donald Duck. Back in LA the federal mediator Stanley White had worked out with Roy Disney that if they got Walt out of town, they could settle the Disney animators strike. The name comes from hotel footmen in Buenos Aires paging the artists as “ El Grupo Disney! Your bus is here.”  The Three Caballeros and Saludos Amigos result.

1954- Walt Disney’s True Life Adventure, “The Vanishing Prairie”, directed by James Algar, opened in theaters.

1962- The Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. One of the reason’s they decided on Ringo was that he came with his own car.

1979- Monty Python’s The Life of Brian premiered. Directed by Terry Jones.

1984- The Walt Disney Company executive board informed its chairman Ron Miller that they wanted his resignation. Disney had fallen to 14th in film box office by then. Miller had been Walt’s son-in-law and he was he was once a tight end for the LA Rams. Within two years of Michael Eisner taking power Disney was number one. 

1985- The Hormel Meat Packing Strike, severely threatening the world’s supply of SPAM.

1986- Pixar short Luxo Jr, premiered at Siggraph ’86 Dallas. 

1992- Famed film director Woody Allen admitted he was having an affair with Soon Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his longtime lover Mia Farrow. He was 60 and she was 21. But as the unrepentant Allen states: “The Heart wants what it wants.” They’ve been together ever since.

 1994 The Great Baseball Players Strike- canceled out the season and the 1994 World Series. It was the longest strike in sports history until the NBA lockout of 1998.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 16, 2022

Birthdays: Fess Parker, Karl Stockhausen, George Meany, Charles Bukowski, Menachem Begin, Otto Mesmer the creator of Felix the Cat, Myron Grim Natwick the creator of Betty Boop, Hal Foster the creator of Prince Valiant, Kathie Lee Gifford, Edie Gorme, Bill Evans, Leslie Ann Warren, Angela Bassett is 64, Julie Numar is 89, Robert Culp, James Cameron is 67, Bruce Beresford, Steve Carrell is 61, Madonna, aka Louise Ciccone of Bay City Michigan, is 64

1858- Queen Victoria sent the first transcontinental wire message to President James Buchanan via Cyrus Field's incredible UNDERWATER TRANSCONTINENTAL CABLE, stretching from London to New York.  After great fanfare about progress and a new era in communications it broke down, as well as the next several tries to fix it. Just hours after the first message a fisherman pulled it up in his net, thought it was the tail of a sea serpent and cut off a chunk to take home and brag to his friends. Other attempts were ruined when technicians tried to correct the faintness of the signal by boosting the voltage beyond the safety range of the insulation-Zapp!

  Direct transcontinental communications didn't really become a reality until wireless broadcasting. But the who-ha over this scientific marvel did inspire author Jules Verne to write "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”

1877- BIRTHDAY OF THE WORD-"HELLO". In a letter dated today Thomas Edison wrote to the first president of AT&T about how people should initiate conversation on the new telephone machine. A genteel Victorian would think it impolite to speak until spoken to. Alexander Graham Bell, an old navy man, always thought the right way to start a phone conversation was to say "AHOY!"  Edison explained that the results of sonic tests proved the old English fox hunting call "Halloo!" was most audible over great distances. In most languages around the world the word hello is the same.  It was the only English word Sioux Chief Sitting Bull ever learned. He loved to grab your hand and pump it vigorously while saying:" HELLO, HELLO!”

1896- THE YUKON GOLD RUSH. Four miners find gold in Bonanza Creek in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory. When a boatload of gold was brought down to Seattle and San Francisco, it caused a stampede of prospectors north. Prospectors included poet Robert Service, Wyatt Earp, and Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump.

1930- Ub Iwerk's "Fiddlesticks" the first Flip the Frog cartoon, done in a simple two-color process called Harriscolor. Iwerks was the first designer and animator of Mickey Mouse, who had left Walt Disney to open his own studio.

1938- In Three Forks Mississippi, Blues legend Robert Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband.

1942- Happy Birthday Mighty Mouse. Terrytoon's short: "The Mouse of Tomorrow".

1954- First issue of Sports Illustrated.

1965- The AFL, American Football League offered it’s first expansion franchise to a new team called the Miami Dolphins. The AFL merged with the NFL in the 80s.

1969- “ Hey Man, we’re gonna serve breakfast in bed for 500,000” So was hippy Wavy Gravy’s announcement at dawn on the second day of the Woodstock Rock Concert. Toasted oats in hot water was ladled out en-masse in paper cups. Wavy declared this was the day Americans learned first learned about Granola. 

