Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 31, 2023

Birthdays: King Manuel I of Portugal 1495, Walt Whitman, Fred Allen, Don Ameche, Prince Ranier, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Ranier Fassbinder, Brooke Shields, Joe Namath, Richie Valens, John Kemeny-the co-creator of the computer language BASIC, Tom Berenger, Denholm Elliot, Peter Yarrow, Lea Thompson, John Bonzo Bonham of Led Zepplin, Colin Ferrell is 47, Clint Eastwood is 93

1894- Happy Birthday Kellogg’s Corn Flakes! Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek Michigan patents "flaked cereal and the process for making same." He felt whole foods like Corn Flakes could help Victorian people curb their sexual u

1911- RMS Titanic launched from the Belfast shipyards. In a strange premonition of her eventual fate, she was never christened at launch time.

1928- The song “Old Man River “sung by Pail Robeson came out as a single.

1929- Steamboat Willie was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, but Mickey didn’t speak much. He just whistled, yelped and laughed. In the cartoon released this day “the Carnival Kid” Mickey spoke his first words “Hot Dogs!” The voice was musician Carl Stalling. Later Walt Disney decided to voice the mouse himself.

1935- Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Pictures merged to become Twentieth Century Fox. In 2017 Walt Disney Company purchased 20th Cent Fox and in the Summer of 2020 phased out the brand.

1958 - Dick Dale invents "surf music" with "Let's Go Trippin".

1969- John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance." at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in downtown Montreal. It became the theme song of the Anti-Vietnam War movement. Because of this song and Lennon’s support of the Hippie protesters the Nixon White House kept a file on him. Lennon spent most of 1972-73 under a constant threat of 60-day deportation from the US. 

1984- Martial arts movie star Steven Segal married soap opera star Adrienne LaRussa. But what Adrienne didn’t know was he already had a wife named Miyako Fujetani and two kids waiting for him in Japan. A few months after this he fell for another actress named Kelly LeBrock.

1985- John Sculley was a former exec from Pepsi brought in by Apple Computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to help run the company. This day his solution to help the company run better was to fire Steve Jobs. Wozniak retired and Sculley eventually moved on. Before his death, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and make it the worlds most profitable company, as well as run Pixar, and be on the board of the Walt Disney Company.

1989- "Skinhead Day at the Magic Kingdom" Disneyland refused to admit a rally of skinheads, Nazis and Klansmen. 

1990- Television sitcom Seinfeld premiered based on a TV special about the standup comedian called the Seinfeld Chronicles. No Soup for You!

1995- A young Mexican-American Tejana singer named Selena was gaining a growing crossover appeal in pop music and there seemed no limit. This day her career was cut short when she was shot and killed by the Yolanda Saldivia, the president of the Selena Fan club.

2000- The first Survivor show premiered, shepherding in the era in America of TV Reality shows.

2004- Peppa Pig created by Astley Baker-Davies debuted on British TV.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for May 30, 2023

Birthdays: Czar Peter the Great, Benny Goodman, Mel Blanc, Stepin Fetchit, Boris Pasternak, Irving Thalberg, Milt Neil, Howard Hawks, Gale Sayers, Agnes Varda, Michael J. Pollard, Wynonna, Keir Dullea is 86, Ceelo Green is 47, Idina Menzel is 51

1919- Hollywood entrepreneur Charles Tolman bought a natural declivity north of Hollywood Blvd called Daisy Dell. People had been picnicking in the grass there for years. Now Tolman wanted to build a concert amphitheater. Conductor Hugo Kirchhofer remarked “ It looks like a big bowl!” So it became the Hollywood Bowl thereafter. 

1930- The Lockheed Terminal was rededicated as Burbank Airport.

1935 - Babe Ruth's last game. He went hitless for the Boston Braves against Phillies.

1955- The New York chapter of the Catholic League of Decency pressured Loews Theater on Broadway to take down a giant 30-foot billboard of Marilyn Monroe trying to push her skirt down.

1962- Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem had its first performance.

1972- Director choreographer Bob Fosse filmed a live performance of Liza Minelli’s one-woman show Liza with a Z. It was telecast in Sept. and became a sensation.

1994 - Death of Baron Marcel Bich, Italian-born French engineer and industrialist who created an empire of disposable BIC pens, lighters and razors.

2003- Pixar’s Finding Nemo opened in general release. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 29, 2023

Birthdays: John F. Kennedy, King Charles II (the "Merry Monarch"), Bob Hope, G. K. Chesterton, Patrick Henry, Oswald Spengler, T.H. White, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Josef Von Sternberg, LaToya Jackson, John Hinckley Jr., Al Unser Jr., Beatrice Lilly, Danny Elfman, Annette Benning is 65, Melissa Etheridge is 62, Rupert Everett is 65

Happy Memorial Day (USA)

1859 –Illinois Congressman Abe Lincoln says in a better documented occasion "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of time, but you can't fool all of the people all of time"

1941-THE GREAT WALT DISNEY CARTOONISTS STRIKE.. The picket line and campsite went up across the street where St. Joseph's Hospital is today. Chef's from nearby Toluca Lake restaurants would cook for the strikers on their off time and the aircraft mechanics of Lockheed promised muscle if any ruff stuff was threatened.   

Picketers included Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), Walt Kelly and Margaret Selby (later Kelly) (Pogo), Bill Melendez (A Charlie Brown Christmas), Steve Bosustow and John Hubley (Mr. Magoo), Maurice Noble and Chuck Jones (What's Opera Doc?), George Baker (Sad Sack), Dick Swift ("the Parent Trap") Frank Tashlin (Cinderfella) Ade Woolery (Playhouse), and four hundred others. Animators from Warner Bros. MGM and Walter Lantz marched with their Disney brothers and sisters, because they knew this was where the fate of their entire industry would be settled. Celebrities like Dorothy Parker, Frank Morgan, and John Garfield gave speeches. The studio claimed no one of importance was on strike. 

The strike was eventually settled by Federal arbitration and a little arm twisting by the Bank of America. Many of the artists who left the studio afterwards set up U.P.A. and pioneered the modern 1950's style.

1942- JOHN BARRYMORE- The great dramatic actor, the first American to dare to play Hamlet in England, died of cirrhosis and kidney failure at age 60. Whether the infamous prank actually happened where Raoul Walsh, Bertholdt Brecht, Peter Lorre, W.C. Fields and some others (the "Bundy Drive Boys") kidnapped Barrymore's body from Pierce Brothers Funeral Home and propped it up at the poker table to scare the willys out of Errol Flynn is a matter of debate. Flynn and Paul Heinried said it was true, writer Gene Fowler said it was false.  John Barrymore's last words were to screenwriter Gene Fowler:   "Say Gene, isn't it true you are an illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?"

1942- Bing Crosby recorded "White Christmas," debatably the greatest selling record of all time.

1952- Edmund Hillary and Sherpa guide Tenzing Norga became first men to reach the top of Mt. Everest. The tallest mountain on the Earth.

1956- Hollywood director James Whale (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) drowned himself in his pool. His career was over and his health was deteriorating from a series of strokes. Bruises were found on his head and at first the police suspected foul play. It wasn’t until 1989 his partner made his suicide note public. His head had struck the pool’s bottom as he jumped in causing the bruise.

1973 - Columbia Records fired president Clive Davis for misappropriating $100, 000 in funds, So Davis went on and founded Arista records.

1978 - Bob Crane, (Hogan-Hogan's Heroes), died at 49 under mysterious circumstances. He was found in a Tucson hotel room surrounded by pornography, bludgeoned to death by a camera tripod.  The murder was never solved.

1987 –pop singer Michael Jackson attempted to buy the XIX century remains of Joseph Meredith a.k.a. the Elephant Man.

1999- Hikers in a Malibu ravine discovered the remains of Phillip Taylor Kramer, the bass guitar player of the 1960’s band Iron Butterfly. The musician had disappeared four years before. Now his skeleton was found sitting in his Ford Aerostar at the bottom of a steep ravine.

2007- Apple sold it’s first iPhone.

TOM SITO'S ANIMATION ALMANAC FOR MAY 28, 2023

Birthdays: Solomon 970 BC, Noah Webster, Dr. Joseph Guillotine, William Pitt the Younger, General Pierre Beauregard, Ian Fleming, Jim Thorpe, The Dion Identical Quintuplets 1930, Gladys Knight, Jerry West, Dietrich Fisher-Deiskau, Sandra Locke, T-Bone Walker, Taffy Abel (one of the first professional hockey stars), John Fogarty is 78, Carey Mulligan is 38, Carol Baker.

1892- The Sierra Club formed.

1929 - 1st all color talking picture, "On With the Show" exhibited (NYC).

1935- Tortilla Flat published. The first novel by John Steinbeck.