1974- The Ramones play their first gig at the NY club CBGBs. Hey-Ho, Lets Go!

1977- E-DAY in Memphis. Elvis Presley, donuts and Pizza Hut box in hand, died of a heart attack while sitting on the toilet. He was reading a book-the Historic Search for the Face of Jesus. He was 42.

1985- On her birthday, Madonna married Sean Penn. They divorced shortly after.

1991- The original Shamu the Whale died of respiratory failure at age 16.

2005- Top Pixar story-artist Joe Ranft was killed in an auto accident. He was 45.

2019- Animator Richard Williams died at age 86.

=========================================================

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 15, 2022

History for 8/15/2022
Birthdays: Napoleon Bonaparte, Leon Theremin- inventor of that weird electronic musical instrument that is in all those 1950s flying saucer movies, Samuel Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia 1685, Lawrence of Arabia, Ethel Barrymore, Huntz Hall, Bill Baird, Edna Ferber, Sir Robert Bolt, Rose-Marie, Linda Ellerbee, Gene Upshaw, Oscar Peterson, Shimon Peres, Mike “Mannix” Connors, Nicholas Roeg, Animator Dick Lundy, Julia Child, Anthony Andrews, Ben Afleck is 49, Debra Messing is 53, Jennifer Lawrence is 31. 

1457 – The earliest dated bound book, The "Mainz Psalter," completed.

1843- Tivoli Gardens opened in Copenhagen. One of the oldest amusement parks in the world. King Christian said “ When people are amused, they don’t worry about politics.”

Hans Christian Andersen was a frequent visitor. One hundred years later, Walt Disney visited to get inspiration for his Disneyland.

1848 - M Waldo Hanchett patents the dental chair.

1885- Sir Richard Burton completed his translation from medieval Persian of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. There had been earlier attempts like a French edition in 1809, but Burton’s edition introduced the west to Aladdin and his magic lamp, Sinbad the Sailor and Scheherazade.

1911- Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco shortening.

1935- Humorist writer Will Rogers and his pilot Wiley Post were killed when their small plane crashed in Barrow, Alaska. 

1936- Disney animator Ward Kimball married painter Betty Lawyer-Kimball.

1939 - In 1st night game at Comiskey Park, Sox beat Browns 5-2.

1946- Disney’s Make Mine Music, featuring Blue Bayou, All the Cats Join In, and Willie the Operatic Whale.

1958 - Buddy Holly weds Maria Santiago.

1965- The Beatles play their largest U.S. concert yet, at New York's Shea Stadium.

1968- The pirate radio station Radio Free London began transmitting.

1969- WOODSTOCK-Three Days of Peace and Music- The rock concert of the 20th Century opened. The promoters, one of whom was heir to the Polident Denture Cream fortune, were hoping to host 50,000 people and launch a recording studio in the quiet New York farming town. What they got was 500,000 young fans and the social phenomenon that defined an age. At one point the more conservative elements of the community got a court order to block the land to be used, but farmer Max Yasgur offered his cow farm for the site.

 Up till then in the tumultuous 1960’s, any gathering of young people that big meant violence and riot, and at one point New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller offered to send in the National Guard. But the magic prevailed and there was no violence outside of 200 bad acid trips and one heroin overdose.

 Richie Havens was the first act to play, he did six sets and kept stalling because the crowd was so immense, they had to bring in the other bands by helicopter. When he ran out of songs to sing, Havens started riffing anything he could think of. This way Havens created his most famous tune “Freedom” with added in spirituals like “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child”.  After his death in 2013, his ashes were scattered at the Woodstock site.

1973- Westworld with Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin opened.

1979- Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now” opened. Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, young Harrison Ford and even younger Lawrence Fishburne.

1984- “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” premiered.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 14, 2022

Birthdays: Gary Larson, Erwin "Magic" Johnson, Lina Wertmuller, David Crosby, Alice Ghostly, Buddy Greco, Nehemiah Persoff, The 20's Parisian nightclub singer Bricktop, Dick Lundy, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, C.S. Watson, James Horner, Wim Wenders, Emmanuele Beart, Halle Berry is 56, Mila Kunis, Steve Martin is 77

1928 - Ben Hecht & Charles McArthur's play" The Front Page," premiered in NYC. They later went on to become top comedy writers in Hollywood after Sound pictures created a need for snappy dialogue. They came out to Hollywood after a mutual friend, writer Herman Mankiewicz sent Ben a telegram, “Hecht, some quick! Fortunes to be made and your competition are idiots!"

1935- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Social Security Act. Considered the most successful US Federal social program ever.

1939 - 1st night game at Comiskey Park -White Sox 5, Browns 2.

1939- Donald Duck Day at the NY World’s Fair.

1956- The Marilyn Monroe movie "Bus Stop" premiered.

1962 - French & Italian workers break through at Mount Blanc to create an auto 

Tunnel through the Alps.

1964 –California angels pitcher Bo Belinsky is suspended after attacking sportswriter Braven Dyer.

1965 - Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" hits #1.

 

1965- Jane Fonda married director Roger Vadim, who put the beautiful young blonde in naughty movies like Barbarella. His previous wife Bridgette Bardot was a beautiful young blonde that he put in naughty movies….hmm.

1979 – A rainbow was seen in Northern Wales that lasted for 3 hours duration.

1995- Super-agent Michael Ovitz of CAA was named President of the Walt Disney Company under Michael Eisner. After 14 fruitless months he left. 

2003- Another blackout shut down the power again in the Northeast, from New York to Toronto to Detroit.

2009- Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo opened in North America.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 13, 2022

B-Dayz: Annie Oakley, Alfred Hitchcock, Don Ho, Buddy Rogers, Bert Lahr, Ben Hogan, Richard Baseheart, Saul Steinberg, Regis Toomey, Johann Christoph Denner (1655)- inventor of the clarinet. Danny Bonaduce, John Logie Baird one of the inventors of television, Hockey great Bobby Clarke, Daniel Schorr, Bombay movie star Viyayanthimala, Fidel Castro

1846- Commodore Stockton and Colonel Freemont with a contingent of U.S. Marines marched up from their ships in San Pedro Harbor to Ciudad Los Angeles. They interrupted a local fiesta to inform the startled inhabitants that they were now part of the United States, whether they liked it or not.  They then moved south to attack San Diego. 

1934- First Little Abner comic strip by Al Capp. Dogpatch, Mammy Yokum, Daisy Mae, Kickapoo Joy Juice, Jubilation T. Cornpone and the Schmoo are born. Al Capp was a hard drinking old curmudgeon of a cartoonist who lost one leg when as a child he fell off an ice truck and it was severed by a streetcar. 

1941- James Stuart Blackton certainly had an interesting career. The English born artist became a top newspaper cartoonist, a vaudevillian drag act as Mademoiselle Stuart, the first American animator, founder of the Vitagraph Company, the movie fanzine Motion Picture World. He even successfully faked a newsreel of the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 by using toy boats, sparklers and cigar smoke. He made fortunes and lost them just as quickly. On this day, a poor freelance artist for low budget Republic Pictures, he died after was struck and killed by an auto on Pico Blvd.

1942-  Disney's Bambi opened in theaters nationwide. 

1946- MGM cartoon Northwest Hounded Police, the short in which Tex Avery perfected the 'Tex Avery Take" - used since in films like Mask, Roger Rabbit and Casper.

1955- Shooting wrapped on Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. He was remaking the film he had done as a silent movie in 1925. One wag said: DeMille has done God one better, because he has now parted the Red Sea twice."

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

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

2016- At the Rio Olympics, American swimmer Michael Phelps won his 22 gold medal, His final total was 28, the most Olympic gold medals of anyone in history. The second most wins was Leonidas of Rhodes in 164BC. But in Leonidas time they didn’t get medals. They received a laurel wreath and several large pots of premium olive oil.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 12, 2022

Birthdays: King George IV, Cecil B. DeMille, The alien Alf- 1757, Cantinflas, Buck Owens, Edith Hamilton, Diamond Jim Brady, screenwriter William Goldman, Mtsislav Rostropovitch, Xenia Sharpe (educator who invented the children’s reader Dick & Jane) Kathy Lee Bates-the author of the song America the Beautiful, Klara Schickelgruber- Hitlers mom, Dominique Swain, Pete Samprass, Sam Fuller, John Casale-I'm not Fredo, George Hamilton is 83, Casey Affleck is 47.

1877- THE BIRTH OF RECORDED SOUND. Thomas Edison announced his sound recording invention and demonstrated it by recording "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a tin cylinder. Edison never quite understood the possibilities of a music industry and was convinced that the recorded sound was going to be a used primarily for people to listen to the voices of deceased family, sort of like a voice from the grave. That idea was so popular that it translated to the Logo of the RCA Company with the familiar image of the dog listening to "His master's voice". The original image of that dog listening to his master's voice, had the dog sitting on a coffin. 