1941- THE WALT DISNEY STRIKE- Labor pressures had been building in the Magic Kingdom since promises made to artists over the success of Snow White were reneged on, and Walt Disney’s lawyer Gunther Lessing encouraged a hard line with his employees. The union claimed they had a majority of employee rep-cards signed, which Walt Refused to acknowledge. On this day, in defiance of the federal Wagner Act, Walt Disney fired animator Art Babbitt, the creator of Goofy, and thirteen other cartoonists for demanding a union. Babbitt had emerged as the union movements’ leader.  Studio security officers escorted him off the lot. “Would you mind if I collect my pencils?” 

That night in an emergency meeting of the Cartoonists Guild at Hollywood Legion Hall, Art’s assistant Bill Hurtz, made a motion to strike, and it was unanimously accepted. Bill Hurtz will later go on to direct award-winning cartoons like UPA’s "Unicorn in the Garden". Picket lines go up next day in Hollywood animation’s own version of the Civil War.

1954- Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in 3D premiered.

1957- The National League Baseball owners voted to allow the Brooklyn Dodgers and NY Giants to move west to California. 

1960- George Zucco 74, a character actor who specialized in horror movies like Blood from the Mummies Hand, died. One version says he died of fright in a mental hospital in San Gabriel California. He was convinced that H.P. Lovecraft's Great God Cthulu was after him. He actually died of natural causes in a nursing home.

1966- the It’s a Small World exhibit, which had been created for the 1964 NY Worlds Fair, reopened at Disneyland, California. 

1977- George Lucas film Star Wars opened in wide release across the country.

1983- “What a Feeling” the theme from the film Flashdance by Irene Cara and Giorgio Moroder reached the top of the pop charts. Everyone began dancing with leg warmers and baggy sweaters torn at the neck.

1998- After a dinner at Buca di Beppo in Encino, Saturday Night Live comedian Phil Hartman was shot to death by his wife Brynne as he slept. She was a heavy drinker and pill user. At 6:00am as the LAPD were knocking Brynne turned the gun on herself. Hartman’s last role was doing the English dub of Gigi the cat in Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service.

2004- Lorenzo, animated short came out with the Disney film Raising Helen. Directed by Mike Gabriel, from an idea created decades ago by 95 year old storyman Joe Grant.

2005- The great London clock Big Ben mysteriously stopped for 45 minutes. 

2005- Actress Lindsay Lohan was photographed passed out drunk in her car shortly after a court hearing for a DUI.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 27, 2023

Birthdays: James 'Wild Bill' Hickock, Julia Ward Howe, Aemelia Jenks-Bloomer, Dashell Hammett, Leopold Goldowsky (the inventor of Kodachrome film), Hubert H. Humphrey, Herman Wouk, Harlan Ellison, Joseph Feines, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Richard Schiff is 68, Peri Gilpin, Paul Bettany is 52, Dr. Henry Kissinger is 100

1874- Prostitution was outlawed in Los Angeles central business district.

1895 - British inventor Burt Acres patented a film camera/projector

1930- HAPPY BIRTHDAY SCOTCH TAPE -Chemist Richard Drew of Saint Paul Minnesota invented cellophane tape, marketed by the 3M Company under the brand Scotch. It was called Scotch after the stereotype perception that Scots people are frugal with money, so it’s a good value. Three years later Drew invented Masking Tape as a way for car manufacturers to paint cars two tone.

1933- Disney’s cartoon “The Three Little Pigs” premiered, whose song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” became a national anthem of recovery from the Great Depression. 

Director of the short Burt Gillette left Disney afterwards to run the Van Beuren Studio in New York. 

1935- The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act (The NRA) program. Roosevelt responds by unsuccessfully trying to stack the court with judges more to his liking. He referred to them as 'The Nine Old Men', a sobriquet Walt Disney would borrow in 1949 for his top animators.

1937- San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened.

1948- Walt Disney feature Melody Time released, featuring Pecos Bill. 

1949- Actress Rita Hayworth married playboy Prince Aly Khan. Prince Aly Khan, 1911-1960, was born in Italy a son of dispossessed Pakistani royalty to the Aga Khan II. He lived his life as an international playboy, socialite and sportsman, making love to women from actress Rita Hayworth to Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law Pamela Churchill-Harriman. Cole Porter wrote him into a song. He died when he crashed his sportscar in France.

1961 – The first black light is sold.

1969 – Construction on Walt Disney World Florida began..

1977- Punk band The Sex Pistols release their hit God Save the Queen, the Fascist Regime, in time for the Queen’s Jubilee year. Her Majesty preferred the Beatles’ All You Need is Love.

1995- Actor Christopher Reeve was left paralyzed from the neck down after falling from his horse in an equestrian event in Charlottesville,Va.  He became a spokesman for stem-cel spinal chord research, but his efforts in the US were frustrated by powerful religious-right lobbyists. Christopher Reeves died in 2004.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 25, 2023

History for 5/25/2023
Birthdays: Miles Davis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josef Broz Tito, Igor Sikorsky, Pontormo, Bennett Cerf, Claude Akins, Leslie Uggams, Bill Bojangles Robinson, Frank Oz (Richard Frank Oznowicz), Beverly Sills, Robert Ludlum, Anne Heche, Irwin Winkler, Mike Myers is 60, Ray Stevenson, Ian McKellen is 84

 

1911- Thomas Mann visited Venice Italy. On the Lido Beach he was inspired to write A Death in Venice.

1927- Ford had put America on wheels with the Model T, the most successful car in history. Today they stopped making the Model T after 15 million cars, costing on average $300 each, $26 dollars down with monthly payments.

1932- Flamboyant New York Mayor Jimmy Walker testified before the Seabury Commission. The corruption scandals of his administration will force him to resign. 

1932- Mickey’s Revue, the first Disney cartoon that featured the character that would eventually be called Goofy.

1935- Babe Ruth hit his final home runs. The Bambino was in his last year, working out his contract with the Boston Braves. This day in Pittsburgh, the Babe showed his old form when he hit three home runs and a single. His record of 714 home runs held for over sixty years.

1942- First day shooting on the film “Casablanca”.

1946- Chuck Jones cartoon Hare Raising Hare, where Bugs meets a large shaggy monster originally named Rudolf, later Gossamer, “Monsters are such interesting people…”

1950- Brooklyn Battery Tunnel opened in NYC.

1957- Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows ended after nearly a decade. The show built a legendary writers room, employing future star writers like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen and Neil Simon.  The show also pioneered the executive strategy of producer Sylvester “Pat” Weaver to not let the show be owned by an entire sponsor, but the network would produce the show and would sell the sponsor commercial time in 30 second chunks. Pat Weaver’s daughter is Sigourney Weaver. Your Show of Shows was finally bested in the ratings by The Lawrence Welk Show.

1961- THE SPACE RACE- The United States had been chafing about how far ahead the Soviet Union was in the exploration of space. In an address to Congress this day President John F. Kennedy pledged the wealth and resources of the U.S. to beating the Soviets to the Moon. "Our pledge is within the next ten years to send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth… We choose to go to the Moon not because it will be easy but because it is hard!" The Moon landing was achieved in 1969. Today it is acknowledged that without the motivation of the Cold War the conquest of the Moon would have happened much more slowly. 

1968- The Rolling Stones released the song Jumping Jack Flash. 

1969- John Schlesinger’s film Midnight Cowboy premiered. The first X-rated film to ever win the Oscar for Best Film. This is the film where Dustin Hoffman yells “Hey! I’m walking here!”

1977- The premiere of George Lucas’ movie Star Wars. The movie opened on the 28th.  After Universal passed, Twentieth Century Fox picked up the distribution but let the backend profits go to Lucas. First because they had taken a loss with the failure of Dr. Doolittle, and second because they didn't think the film would do any serious business. Even George Lucas didn’t expect the film to break even. Fox's market research department told studio head Alan Ladd Jr:  1). don't make this movie; no one will go see a science fiction movie; and 2). change the title; no one will go see a movie with "War" in the title.  Fox executives had predicted the studios hit for that summer would be "Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry" with Peter Fonda and Susan George. 

Star Wars was a monster hit. It was like there were no other movies playing that summer. It sold out Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood 50 weeks in a row. George Lucas became a seriously rich man and developed THX sound, digital animation and Industrial Light and Magic special effects. The film’s popularity ran so ahead of expectations, that at Christmas when you purchased a Star Wars game you got an empty box with a pink IOU note in it pledging to get you the game when they printed more. 

1979- Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic Alien opened. It featured the exotic designs of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and John Hurt with a classic case of chest pains!

1983- Return of the Jedi opened. It was originally Revenge of the Jedi, but George Lucas changed the name just a month before.

1986- Hands Across America stunt to help hunger has 7 million people at one time holding hands at noon.

1994- First International Conference on the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee and CERN talked on how to unify existing internet systems into the new World Wide Web.

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 23, 2023

Birthdays: Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Scatman Crothers, Rosemary Clooney, Artie Shaw, Alicia de Larrocha, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Melissa McBride, Frank McHugh, Drew Carey is 65, Joan Collins is 90

1911- President Taft dedicated the central branch of the New York Public Library.