A few years later Emile Berliner from Georgia invented the flat record disc. Edison thought the disc was clumsy and too fragile. In the future he declared, everyone would use recording cylinders.

1915 - "Of Human Bondage," by William Somerset Maugham, published.

1927- the William Wellman movie WINGS opened with Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the first silent film to win best picture at the Academy Awards before the advent of sound. Director Wild Bill Wellman was himself a former fighter pilot and flew many of the stunt shots. He bolted cameras to the nose of planes and had the actors film themselves while flying.  

The second silent film to ever win best picture was The Artist, in the year 2012.

1932 Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first published. Before anyone ever heard of stem cells, Huxley had written a scholarly paper on the moral dangers inherent in controlled genetic engineering. Writer H.L. Mencken urged Huxley to put his ideas in a fiction form to reach a wider audience. The title comes from Shakespeare's the Tempest " Oh Brave New World, that hath such people in it!'

1951- Bob McKimson’s Warner Bros short Hillbilly Hare. The short includes the long routine animated in part by Emery Hawkins when Bugs Bunny takes over calling a square dance and uses it to torture the two twin-brother hunters after him.

1968- The album Cheap Thrills released from Big Brother and the Holding Company and their lead singer Janis Joplin. R. Crumb drew the famous cover.

1981- IBM introduced its first PC- personal computer and PC-DOS I. Unlike Apple, IBM shared the basic hardware design, so a myriad of cheaper competitor PC’s from Commodore and Dell soon flooded the market.

1983- The Nelvana animated feature Rock & Rule opened in theaters. 

1988- Martin Scorcese’ film The Last Temptation of Christ opened in theaters to howls of protests from religious groups. There had been more inflammatory interpretations of the Christ story on screens in the past like Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew and the Canadian film Hail Mary, but the church groups weren’t that media savvy yet. Like all these protest efforts, all the controversy really did was boost its box office.

1999- In Yorkshire England, Tish, the world’s oldest goldfish, died at age 43.

2008- Entertainer and producer Merv Griffin died at age 81. The creator of shows like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Merv Griffin Show, his last post on his website was " I was planning to go on vacation, but this is not the destination I intended."

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 11, 2022

Birthdays: Antonio Salieri, Frederick Ludwig Jahn 1778- founder of the Gymnastics Movement, Alex Haley, Jack Haley, Rev Jerry Falwell, Hulk Hogan- real name Terry Bollier-is 74, Dick Browne the creator of Hagar the Horrible, Steve Wozniak the co-founder of Apple Computers, Raymond Leppard, Lloyd Nolan, Mike Douglas, Patti Duke Astin, Chris Helmsworth is 38

1896 - Harvey Hubbell patents electric light bulb socket with a pull chain.

1908- The Hearst syndicate press published a story today that Annie Oakley was destitute and was arrested in Chicago trying to buy cocaine from a black man! The story was a phony. The woman arrested was a burlesque dancer who had previously impersonated Annie Oakley. The real Annie Oakley, one of the first big media stars, spent the next 6 years suing 55 newspapers. She won all but one lawsuit.

1932- The original Rin Tin Tin died. The German shepherd dog was the first animal movie star. Legend was he was rescued from a WWI battlefield by a doughboy named Lee Duncan who called him "Rinty". Later in Hollywood people joked he was more spoiled than any human star. Before sound he was the main moneymaker of struggling little Warner Bros studio. Jack Warner called him “Our little rent check.” 
In 1967 Warners admitted they had bred 16 duplicate dogs in case anything happened to him.

1934- The Mickey Mouse cartoon The Orphan’s Benefit. The first cartoon where Donald Duck lost his temper and did his fighting stance, and they started calling Dippy Dog by his new name- The Goof, or Goofy.

1942- Off the coast of Malta, the German U-Boat U-73 torpedoed and sank HMS Eagle, one of the world’s first aircraft carriers.

1942- Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr is awarded a patent for her radio-guided torpedo. It was ignored in her time, but many years later the principles became the basis of Spread Spectrum Technology, revolutionizing wireless communications.

1946- Playwright Moss Hart married Miss America Kittie Carlisle. 

1949- Margaret Mitchell, author of "Gone With the Wind" was hit by a taxicab crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta, and died 5 days later. Her last request was for her husband to burn the original manuscript of Gone With The Wind, which he did. Once accused of being a racist, it came out later Mitchell quietly paid for scholarships for dozens of black students to attend medical school and become doctors.

1956- Abstract artist Jackson Pollack died when he drunkenly crashed his car into a tree near East Hampton Long Island. He was 44.

1957- The Toyota Car Company of Japan introduces itself to the United States with a car called the Toyopet. It's first year’s sales were so bad; they almost gave up on the U.S.

1962- Sir Lawrence Olivier founded the National Theatre in London.

1965- THE WATTS RIOTS- 6 days of urban warfare began when an angry crowd attacked some LAPD apprehending a black motorist named Marquette Frye. 34 deaths, 1000 injured. Similar riots erupted in a number of U.S. cities that year including Detroit, Newark and Washington D.C. 

1972- San Antonio Texas holds its first annual Cheech & Chong Day.

1995- The Walt Disney short Runaway Brain, featuring Mickey Mouse, premiered.

2001- First day shooting on the film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou.

2014- Comedian/Actor Robin Williams committed suicide in his San Francisco home.  He had been battling depression and recently received a diagnosis of Diffuse Lewy Body Dementia, a form of early onset Alzheimers. He was 63.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 10, 2022

Birthdays: Alexander Glauzunov, Billie Holiday, Eddie Fisher, Leo Fender, Herbert Hoover, Polish King Jan III Sobieski, Norma Shearer, Rhonda Fleming, Jimmy Dean, Justin Theroux, Rosanna Arquette is 63, Antonio Banderas is 62

1629- Painter Diego Velasquez traveled to Italy to study the Renaissance masters on the advice of his buddy, painter Peter Paul Rubens.

1787- Mozart completes his Eine Kleine Nachtmusik -A Little Night Music.

1793- In one of the more positive results of the Reign of Terror, the French Revolutionary Government opened the royal art collection of the Louvre to the public as a museum.

1948 – Allen Funt's "Candid Camera" TV debut on ABC.

1970 - Jim Morrison is charged in Miami on "lewd & lascivious behavior"

1972 - Paul & Linda McCartney are arrested in Sweden on drug possession.

1973 –San Francisco’s first BART train travels through the transbay tube to Montgomery St Station.

1983- Discovery of the Vega Galaxy.  This was the first physical proof of a planetary system outside our Milky Way. With modern orbiting telescopes we’ve since found millions of them.

1984- Famed New Yorker cartoonist and former Disney artist Virgil “Vip” Partch died in a car crash with his wife, outside of Valencia, California.

1987- Clara Peller, the elderly actress who gained last minute advertising fame by saying Where's the Beef? died at 86.  The director and writer of the spots was the father of J.J. Sedelmier, who created the Ambiguously Gay Duo and other TV Funhouse animations for SNL.

2001- Warner Bros film Osmosis Jones opened in theaters. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 9, 2022

Birthdays: King Henry V of England, John Dryden, Sir Issac Walton-author of the Compleat Angler, Melanie Griffith, Whitney Houston, David Steinberg, Bob Cousy, Jill St. John, Robert Shaw, Robert Aldrich, Sam Elliot is 78, Gillian Anderson is 54, Pamela Travers –the creator of Mary Poppins, Marvin Minsky, Eric Bana is 56, Audrey Tautou is 46, Philippe Bergeron is 63

1854- Henry David Thoreau published “Walden”, the first great work about nature conservation. 

1919- HAPPY BIRTHDAY ZORRO! Mexican California ranchers had issues with the provincial governors sent from Mexico City. Juan de Alvarado revolted against Gov Michel de Micheltorena in 1847. In the 1850s Joaquin Murrietta was a kind of Jesse James, Robin Hood bandit who rode through California Gold Rush Country. A book was written about him in 1854.

Then in 1919, Johnson McCulley, a Los Angeles man who made a living writing adventure stories for pulp magazines, took the bio of Murietta, and wrote a story of a rebellious ranchero, borrowing also from The Scarlet Pimpernel.

He named him Don Diego De La Vega, who rode at night as El Zorro, the Fox. This day The Curse of Capistrano, the first story of Zorro appeared in All Story Weekly magazine.

1942- The premiere of Walt Disney’s Bambi.

1944- Antoine Du Saint-Exupery, the author of the Little Prince, died when he crashed his fighter plane. He was not shot down by the Germans, he just wasn’t a very good pilot. The main protagonist of The Little Prince was an aviator who crashed his plane.