1931- In Max Fleischer's Silly Scandals, the girl character first seen in Dizzy Dishes is first called by name Betty Boop.

1941-Hollywood union boss George Brown and assistant Willard Bioff (also a Frank Nitti bagman) were indicted on federal racketeering charges. Brown had been a Chicago operative and it was said 'he could drink 100 bottles of beer in one day". Their main contact among the Hollywood studio heads was Nicholas Schenck, the chairman of Loews Theaters and on the board of MGM. Willie Bioff had tried to help Louis B. Mayer defeat the screen actors guild and hijack the Disney animator's union. After their jail time Bioff blew up in his car after turning government witness, and Brown 'disappeared...' Nicholas Schenck meanwhile was pardoned by President Truman himself.

1969- The Who released their rock opera Tommy. 

1980- Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, opened. Here’s Johnny!

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 22, 2023

Birthdays: Sir Lawrence Olivier, Mary Cassatt, Richard Wagner, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, T. Bone Pickens, Herge’ (Tintin), Irene Pappas, Paul Winfield, Richard Benjamin, Susan Strassberg, George Baker (Sad Sack), Paul Winchell, Tommy John, Naomi Cambell, Dr. Robert Moog –inventor of the music synthesizer, Ginnifer Goodwin is 45

1915- The San Fernando Valley voted to become part of Los Angeles. 

1922-The U.S. Supreme Court rules Baseball is not a monopoly but a sport. This is the Achilles heel issue everyone jumps on when arguments about baseball owners use of salary fixes and other group actions reach crescendo.

1925- First day of shooting on Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis.

1954- Chuck Jones “Claws for Alarm” with Porky and Sylvester.

1955-The Golden Age of Radio ended when after 22 years the Jack Benny show was canceled. Once the top broadcast show in the nation, Benny went into television.

1966- Bill Cosby became the first African-American to win an Emmy Award for starring in a television series- I-Spy.

1967- T.V. children's show Mr. Roger's Neighborhood debuted.

1973- Scientist Bob Metcalfe of Xerox PARC patented the Ethernet.

1985- Top Disney animation director Wolfgang "Woolie" Reitherman, who directed the Jungle Book among other films, died in a car crash following lunch at the Smoke House in Burbank. He was 75. 

1992- The film Encino Man premiered, with Brendan Frazier and Pauly Shore. Aaoooh!

2001- Ted Turner and Jane Fonda divorced. 

2002- The Ayatollahs of Iran outlaw Barbie dolls. They denounced Barbie as "agents of subversive Zionist Western propaganda."

2012- SpaceX, the world’s first privately owned spacecraft, blasted off to bring supplies to the International Space Station.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 21, 2023

Birthdays: Plato, Fats Waller, Albrecht Durer, Andre Sakharov, Armand Hammer, Raymond Burr, John Hubley, Dennis Day, Al Franken, Harold Robbins, Judge Reinhold, Larry Terro called Mr. T. is 73

1892- Leoncavallo's opera "I Pagliacci" debuted at La Scala in Milan.

1906 - Louis H Perlman patented a de-mountable tire-carrying rim for cars.

1908 - 1st horror movie “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde” premiered in Chicago.

1922- On the Road to Moscow, the first political cartoon to win a Pulitzer prize. The cartoonist Rollin Kirby, was passionate about Prohibition. He had a regular character to extol temperance named Mr. Dry. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933 Kirby killed off Mr. Dry in print.

1933- 23 year old Woolie Reitherman’s first day at Walt Disney Studio.

1945- BOGEY LOVES BABY-Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall on a friend’s farm in Ohio. He was 48 and she was 21. Her real name was Betty Persky, but she passed for wasp. So when the publicity photographers came, they were under strict instructions from Jack Warner to frame out Bacall’s more Jewish-looking relatives. His nickname for her was “Slim”, and she called him “Steve”, after their characters in the film “To Have and to Have Not.”

1952- Actor John Garfield died. Some say he died in the midst of wild fornications; in truth he died in his sleep of heart failure aggravated by stress and alcoholism. He was 39. The matinee idol of “The Postman Rings Twice” and “Kid Galahad” was too politically left for the conservative postwar age. When a young stage actor he had run guns to the IRA, later he supported progressive union movements, anti-fascism and desegregation. His outspoken politics got him blacklisted in Hollywood, his friends deserted him, and he was ruined. The photo is of him at the Disney Animators Strike of 1941 

1954- The Disney short Pigs is Pigs, directed by Jack Kinney, released.

1971- Marvin Gaye’s song “ What’s Going On?” Released.

1972- A lunatic shouting I am Jesus Christ, attacked Michelangelo’s statue La Pieta with a hammer. He is the reason why today we can only enjoy this beautiful sculpture from behind 3 inch thick bulletproof glass.

1979 - Elton John becomes the first western rocker to perform live in USSR.

1980 – Star Wars “The Empire Strikes Back" premiered.

1983 - David Bowie's "Let's Dance," single goes #1. The tracks featured a then little-known guitarist named Stevie-Ray Vaughn.

1992- Tonight Show host Johnny Carson did his last show “I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight.” Johnny spent his remaining years in privacy, even refusing an invitation to appear at the NBC 75th anniversary special.

2017- In Nassau County NY was the final performance of Ringling Bros, Barnum & Bailey Circus. The Greatest Show on Earth had been a tradition for 146 years. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 20, 2023

Birthdays: Honore Balzac, Jimmy Stewart, Leon Schlesinger, William Fargo of Wells Fargo, Moshe Dayan, Henri Rousseau, Dave Thomas, Ted Bessell (Donald to Marlo Thomas’ “That Girl”), Japanese baseball great Sadaharu Oh, Antony Zerbe, Bronson Pichot, Joe Cocker, Cher is 77, Busta Rhymes

1891- Thomas Edison demonstrated an early prototype of kinetoscope- a motion picture machine- to his wife's friends at a party. The footage was of engineer W.K.L. Dickson and his associates dancing. That night Edison wrote a letter about his movie machine to photographer Eadweard Muybridge: " I doubt it will ever have any commercial value...”

1916- Artist Norman Rockwell sold his first painting for a Saturday Evening Post cover.

1926 - Thomas Edison says Americans prefer silent movies over talking pictures. He also thought the flat record disc could never replace the cylinder.

1937-The Cinema Editor's Guild started.

1937- Bob Clampett promoted to director at Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes Studio. Clampett’s mother hand sewed the first Mickey Mouse dolls for Walt Disney.

1975- In a small warehouse in Sherman Oaks California, George Lucas assembled an effects crew to create the film Star Wars. It is the birth of Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM. 

1979- The last Saturday Night Live show done by the original cast. Many of them had their 5 year contracts up and they wanted to do something else. Plus, producer Lorne Michaels was feuding with NBC chairman Fred Silverman and wanted to leave. So goodbye Lorne Michaels, Gilda Radner, Lorraine Newman, Garret Morris, Bill Murray and Al Franken. Hello Jean Doumainian and Joe Piscopo! Lorne Michaels came back to the show a few years later and has produced it ever since.

1984- Hanna Barbera’s “The Smurfic Games”.

1988- George Lucas film Willow premiered.

1993 - Max Klein, the inventor of Paint by Numbers sets, died at 77. President Eisenhower once passed out paint-by-numbers sets to his senior cabinet so their paintings could adorn the West Wing offices. Imagine seeing on your wall an original artwork by Richard Nixon or Curtis LeMay! 

1994- Walt Disney released Aladdin II, the Return of Jaffar. Done overseas at ¼ the budget of the original, it nevertheless success spawned the industry of Disney direct-to-video sequels.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 19, 2023

Birthdays: Malcolm X- born Malcolm Little, Ho Chi Minh- born Ngyun Tat Tanth- Ho Chi Minh means the Enlightener, Giovanni Della Robbia, John Hopkins, Lord Waldorf Astor, Dame Nelly Melba, Frank Capra, Wilson Mizner, Elena Poniatowska, Jim Lehrer, Nora Ephron, Grace Jones, Peter Mahew, Nancy Kwan, Pete Townshend, Joey Ramone, Andre the Giant, Polly Walker, James Baxter, Tom Sito, aka me, your author.

1898 - Post Office authorizes the use of postcards.

1934- Mickey Mouse short cartoon Gulliver Mickey.

1956- Cecil B. de Milles film " The Ten Commandments" premiered. Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter and Edward G, Robinson.

1956- The Disney film Pollyana debuted, making a star of Haley Mills.

1958- The film,” The Attack of the 50 Ft Woman” premiered. A drive-in favorite.

1960 - DJ Alan Freed is accused of bribery in the radio payola scandal, the first scandal to hit the new world of Rock & Roll.

1962- Giant birthday party and rally held for President John F. Kennedy in New York's Madison Square Garden (his birthday was actually the following week). What made it memorable was Marilyn Monroe in a dress so tight she had to be sewn into it, singing her sexy version of the Happy Birthday song.  'Happy (exhale) Burth- Day, Mister - Prezz- a -dent (sigh), Happy, etc. "

1991- Willy T. Ribbs became the first African American racecar driver to qualify for the Indianapolis 500.

1992- The completion bond company seized Richard Williams unfinished masterpiece Cobbler and the Thief. They had the film’s remaining sequences completed by another studio (Fred Calvert, and one sequence subcontracted to Don Bluth) and released as Arabian Nights. 

1997- Matthew Broderick married Sarah Jessica Parker. 

1999- George Lucas’ much anticipated film Star Wars Episode One the Phantom Menace premiered, the first Star Wars sequel in over a decade. It was the first major film premiere to be projected digitally. Only two theaters in New York and two in Hollywood could do digital projection then. It featured Jarr Jarr Binks, a character so annoying, that web sites like www. I Want Jarr-Jarr to Die-Die.com soon racked up tens of thousands of hits.

2000- Walt Disney film Dinosaur opened.

2005- Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith premiered.

2006- Dreamwork’s animated film ‘Over the Hedge’ premiered.

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Yesterday’s question: The Battle of Blenheim was one of the great British victories, like Waterloo. Where exactly is Blenheim?

Answer: In Bavaria in Germany.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 18, 2023

Birthdays: Pope St. John Paul II, Grover Cleveland, Ezio Pinza, Czar Nicholas II, Omar Khayam, Walter Gropius, Reggie Jackson, Margot Fonteyn, Robert Morse, Perry Como, Dwayne Hickman aka Dobie Gillis, Big Joe Turner, Richard Brooks, Mad artist Don Martin, Miriam Margolyes, Chow Yung Fat is 68, Tina Fey is 53

1911- Composer Gustav Mahler died of heart disease shortly before his 51st birthday. He had completed his Ninth Symphony with dread, because he knew Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner had never lived beyond their ninth symphony.  On his table were preliminary sketches for his tenth.

1926- L.A. evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was the Billy Graham of her time. This day she shocked the nation when she mysteriously disappeared on a beach near Venice Cal. After an exhaustive search involving ships and planes, she turned up a month later with a lame story of being kidnapped. Truth, was she ran off with her boyfriend Kenneth Ormiston for a romantic week in Monterrey. Hallelujah!

1927- Sid Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood opened. The first show was the premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings. Ushers and doormen were dressed in imported Mandarin robes, and wall hangings were painted by young artist/actor Key Luke. Sid Grauman was the showman who also invented the Hollywood premiere with spotlights and limo's pulling up to red carpets, etc.

1940- John Halas & Joy Batchelor founded Halas & Batchelor, for many years the preeminent animation studio in England.

1976- The filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was disrupted when the Philippines was hit by a major typhoon. Francis rode out the storm cooking pasta, smoking pot and listening to recordings of La Boheme.

1995- Elizabeth Montgomery, the star of Bewitched, died of colon cancer at age 62.

2001- Dreamworks animated SHREK opened gnerally. The voice of Shrek was originally planned to be Chris Farley but the big comedian died of a drug overdose and was replaced by Mike Myers. I’m serving Waffles!

2003 Pixar’s Finding Nemo opened. Directed by Andrew Stanton.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 17, 2023

Birthdays: Sandro Botticelli, Eric Satie, Ayatollah Khomeni, Edmond Jenner, Archibald Cox, Sugar Ray Leonard, Maureen O'Sullivan, Howard Ashman, Craig Ferguson, Bill Paxton, Ralph Wright- the original voice of Eeyore, Alan Kay-inventor of the laptop computer, Dennis Hopper, Enya is 61- born Eithne Patricia Ni’ Bhraonain

1890 - Comic Cuts, 1st weekly comic newspaper, published in London.

1924- Marcus Loew of the Loew's theater chain bought Metro Pictures and combined them with Sam Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer’s studios to form Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Two years ago Amazon bought MGM for $8 billion.

1931- Broadway dancer James Cagney became a tough guy movie star when the Howard Hawk’s film The Public Enemy opened in general release. “There you go with that wishing stuff! I wish you wuz a wishing well… so I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya!”

1938 - Radio quiz show "Information Please!" debuts on NBC Blue Network.

1941- The Looney Toon Lockout. Producer Leon Schlesinger tried to forestall the unionization of his Bugs Bunny cartoonists by locking them out. After a week he relented and signed a contract with the cartoonist guild. Chuck Jones called it “our own little six-day war.”

1965- At a hotel in lower Manhattan, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke shook hands and agreed to write a sci-fi movie, with an accompanying novel. 

First called How the Solar System was Won, because How the West Was Won was a popular film then. Then Journey Beyond the Stars, the title finally became- 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1967 – Bob Dylan's 1965 UK Tour is released as film "Don't Look Back"

1971 - Stephen Schwartz' musical Godspell premiered off-Broadway.

1973 - Stevie Wonder released "You are the Sunshine of my Love"

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 15, 2023

Birthdays: Lyman Frank Baum, Claudio Monteverdi, Richard Avedon, James Mason, Joseph Cotten, George Brett, Jasper Johns, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Jean Renoir, Richard Daley Sr., Trini Lopez, Charles Lamont, director of Abbott & Costello Go to Mars, country singer Eddy Arnold, Chaz Palmintieri is 70, Lainie Kazan, animator Joe Grant

1703- Charles Perrault died. Perrault 1628-1703 was a retired minister to French King Louis XIV, who wrote stories for children under the pseudonym Mother Goose. He created Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Puss in Boots. 

1863- Edouard Manet first displayed his Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)  at the Salon des Refuses in Paris. It was his modern interpretation of The Judgement of Paris by Renaissance master Marcantonio Raimondi. 

1905- From a public auction of railroad land, the town of Las Vegas Nevada founded. 

1927- The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel opened for business. Named in honor of Teddy Roosevelt.

1928- Walt Disney held a private sneak preview screening of his completed cartoon Plane Crazy, featuring his new star Mickey Mouse, imitating hero Charles Lindbergh. But it was a silent cartoon, and Walt had recently been impressed by the new Talking Pictures. So, he decided to hold back the release of this cartoon and push ahead with his first sound cartoon Steamboat Willie. After the wild success of Steamboat Willie, Plane Crazy was refitted with a soundtrack and released as the 4th Mickey Mouse cartoon in 1929.

1940- The first Nylon stockings go on sale in the US.

1941- Yankee centerfielder Joe DiMaggio had been in a dry spell hitting lately. This day he got a safe hit and began a hitting streak that ran for 56 straight games, an unparalleled feat. He became America’s most famous baseball player since Babe Ruth. He was variously nicknamed Joltin’Joe, the Yankee Clipper but his teammates called him affectionately the Big Dago.

1942- The U.S. initiated a program of wartime gas rationing. Slogans like “Is this Trip Really Necessary?” and a system of ratings vehicles with A, B & C cards pop up in a lot of gas stations for the duration. C meant a war-essential worker and you went to the head of the line to get gas. A cards was the lowest status. 

1946- The first Tommy’s Burger stand opened in Los Angeles.

1953- Rocky Marciano defeated Jersey Joe Walcott for the Heavyweight Championship.

1963 - Peter, Paul & Mary won their first Grammy for, “If I Had a Hammer”.

1967- Paul McCartney first met his first wife Linda Eastman.

1968 - Paul McCartney & John Lennon appear on the Johnny Carson Show to promote

Apple records, Joe Garagiola is substitute host. 

1970 – A month after their breakup, The Beatles' last album, "Let It Be," is released in US.

Tom Sito's ANimation Almanac for May 14, 2023

Birthdays: Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Wedgewood, Francesca Annis, David Byrne, Jack Bruce, Bobby Darin, Mark Zuckerberg is 39, Tim Roth is 62, Robert Zemeckis is 72, Kate Blanchett is 54, George Lucas is 79

Happy Mothers Day (US) 1908. The holiday was inspiration of a West Virginia social activist named Anna Jarvis. She had 13 children herself, 4 of whom died of childhood diseases, and 5 died in the Civil War. Mrs Jarvis had spent her life mobilizing mothers to care for their children and she wanted mothers' work to be recognized. "I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mothers' day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life." She began organizing Mother’s Day Clubs as early as 1858. After her death her daughter Anna Maria Jarvis took up the cause. She celebrated The First Mother's Day on the anniversary of her mothers passing in 1908; it became a national holiday in 1914. Mrs, Jarvis insisted the holiday idea not be commercially exploited. She hated the commercialization of Mothers Day so much that in 1943 she circulated a petition trying to get the holiday rescinded.  In 1948 Anna Maria Jarvis died broke and surrounded by store-made Mother’s Day cards sent from well-wishers. 

1842 - 1st edition of London Illustrated News.

1935- Griffith Park Observatory above Hollywood first opened to the public. It is featured in the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause.