1947 -The British government in an attempt to bolster revenue for their shattered postwar economy, announced a 300% import tariff on Hollywood films. The Big Eight-Hollywood studios retaliate by stopping the export of movies to Britain. The British film industry has a heyday and Disney starts producing films locally in Britain like 'Rob Roy Highland Rogue' and such.

1961- Marvel creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby first introduced their superhero team The Fantastic Four comic book. (Its dated today, but may have come out in November)

1963 – Britain’s rock & roll TV show, Ready Steady Go, premieres.

1967- Joe Orton, English actor/playwright (Leaf, Murdered), died at age 34.

1989- The Abyss opened, directed by James Cameron. Ed Harris, Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio, and breakthrough CGI water effect. 

1993- Heidi Fleiss, The Hollywood Madam arraigned for prostitution. The film community shuddered when she threatened to reveal the names of her clients in her “black book”. Most were suppressed except actors Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn who admitted as much early on. Fleiss wrote a memoir called “Pandering” and still thinks prostitution is an honorable profession. “I ran an 85% cash business.”

1995- Rocker Jerry Garcia died, the Grateful Dead broke up.

1995- THE HIGH TECH BUBBLE- Netscape first appeared on the stock market. The 15 month old company started by a Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark and a 22 year old college senior Marc Andreesen immediately shot up to $1.07 billion dollars in value. This IPO signaled the beginning of the gold rush in high tech stocks which five years later came crashing down as violently. Stocks like Lucent Technology, which sold at $84 dollars a share in 1998, dropped to .39 cents a share in 2001.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 8, 2022

Birthdays: Emiliano Zapata. Esther Williams, Gene Deitch, Dino DeLaurentis, Keith Carradine is 72, Rory Calhoun, Mel Tillis, Martin Brest, Peter Weir, Connie Stevens, Patricia Arquette, Dustin Hoffman is 84, Lee Unkrich is 55, Mamoru Oshii is 71

1818- 22 year old English poet John Keats returned from a trip to the Lakes District only to discover the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him.

1876 - Thomas Edison patented the mimeograph, a forerunner of the Xerox photocopier.

1939- On Walt Disney’s soundstage, Leopold Stokowski met with Walt and the story artists and directors of Fantasia to hammer out their approach to Beethoven’s 6th Pastorale. Ham Luske, Webb Smith, Otto Englander, Ben Sharpsteen and Ed Penner. To fit in the movie, Stokowski had to edit the 40 minute symphony down to 20 minutes without any noticeable parts missing.

1944 - Smokey the Bear, named after NYC fireman Smokey Joe Martin born.

1960 – Brian Hyland’s song "Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Yellow Polka-dot Bikini" hits #1.

1963 – The Kingsmen released the song "Louie, Louie".  Many labeled it obscene, although no one is quite sure just what the song lyrics mean. In the 1980s Northwestern University staged Louie-Louie Marathons- 44 straight hours of Louie-Louie, played by punk bands, polka bands, marching bands, folk trios, and singing water glasses.

1964 - Rolling Stones 1st Dutch concert.

1978- The character of Odie the dog first met Garfield in Jim Davis’ comic strip.

.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for Aug 6, 2022

Birthdays: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Daniel O'Connell "the Liberator", Dutch Schultz (real name Arthur Fleigenheimer), Louella Parsons, Lucille Ball, Robert Mitchum, Andy Warhol, Hoot Gibson, William B. Williams, Michelle Yeoh is 60, M. Night Shyamalan, Melissa George, Soliel Moon-Frye 

1934- Charles Addams first New Yorker cartoon featuring the Addams Family.

1959- Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest went into wide release.

1970- THE HIPPIES ATTACK DISNEYLAND- A nationwide call for civil disobedience at the famous American-establishment tourist spot was called for August 6th. Called "Yippie Day" Yippies were considered more radical than Hippies. 750 long haired, denim clad young teens filtered into park. Once in they quickly massed, then invaded the Wilderness Fort in Frontierland. There they raised the Vietcong flag, passed out marijuana to tourists and chanted "Stop the War! Free Charlie Manson!" They were finally expelled with great difficulty by park security and the Anaheim police. 

In the 1980’s Disney was almost invaded by Nazi skinheads, but this time they were ready.

1973- Stevie Wonder was involved in car crash. After being in a coma for 4 days he recovered completely.

1984- Carl Lewis won four gold medals in track & field at the Olympic Games in LA.