1942- Walt Disney composer Frank Churchill, who wrote "Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf", Whistle While you Work”, shot himself at his piano at home. He was 40. He left a suicide note that said, “Dear Caroline: My nerves have completely left me. Please forgive this awful act. It seems the only way I can cure myself. Frank.”

1944- In the comic strip Dick Tracy, the longtime nemesis Flattop Jones was killed.

1951 - Ernie Kovacs Show, debuted on NBC TV. Kovacs was a great pioneer in the video medium who created uniquely surreal images and pantomime blackout skits.

1976- Keith Relf of the rock group the Yardbirds, was electrocuted while playing his guitar in his bathtub.

1968 - Beatles announce formation of Apple Records.

1992 - Carlos “ Danny” Herrera, bartender inventor of the Margarita, died at age 90- The Margarita was supposedly invented in 1938 for Hollywood actress Margaret Sullivan who wanted to drink tequila with the guys, but couldn’t tolerate the strong taste. Herrera mixed the tequila and lime juice into an iced cocktail and put the salt along the rim. He mixed a batch whenever he heard the actress was in Tijuana, writing on the bottle- For Margaret- Por Margarita.

1998 - Last episode of sitcom Seinfeld on NBC. Elderly singer Frank Sinatra died shortly after watching it.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for May 13, 2023

History for 5/13/2023 Birthdays: St. Sergius of Radonez 1314, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Cyrus McCormick, Stevie Wonder, George Braque, Daphne DuMaurier, Joe Louis, Richie Valens, Gil Evans, Beatrice Arthur, Harvey Keitel is 82, Dennis Rodman, Clive Barnes, animator Burnett “Burny” Mattinson, Steven Colbert is 58

1950 - Diner's Club issued its first credit cards.

1956- Actor Montgomery Clift was disfigured in a car crash. He had to have his jaw wired until it could heal.

1963- The English adventure comic Modesty Blaise, by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway debuted.

1963- Marvel published the first The X-Men comic book.

1965 - Rolling Stones recorded "Satisfaction".

1965- In a DC nightclub, the Ramsey Lewis Trio recorded live “The In Crowd”, one of the last jazz singles to crossover and become a hit pop song. 

1966 - Rolling Stones released "Paint it Black"

1971 - Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane seriously injured in a car accident

1988- Legendary jazz trumpeter Chet Baker “The Prince of Cool” died when he fell off of a window ledge of the Hotel Prinz Hendrik in Amsterdam. He frequently locked himself out of his room and trying to climb in a window. Heroin and cocaine were found in his system. He was 58.

1992- Police arrest the manager of Comic Book Heaven in Sarasota Florida on seven counts of "displaying materiel harmful to minors", i.e., comic books.

2006- Disney’s The Little Match Girl, directed by Roger Allers was released.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for May 12, 2023

Birthdays: Dolly Madison, Dante Rossetti, Frank Stella, Florence Nightingale, Tom Snyder, George Carlin, Wilfred Hyde-White, Emilio Estevez, Ron Zeigler, Farley Mowat, Ving Rhames, Bruce Boxleitner, Katherine Hepburn, Yogi Berra, Joy Batchelor

1934- Winnie, a Canadian black bear who had been living at the London Zoo, passed away at the ripe old age of 20. She had been at the Zoo since 1915. She was a favorite of young Christopher Robin Milne, the son of author a.a. milne. Winnie was the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh.

1936- John Maynard Keynes most famous work "the General Theory of Money, Interest and Work" was published. Today if a politician advocates government controls in the business market, he is called a "Keynesian". Keynes once said: ' My only regret in life is that I did not drink more champagne."

1938- “The Adventures of Robin Hood” starring Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, Olivia DeHaviland, Claude Rains and Eugene Paulette premiered. The swashbuckling film then cost a whopping $2 million dollars to make! The light brown mare Maid Marion rode in the movie was later bought by singing cowboy Roy Rogers and renamed Trigger.

1962- First day shooting on Frederico Fellini’s film 8 1/2. When screened for American Producer Joe Levine, Levine took the cigar from his mouth and growled-” Frederigo, what da hell did that movie mean? ” Fellini shrugged, “I don’t know”.

1963- Folksinger Bob Dylan walked out of a taping on the Ed Sullivan Show. He objected to CBS censors wanting to cut his number making fun of extra Right-Wing extremists like the John Birch Society.

1971 - Rolling Stone Mick Jagger weds Bianca Macias at St Tropez Town Hall.

They later divorced and Bianca became a famous habitue’ of trendy discos and fashion magazines.

1971- Tor Johnson died of a heart attack at age 68. Swedish wrestler turned actor, Tor’s best known role was of the bald eyeless zombie in classics like Plan Nine from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster.

1977- A small Westchester radio station WENW hired a thin, gawky, college grad as a DJ- Howard Stern. US radio would never be the same.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for May 11, 2023

Birthdays: Salvador Dali', Jean Jerome, Chang and Eng Bunker-the original Siamese Twins-1811, Baron Munchausen, Irving Berlin, King Oliver, Martha Graham, Dr. Richard Fenyman, Mort Sahl, Foster Brooks, Denver Pyle, Henry Morgenthau, Doug McClure, Randy Quaid, Natasha Richardson, Rev Louis Farrakhan, Albert Hurter, Phil Silvers, Margaret Kerry the model for Walt Disney’s Tinkerbell is 94

1934- The Howard Hawks screwball comedy Twentieth Century premiered with John Barrymore and Carol Lombard. 

1935-Disney Silly Symphony Water Babies. Directed by Wilfred Jackson.

1945- After Nazi Germany surrendered, the Nazi-collaborator governor of occupied Norway, Josef Treboven, committed suicide by sitting on a stick of dynamite. When Wiley E. Coyote does it, it’s funny. But Norwegian Nazis? Pretty messy.

1956 -  The Pinky Lee Show last airs on NBC-TV.

1968 - actor Richard Harris attempted a singing career, releasing the song "MacArthur Park".

1972 -On the Dick Cavett talk show rock star and peace activist John Lennon said his phone had been tapped by FBI. It turns out it was, but at the time we all thought he was just paranoid from too many drugs.

1981- The musical play CATS opened in London.

1981- Bob Marley died of brain cancer at age 36. Marley and his group the Wailers, made Jamaican Reggae mainstream in pop music. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 10, 2023

Birthdays: Fred Astaire, Phil Silvers, Nancy Walker, French royal minister Turgot, Marshal Jean Lannes, Marshal Nicolas Davout, John Wilkes Booth (assassin of Lincoln) Mark David Chapman (assassin of John Lennon), David O. Selznick, Mother Maybelle Carter, Ariel Durant, Jim Abrahams, Nancy Walker, Donovan, Homer Simpson, Bono, Kenan Thompson is 45, Paige O’Hara the voice of Belle in Beauty & the Beast.

1893- The U.S. Agriculture Dept. declared the tomato was officially a vegetable and not a fruit.

1908- An article in the New York Times advised women to wash their hair every two weeks. The norm then was every three months!

1928- General Electric started up WG4 Schenectady, the first T.V. Station.

1929- Yankee slugger Babe Ruth signs new contract that paid him more money than President Herbert Hoover. Babe replied, "Well, I had a better year than he had.”

1929- Walt Disney’s short Skeleton Dance premiered. Animated mostly by Mickey Mouse designer Ub Iwerks, it was a breakthrough in tightly done musical sync animation.

1933- Nazis Leader Josef Goebbels holds the first mass book-burning in Berlin. " We consign everything unGerman to the flames." 20,000 works by Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Freud and Einstein are burned. 

1962- The first Incredible Hulk comic book.

1963- On the advice of George Harrison and Little Richard, Decca Records signed a new teen band called the Rolling Stones to a recording contract.

1977- Joan Crawford died of cancer and a heart attack. Once the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, now a neglected old recluse. She was 74. Soon after her daughter Christine published the memoir Mommy Dearest, in which she alleged years of abuse and neglect. Her last words were when she saw her nurse and maid were praying, she said,” Damn it! Don’t you dare ask God to save me!”

1993- 188 young women died in a fire in a toy making factory near Bangkok, Thailand. They were locked into the building by their employer like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire victims in 1911. They were making Bart Simpson dolls for America.

1994- Former children’s party clown and serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection. Police found 28 children buried around his house. His last words: "Kiss My Ass!"

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 9, 2023

Birthdays: John Brown, James M. Barrie the creator of Peter Pan, Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum, Pedro Armendariz, Frank Frazetta, Glenda Jackson is 87, Billy Joel, Candice Bergen is 77, Mike Wallace, Pancho Gonzales, James L. Brooks, Rosario Dawson, John Corbett, Albert Finney

1662- London diarist Samuel Pepys noted today he first saw a Punch & Judy puppet show in Convent Garden.

1754- THE FIRST NEWSPAPER CARTOON- Ben Franklin in his Pennsylvania Gazette prints a drawing of a segmented snake with each piece named for a colony with the inscription: Join or Die. (Okay, it's not Calvin and Hobbs, but it's a start).