1991- Tim Berners Lee of CERN announced the world wide web, aka www. Today the first website of the web went online- http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

1999- I see dead people..” The Sixth Sense premiered.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 5, 2022

Birthdays: Guy de Maupassant, Amboise Thomas, William- first black child born in British America, Neil Armstrong, John Huston, Robert Taylor, Conrad Aiken, Roman Gabriel, Selma Diamond, Patrick Ewing, Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Loni Anderson, John Saxon, Jonathan Silverman is 51

1667- Moliere’s comedy “Tartuffe” first played for the public. The next day the Parliament of Paris ordered the theater closed and its posters ripped down. The Archbishop of Paris threatened excommunication of anyone who saw it or performed it. It seemed the Church didn’t like all the jokes about a con man who steals everything from a family by pretending to be a priest. But King Louis XIV thought it was funny. He overruled the prelates and ordered the play resumed. 

1769- Marching up the California coast, Gaspar de Portola discovered the San Fernando Valley. He came down out of the Sepulveda pass, turned west along a trail that would one day be Ventura Blvd. and went over to the Chumash village by a spring. They called it Encino, Spanish for grove of oaks. The original Indian word for this valley was “Valley of Smoke” because of all the brush fires creating a lingering haze.

1847 -Author Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne. They went for a hike together in the Berkshires.

1921- KDKA Pittsburgh does the 1st radio baseball broadcast Pirates-8, Phillies-0.

1924- Arf, Arf ! the first Little Orphan Annie comic strip drawn by Harold Gray. 

1926- Magician Harry Houdini stays in a coffin under water for one hour.

1927- RCA-Victrola record producer Ralph Peer realized there might be a market for “Hillbilly Music”. So he set up a makeshift recording studio above a furniture store in Bristol Tennessee, and put an ad in the local papers for talent. In one day he recorded stars Jimmy Rogers the Singing Brakeman, The Carter Family, The Tennessee Mountaineers and Ernest “Pop” Stoneman. This session has been called the “Big Bang of Country Music.”

1953- The film “From Here to Eternity” opened, starring Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. But the big story was Frank Sinatra’s Oscar winning performance as Maggio that signaled the turnaround in his slumping career.

1955- The Screen Actor’s Guild strikes Hollywood for television residuals. Their president was Walter Pidgeon who had played Dr. Morbius in Forbidden Planet.

1956- Chuck Jones short Rocket By Baby premiered.  “Mot!”

1957- American Bandstand featuring the eternally teenage Dick Clark debuts on television.

1962- GOODBYE, NORMA JEAN. Marilyn Monroe found nude in bed, dead of barbiturate overdose. She was 36. Whether you think the starlet overdosed by accident, suicide, or was done in by the Mafia, the Kennedys, a Svengali like personal physician, lovesick lesbian physical therapist or space aliens, it is still a mystery. She made a call to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s office in Washington several hours earlier but was rebuffed. Her last call was to her hairdresser Mr. Guilaroff.  She left the bulk of her belongings to her drama teacher Lee Strassberg and her funeral was organized by ex-husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Her Westwood cottage had a tile over the doorway which read :"All my troubles end Here." 

1964 - Actress Anne Bancroft & Comedian Mel Brooks wed.

1966- Caesar’s Palace Hotel & Casino first opened to the public. This was the first of the super-resort casinos, with a total theme park design and three times the space and accommodations of anything yet seen on the Vegas Strip. Its success ushered in an accelerated era of building for Las Vegas casinos.

1966 –It a moment of youthful indiscretion, John Lennon declared his band the Beatles were now more popular than Jesus. This flippant comment provoked a firestorm of nationwide protest among conservative elements in the US.  Beatles albums were publicly burned in the streets. Lennon apologized, then followed up by saying he was being crucified over the comment. Paul McCartney rush up to the mike to insist that wasn't the choice of words they preferred.

1967- Bobby Gentry released “Ode to Billy Jo”.

1980- The Osmond Brothers break up.

1984- Welsh actor Richard Burton died of cerebral hemorrhage at 64. With a tumultuous career and two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, the hard drinking Burton was the most famous English-speaking actor of his day. But unlike Olivier and Gielgud, he was never knighted. The monarchy objected to their portrayal when Burton starred in a TV miniseries on Winston Churchill. Burton was buried with a copy of Dylan Thomas’ poems in his pocket.

1984- Joan Benoit won the first Women’s Olympic Marathon.