1887- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show did its first performance in Europe. In London the English public, several European kings and writer Oscar Wilde thrilled to displays of trick riding, real red Indians, cowboys and little Annie Oakley the trick shooter. 

1932 – London’s Piccadilly Circus first lit by electricity.

1935- The First Belch heard on nationwide radio. Melvin Purvis (the FBI man who killed John Dillinger) was doing an ad for Fleischmann’s Yeast when he committed the offense, which was dubbed “The Burp Heard Round the World”.

1937- ACTOR’S SHOWDOWN WITH L.B. MAYER- In a dramatic confrontation the heads of the Screen Actor’s Guild Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone go to MGM boss Louis B. Mayer’s beach house during a Sunday garden party. While Capone gangster Willie Bioff stood by to give Mayer support, Montgomery told Mayer he had a 96% strike vote from the actors, so if Mayer didn’t recognize SAG as the sole bargaining agent for actors they would paralyze Hollywood come Monday morning!

  Mayer thought about it, then gave in. Bioff got from the actors a deal that the IA would back off if the actors would withdraw their support from a rival union to IATSE’s organizing the behind the scene’s technical artists. That night 5,600 actors and friends celebrated at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Next morning 200 waited in line to get their SAG cards including Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow. 

1937- Burne Hogarth began drawing the Tarzan comic strip. Hal Foster had been in contract negotiations with the syndicate over money and the right to his originals. He had created Prince Valiant as a bargaining chip when the syndicate called his bluff by giving the Tarzan job to Hogarth. Foster went on to greater glory with Prince Valiant, but never forgave Burne.

1942- Chuck Jones wartime comedy short “ The Draft Horse” premiered. 

1955- Washington D.C. station WRC TV put on a young Univ of Maryland grad named Jim Henson as filler before the TODAY Show. First called Sam & Friends, Henson antics with his puppets, including a green frog called Kermit, fashioned from fabric cut out from one of his mother’s old green coats. The Muppets were born.

1961- John F. Kennedy's newly appointed head of the FCC, Newton Minow, did his first major address to a luncheon of top television executives. In his speech he blasted them for TV’s mindless content and violence. He called television: " A Vast Wasteland."

 What makes it historic is it's the first time anybody had noticed just how lousy TV is and how badly we are all addicted to it. Minnow did a lot to build up PBS and Sesame Street. In the show Gilligan’s Island, the boat they were on was named the Minnow for Newton Minnow.

1973- Soylent Green opened in general release. Starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in his last movie role. Soylent Green takes place in the year 2022.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for May 8, 2023

Birthdays: Harry Truman, Roberto Rossellini, Leopold Bakunin, Louis Gottschalk, Oscar Hammerstein, Ted Sorenson, Sonny Liston, Toni Tennille, Ricky Nelson, Peter Benchley, Thomas Pinchon, Arthur Q. Bryan the voice of Elmer Fudd, David Attenborough, Keith Jarrett, Alex Van Halen, Melissa Gilbert, French illustrator Jean Giraud aka Moebius, Enrique Inglesias, animator Bob Clampett, Don Rickles, Saul Bass

1824- Ludwig Von Beethoven performed his Ninth (Choral) Symphony and Missa Solemnis in concert for the first time. Even though he was stone deaf he was still in demand as a conductor. The orchestra trained themselves to ignore the Maestro's baton waving and follow the lead of the concert-master (first violinist).  It was said when they finished and the audience was cheering,  Beethoven was still waving his arms and moaning the melody, unaware of the sound of his own voice.

1878- David Hughes invented the Microphone while trying to get over bronchitis.

1910- Russian-Jewish glove salesman Schmuel Gelpfisch married Blanche Lasky, the daughter of vaudeville performer Jesse Lasky. Gelpfisch later changed his name to Sam Goldfish, then Sam Goldwyn. He and his father-in-law Jesse Lasky went into the new flicker business and started the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. They soon moved to Hollywood. 

1912- The movie studio Famous Players Lasky born. In 1914 they changed their name to Paramount Pictures. 

1933- When the Rockefellers were building their huge office complex Rockefeller Center in New York City they decided to get one of the greatest living Mexican painters Diego Rivera to design the murals for the interior of the atrium ’Man at the Crossroads". This, despite the fact that Rivera was well known as a radical communist.  

Soon Nelson Rockefeller noticed Rivera was painting in the center of the mural a huge portrait of Lenin stepping on his father John D. Rockefeller’s face! Over Rivera’s protests Rockefeller ordered the mural painted over and no record of it’s existence ever kept. But on the night before the painting was to be destroyed Swiss art student Lucienne Bloch slipped a camera into her shirt. While Frida Kahlo distracted the guards, she took the only photos of the mural for posterity. 

1943- Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood"- Ooohh Wolfy!

1962-"A Funny thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum" opened on Broadway.

1962- Director Joe Mankiewicz shot the climactic spectacle scene of Cleopatra –Elizabeth Taylor, entering Rome through the Arch of Titus on a mobile sphinx surrounded by thousands of extras. The shot had been delayed six months after a stunt woman fell off an elephant, and then the light in the Forum had not been right. When Elizabeth Taylor appeared in the scene, the Italian extras were supposed to shout "Hail Cleopatra!, but instead they all shouted "Liz! Liz!"

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 7, 2023

Birthday: Johannes Brahms, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Gary Cooper, Anne Baxter, Gabby Hayes, Ichiro Honda, Robert Browning, Marcus Loew of Loews Theater chain, Darin McGavin, Edward Land (inventor of the Polaroid lens and camera), Amy Heckerling, Traci Lords, Disney director Jun Falkenstein 

1901- The actions of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, takes place this day. 

1904 - Flexible Flyer trademark registered

1937- Nobel Prize winning writer William Faulkner hired by MGM Studios, earning $500 a week. He celebrated by going on a two-week drinking binge. MGM's Head of Writing Sam Marx had him tracked down to an Oakie migrant camp in the Imperial Valley. He was dragged off, boozily whining, "Ah wanna write for Mickey Mouse!"

1939- Los Angeles Union Station opened. It was built on top of L.A's original China Town.

1941-Glen Miller records the "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" for RCA. the first gold record million seller.

1942- Battle of the Coral Sea-The U.S. Navy, suffering only defeats up till then, stopped a Japanese task force. This is the first engagement in which the two fleets never saw each other but fought long distance with carrier launched airplanes. Veterans commented that one of the sadder losses was when the aircraft carrier USS Lexington went down, she took the fleet's supply of 6 Bugs Bunny cartoons down with her. War is Hell.

1945- Director Bob Clampett left Looney Tunes, now called Warner Bros Cartoons, to strike out on his own.

1950- The Carolwood Pacific Railroad. Walt Disney had grew up around and loved trains. Animator Ward Kimball got him interested in collecting model trains. Walt grew so enamored he built a miniature steam train big enough to take children on rides. The tracks ran all around the back of his Holmby Hills home. This day was the first running of his new hobby. The germ of his idea for Disneyland began here. After the home was sold, in the 1990s the Carolwood Barn and trains were moved to Griffith Park.

1966- “Monday Monday” by the Mammas and the Poppas becomes #1 in the pop charts.

1989- Police in Buenos Aires discovered the body of actor Guy Williams (Zorro, Lost In Space) He had died of a brain aneurysm in his apartment. He was 65.

1996- Comedian Martin Lawrence went berserk and ran down a main intersection in Van Nuys Cal. raving and waving a pistol. When asked to explain himself, Lawrence blamed it on “Dehydration.”

1998- Apple Computers introduced the iMac.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 6, 2023.

Birthdays: Maximillien Robespierre, Sigmund Freud, Rudolph Valentino, Orson Welles, Robert Peary, Willie Mays, Stewart Granger, Bob Seger, Toots Schoor, Weeb Ewbank, Adriana Caselotti- the voice of Snow White, Ruben Hurricane Carter, Christian Clavier, Roy Nesbit.

Tony Blair, George Clooney is 62. 

1793- After a stay in Europe, American artist Gilbert Stuart arrived back home dead broke. In the age of Gainsborough, Romney and West, Stuart didn’t fare too well. He left America because he was tired of being pestered to do copies of his famous portrait of George Washington, the one that is currently on our dollar bill.

1915- Babe Ruth hits his first home run. He was a Boston Red Sox pitcher at the time. He will finish his career with 714 home runs, a record that held for decades until Hank Aaron.

1919- Wizard of Oz creator L. Frank Baum died of heart disease at 62. He was trying at the time to buy real estate in Los Angeles for an Oz- theme amusement park.

1937- THE FLEISCHER STRIKE-Cartoonists voted to strike Max Fleischer’s Studio after Max fired 13 animators for union activity and complaining about their 6 day work week.

  The strike was settled several months later when parent company Paramount forced Max to concede. Strikers sang "We're Popeye the Union Man! We're Popeye the Union Man! We'll Fight to the Finish, Cause We Can't Live on Spinach! We're Popeye...etc."

1937- The Society of Motion Picture Art Directors formed.

1941- A friend of Bob Hope who was now in the service suggested the comedian come and entertain troops on their army base. Hope took the suggestion, and it became his signature event. For decades, into his eighties he entertained servicemen around the world in five wars.

1946- Curly Howard, was the most outrageous of the comedy troupe The Three Stooges. 

While people laughed at his antics, he lived a wild Hollywood life, lots of clubs, drinking, smoking and girls. This day while filming the short Halfwits Holiday, he suffered a massive stroke. He was only 42. He survived 6 more years in debilitated health, moved from hospital to hospital by his brothers. He died in 1952 at age 48.

1949- In Cambridge University England, The computer EDSAC ran its’ first calculations. The first computer that could store data in its memory.

1954- Oxford student Roger Bannister ran the first Four Minute Mile. His time was 3:59.04.

2001- Variety reported that the Walt Disney Company in promoting their upcoming summer film Pearl Harbor, had canceled plans for Pearl Harbor Happy Meals at McDonalds, as being in bad taste. 

2003- A tornado destroyed the factory in Jackson, Tennessee that produced most of the world’s supply of Pringles Potato Chips.

2005- Senior Walt Disney storyboard artist Joe Grant died a few days before his 97 birthday. Joe had worked on Disney films from Snow White to The Incredibles. He died quietly at his desk while drawing. He finished the drawing.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for May 5, 2023

Birthdays: Tyrone Power, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Cochrane called Nellie Bly, Soren Kierkegard, Alice Faye, James Beard, Michael Palin is 81, Jim Kelly, Pat Carroll, Patrick Ewing, John Rhys Davies is 79, Lance Henriksen is 83, Brian Williams, Floyd Gottfredson

National Teacher's Day.

National Cartoonist's Day.

1862- CINCO DE MAYO- Battle of Puebla-Mexican Juaristas under Zaragosa defeated a French invasion force sent by Napoleon III. One of the heroes of the battle was a soldier named Porfiro Diaz. After Benito Juarez’s presidency Diaz made himself dictator and reigned 38 years until being ousted in the Mexican Revolution in 1910. 

1864- While Lee and Grant’s armies began to battled in The Wilderness, Sherman began his Atlanta campaign. Sherman told Grant:" You hold Lee down and give me enough troops and I can make Georgia howl!"

1891-Carnegie Hall in New York opened. One old musician told me the acoustics are so perfect that you can fart in the trumpet section, and you'll be heard in the second balcony.

1945- Happy Birthday Yosemite Sam! Hare Trigger, the first cartoon to feature the red mustachioed desperado premiered.

1953- Broadway Director Jerome Robbins was riding high after directing hits like On the Town and King & I, when he was labeled a Communist. To save his career, this day he testified before Joseph McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee. He admitted he had been a communist party member and named names. One actress he finked on, Margaret Lee said,” I’ve just been stabbed by a wicked fairy”. Ironically, Jerome Robbins went on to direct two of his biggest hits “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the Fiddler on the Roof using Zero Mostel, Beatrice Arthur and Jack Gilford, blacklisted actors who all hated him. During a break in rehearsal on Fiddler, one actor said, “I’d like to kick Jerry in the balls!” Beatrice Arthur replied, “Jerry has no balls.” The famed actor/director Orson Wells observed that “Friend informed on friend not to save their lives but to save their swimming pools.”

1961- Alan Shepard became the first American in space on board Friendship VII. The rocket took him 115 miles into space but not high enough to achieve an orbit. That was done one year later by John Glenn.  Shepard was kept on the ground in his capsule for so long he had to pee in his suit. In the upside-down position the fluid ran up his back and puddled up in his helmet behind his head. NASA realized it needed to make modifications on the space suit….

1968- Albert Dekker, character actor and star of movies like Dr. Cyclops, was found dead by his fiance kneeling in his bathtub, handcuffed, Noose around his neck, ballgag, and wearing ladies lingerie. A narcotics needle was sticking in his arm. Someone wrote in red lipstick on his butt “ whip”. He was 62. The police declared it an “auto-erotic episode that had gone wrong." His fiancé Geraldine Saunders went on to create the hit TV show The Love Boat.

1975- Anne Rice’s novel The Interview With The Vampire first published.

40th Anniv,1984- Cartoonists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were sitting around one night. Over beers they tried to conceive the most ridiculous superheroes mag they could think of. Something with Ninjas, Mutants, and Teenagers. They had just enough from Peter’s tax refund to print one limited edition. This day at a regional Comicon in Portsmouth New Hampshire, the first edition of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out and sold out within two hours. It became a monster hit and spawned TV series and movies.

2006- Walt Disney Company formally acquired Pixar Studio.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 4th, 2023

Birthdays: Bartolomeo Christofori'- inventor of the piano, Alice Liddel 1852- the inspiration of Alice in Wonderland, Audrey Hepburn –real name Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Rusten, Roberta Peters, Maynard Ferguson, Pia Zadora is 70, Howard Da Silva, Tammy Wynette, Randy Travis, Hosni Mubarak, George Will, Richard Jenkins

1776-While marching up the California coast, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola came upon a Tongva Indian village on the shore of a big bay. It being Saint Monica's Day, he named the bay Santa Monica. St. Monica was famous for crying, she had a wicked son who later reformed and became a Saint himself, St. Augustine. Portola was looking for water that dry year, and Tongva locals took him to a spring, still there, on the campus of Uni High. He named the area for her life giving tears, on her day.

A little further up the coast he found a village called Himaliwu by a little beach and lagoon the Indians called “ place where the surf is loud”, in their language- Malibu

1891 –THE DEATH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES According to Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, this was the day Sherlock Holmes perished at the Reichenbach Falls grappling with sinister Prof. Moriarity- The Napoleon of Crime.  Conan Doyle had tired of his eccentric detective and wanted to get on to other types of novels. But readers were horrified he had killed off the great sleuth. Conan-Doyle couldn’t take a walk down the street without someone stopping him:” Sir, How could you?!” When touring the U.S. he wanted to lecture about historical subjects and spiritualism, but people only wanted know about Holmes & Watson. Finally after a decade, Arthur Conan-Doyle gave in and began a new series called the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

1897- In Paris during a charity cinematograph show the nitrate film catches fire and 200 die. Movie film before the 1940’s was made from a very unstable Nitrate mixture and could explode from the slightest contact with flame. 

 

1927- The Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences formed. Studio heads Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer originally conceived the Academy as an arbiter where studio artists could air grievances without fear of retaliation, thereby sidetracking the call for union representation. It didn't work. After the stock market crash the Academy supported the studio heads enforced employee salary cuts. Soon all pretense as an ombudsman was abandoned and AMPAS focused instead on being the arbiter of artistic achievement.

Writer and WGA supporter Dorothy Parker commented: "Going to the Academy with your problems is like trying to get laid in your mother's house. Someone's always peeking through the curtains"

1948- Norman Mailor's first novel published: "the Naked and the Dead".

1953 - Pulitzer prize awarded to Ernest Hemingway for The Old Man & The Sea.

1957 - Alan Freed hosts "Rock n' Roll Show" 1st prime-time network rock music show.

1967- The Big Mac hamburger is invented by Jim Delligatti at his MacDonalds franchise restaurant in Pittsburgh. Steelworkers weren’t coming to his McDonald’s. They often ate one big meal a day after double shifts and the tiny burgers at McDonald’s weren’t going to cut it. They preferred the hearty burgers and meal sizes sandwiched at Eat’n Park or Primanti Bro’s. So the only way he could compete was to double his burgers! 

1975- Moe Howard died, the last of the original Three Stooges.

1991- Bing Crosby’s son Dennis Crosby put a shotgun to his head and ended his life. In 1989 his younger brother Lindsay had committed suicide in a similar fashion.

2000- The Love Bug Computer virus ravaged the worlds commerce through Microsoft Outlook causing $10 billion dollars in damage and shutting down temporarily the e-commerce of large firms like Reebok. It was launched by a Philippine grad student as part of his thesis.

2001- Bonnie Lee Blakely, the wife of actor Robert Blake, was found in her car dead of a gunshot wound to the head outside of Vitello’s Restaurant in Studio City, Ca. They had just had dinner, and Mr. Blake had returned into the restaurant to retrieve a gun he had left at his table. In 2005 the actor was acquitted of his wife’s murder but lost a wrongful death suit to Blakely’s family. Robert Blake died in 2022. No other suspect was ever identified. 