1986 - It's revealed painter Andrew Wyeth had secretly created 240 drawings & paintings of his neighbor Helga Testorf, in Chadds Ford, Pa

1995- The infamous SIGGRAPH party at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda.  Titled Nailed: An Evening on the Cultural Frontier. When the very conservative Nixon Library was approached about the party, they heard it was a limited invitation event sponsored by ILM and Silicon Graphics. What could go wrong? What they got was 3,000 drunken, pot smoking hippies and computer nerds.  The grounds were festooned with scantily clad Brazilian Carnival dancers, snake charmers, sword swallowers, Japanese Taiko drummers, and the bands Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone. LSD guru Timothy Leary held a mock exorcism over Nixon’s grave. SIGGRAPH Orlando chapter president said” It was wonderful! I doubt Richard Nixon would have appreciated any of this!”

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 4, 2022

Birthdays: Percy Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen, Nicholas Conte' 1755-inventor of the modern pencil and the conte'-crayon, Louis Armstrong, William Pater, Dr. Alexander Schure, Richard Belzer, Franco Corelli, Elizabeth-England's late Queen Mum, Roger Clemens, runner Mary Decker-Slaney, Billy-Bob Thornton is 68, former President Barack Obama is 61

1782- In Vienna’s St Stephen Cathedral, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart married Constanze Weber, the aunt of composer Karl Maria von Weber. Mozart had first proposed to Constanze's sister, but she chose another. They had several children, but only two survived to adulthood. They both died childless.

1821- 1st edition of Saturday Evening Post -published until 1969.

1855 - John Bartlett publishes his first book of "Familiar Quotations"

1892-" Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks, when he saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one.", etc. In Fall River Mass, Andrew and Abbie Borden were found brutally murdered and their daughter Elisabeth was accused.  Ms. Borden pleaded innocence and cited a long history of abuse from her parents. She was acquitted but the murderer was never found. When Lizzie died peacefully in 1927 she left $30,000 to the ASPCA.

1921 The Motion Picture Fund created.

1942- The Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire-Marjorie Reynolds film the Holiday Inn released. The film featured Irving Berlin hit songs like White Christmas and Easter Parade, but is hardly ever shown anymore because the Lincoln’s Birthday skit featured the cast in embarrassing minstrel blackface, singing “ ‘bout Massa Lincoln”.

1956- Elvis Presley released his version of the Big Mama Mabel Thornton song, "You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog".

1984- Actor Johnny Depp opened his own club on the Sunset Strip called the Viper Room. The original club on that site had once been owned by mobster Bugsy Siegel.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug. 3, 2022

Birthdays: British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Elisha Otis inventor of the elevator, John T. Scopes- the teacher accused in the Monkey Trial, Habib Bourguiba, Ernie Pyle, Gene Kelly, Lenny Bruce, John Landis, Jay North, Dolores Del Rio, Leon Uris, Ann Klein, Martha Stewart, Corey Burton, Martin Sheen is 82, John C. McGinley is 63, Tony Bennett is 96

1769- Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola made the first-ever recorded mention of the La Brea "tar pits" in Los Angeles: "The 3rd, we proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right of it were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote.  We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.”

1933- The first Mickey Mouse watches go on sale. For $2.95 each.

1935- Mickey’s Fire Brigade, directed by Ben Sharpsteen.

1936- Jesse Owen’s won gold in the 100m dash at the Berlin Olympics.

1948- Now that Baseball was finally integrated, Satchel Page, genius of the Negro Leagues, makes his belated Major League debut with the Cleveland Indians. A 45 year old rookie. Page once said:" Don't look back, something may be gaining on you."

1949 -The National Basketball League is founded. 

1963 –Unemployed television producer Alan Sherman released an album of comedy songs at the request of his friends. Called “My Son the Folksinger” it contained the hit “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, Here I am at, Camp Granada” and became an overnight sensation.

1966- While celebrating his 39th birthday, Comedian Lenny Bruce died of a morphine overdose. The groundbreaking comedian who coined the term “T & A” was arrested in 1964 and charged with obscenity for using the "F" word in his act. President Johnson and his opponent Senator Barry Goldwater would swear frequently in private, but comedians were only supposed to make mother-in-law jokes.  

.Lenny Bruce did six months in jail, and left broken physically and financially. No club would dare hire him. Phil Spector said: “ Lenny died of an overdose of cops” Yet he is the model for all modern stand-up comedy. 

1996- The Macarena, by Los Del Rio, becomes the #1 hit worldwide dance craze.

2012- At the London Olympics, swimmer Michael Phelps won his final race. That made his total earning 22 Olympic medals, 17 of them gold.