2012- Marvel's The Avengers, directed by Josh Whedon, opened.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 3, 2023

Birthdays: Niccolo Macchiavelli, Bing Crosby, Golda Meir, Sir Richard D'Oly-Carte, Peter Gabriel, James Brown, Pete Seeger, Betty Comden, Doug Henning, Beaulah Bondi, Mary Astor, Sugar Ray Robinson, Alex Cord, 70’s singer Engelbert Humperdinck, Dule Hill, Christina Hendriks, Bill Sienkiewicz

1675- Massachusetts Puritans passed a law that church doors be locked during Sunday services. Too many people were leaving during long, boring sermons.

1888- The Poem "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Thayer first published.

1931- E.C. Segar introduced Popeye’s friend J. Wellington Wimpy in his Thimble Theatre comic strip. Based on Segar’s old boss William Shuchert, who own a local opera house in Decatur, Illinois and ate a lot of hamburgers. “I would gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today.”

1933- Fritz Lang’s movie M released in the US. It made a star of Peter Lorre.

1936- Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio first game for the New York Yankees. He got three hits.

1948- THE PARAMOUNT DECISION- In 1938 the independent theaters and producers (including the Walt Disney Company) had brought suit in Federal court against the major Hollywood Studios over their monopolistic practices. Ten years later the Supreme Court ruled the Motion Picture Studios did constitute a monopoly and under the Sherman AntiTrust Act ordered them to sell their theater chains. 

One casualty of this rule was the short cartoon. Because theater managers no longer were forced to run a cartoon, newsreel and short with a feature (block-booking), they opted for the time to run more showings of the main feature. Many people were starting to become interested in that new television machine, anyway.

1952- President Harry Truman showed off the newly renovated White House to the newfangled network television cameras. 

1969- Groundbreaking in Valencia for the California Institute of the Arts. 

1971- National Public Radio’s news program "All Things Considered" goes on the air, the first U.S. news program with women anchors like Susan Stanberg.

1973- Chicago’s Sear Tower was topped off at 443 meters, to be the tallest office building in the U.S.A.

1978- THE FIRST SPAM E-MAIL- Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for Digital Equipment Corp wanted to invite all the scientists and professors on the ARPANET system to an event. It was too much work to do one e-mail at a time, so he devised a way to mail 600 people at once. 

1991- Steve Jobs agreed to the deal between Walt Disney and Pixar to create the film Toy Story.  He insisted the Pixar logo be at the head of the film, instead of in the back roll credits. The world needs to know that Pixar are the one’s making these movies, not them. It’s all about marketing. The public will soon know who we are, more than they are.”

1997- The Chairman of Phillip Morris Tobacco Company James J. Morgan testified to a congressional committee that cigarettes are no more addictive than Gummy Bears candy.

2002- Spiderman, directed by Sam Raimi, and starring Tobey McGuire and Kirsten Dunst.

2014-Kevin McCoy created the first NFT (Non-Fungible Token) entitled “Quantum”.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 2, 2023

Birthdays: Czarina Catherine the Great, Domenico Scarlatti, Manfred Von Richthofen the Red Baron, Bing Crosby, Dr. Benjamin Spock the Baby Doctor, Vernon Castle, Lorenzo Music, Theodore Bikel, Lesley Gore, Roscoe Lee Browne, Satyajit Ray, Pinky Lee, Link Wray of the Wraymen, Christine Baranski, Doug Wildey, Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock is 51, animator Marty Abrahams.

1519- Leonardo Da Vinci died of a stroke at the Chateau d’Amboise in the arms of King Francis I. He had accepted the offer of the French King of a stable retirement (even then artists worried about that kinda stuff).  He was 67. 

1885- First Good Housekeeping Magazine.

1920 –The Negro National League, the first successful all-Black baseball league, held its first game in Indianapolis. The league was founded earlier that same year by legendary baseball player, Andrew "Rube" Foster, and featured teams such as the Chicago American Giants, Chicago Giants, Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos, Indianapolis ABCs, Kansas City Monarchs and St. Louis Giants in its first season.

1921- Chicago’s Field Museum opened to the public. It was housed in the building originally called the Hall of Fine Arts in the Great Chicago Exhibition of 1893.

1932- Jack Benny's Radio Show debuts. Oh Rochester! Mel Blanc the voice of Bugs Bunny did many characters and voices on the show, including the sputtering engine of Jacks’ old Maxwell automobile. He didn't start doing voices for Looney Tunes until 1935.

1933- The first modern sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. The Inverness Courier published an account of a couple that sighted Nessie and offered a reward for proof.

1964- Disney’s audio-animatronic Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln opened at the NY World’s Fair.

1972- First day shooting on Steven Spielberg’s film JAWS. The giant mechanical shark used as a prop was nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg’s lawyer.

1982- The 24 hour Weather Channel started.

1983- Microsoft introduced the three-button mouse.

1999- Actor Oliver Reed was filming the movie Gladiator in Malta with Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott. Reed, like many British actors of his generation was a very hard drinker. Some like Richard Harris and Anthony Hopkins managed to pull themselves out of their spiral and went on to full careers in later life. But Oliver Reed did not. This day in a local pub, he got into a drinking contest with several young English sailors from HMS Cumberland. At one sitting Oliver Reed drank 8 pints of beer, a dozen shots of rum, half a bottle of whiskey and a few shots of Hennessey cognac. Then when arm wrestling the sailors, he suffered a massive heart attack and dropped dead. Oliver Reed was 61. Ridley Scott had to use computer imaging to complete his remaining scenes in the film. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for May 1, 2023

Birthdays: Mary Harris a.k.a. Mother Jones, Marshal Vauban 1633, Benjamin Latrobe, Calamity Jane, Joseph Addison, Kate Smith, Jack Paar, Joseph Heller, Rita Coolidge, Steve Cauthen, Judy Collins, Glen Ford, Ray Parker Jr., Maurice Noble, Fyodor Khytruk, Louis Nye, John Woo, Wes Anderson is 54, Joanna Lumley is 77, Eric Goldberg is 68.

May is named for Maia Majestus, Roman god of flowers, one of the Pleiades, a daughter of Fauna and Vulcan. It’s also the Roman festival for the Bona Dea or the Good Goddess, a deity of fertility.

1373- Dante Alighieri met the love of his life Beatrice at a MayDay party in Florence. Although she married another, he was inspired to write his Divine Comedy to her.

1786- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO premiered in Vienna. So many encores and bows were demanded that the evening went on twice as long.

1898- BATTLE OF MANILA BAY- Admiral Dewey's fleet sank the Spanish fleet when he gives the order to the captain of the USS Olympia :"You may fire when ready, Gridley:"  I'm sorry, Bugs Bunny didn't say it first. 

1902- Richard Outcault's comic strip Buster Brown and Tige first appeared. Outcault, the creator of the first hit cartoon the Yellow Kid was so famous that as part of his deal to do this strip he negotiated the first back-end deal for a percentage of the merchandise sales.

1914-THE BIRTH OF THE BIG BLUE- Thomas Watson got a job at a little business machine company called CTR, the Calculating Typewriter and Regulating Company. He quickly rose to the top and renamed the company International Business Machine or IBM. When he retired in 1956 it employed 60,000 workers, and was one of largest companies in the world.

1926- Famed black baseball pitcher Satchel Page pitched his first game. His nickname came from Satchel-mouth.

1931- The Empire State Building in New York dedicated. For fifty years it was the worlds tallest office building and King Kong’s hangout. It’s topmost deck was designed to be a dirigible mooring post, but despite several tries, no zeppelin has ever been able to park there. A Goodyear Blimp attempted mooring there in 1976 but the high winds bobbed it around like a bucking bronco. The building was dedicated during the depths of the Great Depression when business was so bad it was nicknamed the 'Empty State Building'.

1935- Lou Gehrig, the Yankee "Iron Man" who had never missed a baseball game, takes himself out of a game because of illness. It is the first sign of the degenerative muscular disease ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, that would soon be called Lou Gehrig's Disease.

1941- Orson Welles film "Citizen Kane" debuted at the Paramount theater (the El Capitan) in Hollywood. At the last minute William Randolph Hearst's friend Louis B. Mayer tried to buy and destroy every print of the film and the Hearst press went crazy attacking it. Hearst spokesperson Louella Parsons threatened "A Beautiful Lawsuit" if the film was not pulled. Despite winning some Oscars, the film didn't do well in its initial release, but it remains one of the greatest films of all time. Orson Welles said later:" The problem I've always had is my movies become classics ten years later."

1964- Scientist John Kemeny at Dartmouth created the computer language BASIC.

1967- Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin casino in Las Vegas.

1989- Walt Disney Feature Animation in Orlando Florida opened. It closed in 2006.

1993- The Florida Animation Union Local 843 chartered. 

1997- Frank Gifford, ABC television sportscaster and husband of morning show celebrity Kathy Lee Gifford, was caught on videotape doing the nasty with stewardess Suzie Johnson. She got paid by a tabloid and posed nude for Playboy.

1997- Bebe, the dolphin who played Flipper on the television show, died at age 40.

1999- Spongebob Squarepants premiered on Nickelodeon. 

3019TA- Aragorn II was crowned King of Gondor (according to Tolkien)

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