Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 31, 2023

Birthdays: Liberace, General George H. Thomas the "Rock of Chickamagua", Sebastian Sperling Kresge the founder of S.S. Kresge stores, Milton Friedman, Sherry Lansing, Geraldine Chaplin, Kurt Gowdy, Dean Cain, Leon “ Bull “Durham, Primo Levi, Fred Quimby, animator Ken Harris, Ted Cassidy who played Lurch in the Adams Family, Wesley Snipes is 61, and according to J.K. Rowling, today is the birthday of Harry Potter

1922- Ralph Samuelson invented water skis.

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

1948- President Truman dedicated New York City’s second major airport Idlewild Field. In 1963 it was renamed JFK Airport.

1954- Steve Allen married Jayne Meadows. 

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

1970- Black Tot Day- The British Navy officially ended its centuries old custom of giving a ships crew a ration of rum.  

1971- Apollo 15 astronaut went for a drive on the surface of the moon in their land-rover.

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

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

1995- The Walt Disney Company bought the ABC Network, the Discovery Channel and ESPN. Recently, they are looking to sell them off.

1999- Premiere of Brad Bird’s movie The Iron Giant at Mann's Chinese in Hollywood.

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

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 30, 2023

Birthdays: Georgio Vasari, Henry Ford, Emily Bronte', Casey Stengel, Roy Williams, Vladimir Zworykin, Arnold Schwarzenegger is 76, Ed "Kookie" Byrnes, Peter Bogdanovich, Delta Burke, Henry Moore, Anita Hill, Lawrence Fishburne is 62, Jean Reno is 74, Hilary Swank is 49, Christopher Nolan, Lisa Kudrow is 60 

1929 -The Hollywood Bowl musicians go on strike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's ANimation ALmanac for July 29, 2023

Birthdays: Alex de Tocqueville, Benito Mussolini, Clara Bow, Natalie Wood, Paul Taylor, Sig Romberg, Dag Hammarskjold, Peter Jennings, Michael Spinks, Maria Ouspenskaya, Dave Stevens creator of the Rocketeer, Ken Burns is 69, Booth Tarkington, David Warner, Steven Dorff, Professor Irwin Corey, William Cameron-Menzies, Peter Jennings, William Powell, Will Wheaton

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

1927- Dr Phillip Drinker and Dr Louis Shaw installed the first Iron Lung breathing apparatus at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

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

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

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

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

1957-Happy Birthday NASA! President Eisenhower signed the bill creating the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, or NASA to oversee the space program, separate from the military. 

1957- Tonight with Jack Paar premiered. 

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 27, 2023

Birthdays: Confucius, Alexander Dumas fils, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Maureen McGovern, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Ilya Salkind, David Swift –director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap, Maya Rudolph is 51, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is 46, Norman Lear is 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1977- Allegro Non Troppo opened in American theaters. Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto’s homage to Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

2007- The Simpson’s Movie debuted.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 26, 2023

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

 Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Ken Muse, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Ken Muse, Sandra Bullock is 59, Kevin Spacey, Kate Beckinsdale, Helen Mirren is 78, Jason Statham, Mick Jagger is 80

1656– Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.

1861- Mark Twain left St. Jo Missouri to go west and sit out the Civil War. He went with his brother Oren Clemens who had been appointed to administer the Nevada territory. 

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks. Besides leaded gasoline, many suburban homes had little backyard ovens to burn their garbage.

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. Chaplin never was a communist or any other radical movement. He was just outspoken in his views, and in Commie-Paranoid America that was enough. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achievements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.

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

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

1970- Oh, Calcutta! Play opened in London. Oh, Calcutta had nothing at all to do with a city in  India, the show was a series of unrelated, but sex-dominated sketches featuring a totally nude cast, both male and female. Sketches were written by John Lennon, Sam Shephard and Jules Feiffer. The title came from a 1946 Dadaist painting by Clovis Trouille. It was a pun on the French “O quel cul t’as” meaning “what a nice ass you have”. The fun turned dark in 1988 when the show’s producer Norman Kean went mad, stabbed his wife then committed suicide.

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

1990- Pres. George H.W. Bush signed the Citizens with Disabilities Act into law.

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 25, 2023

Birthdays: Bishop Theitmar of Merseberg- 975AD, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Stuart K. Hine 1899 missionary who wrote the hymn "How Great Thou Art", Woody Strode, Walter Payton, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illena Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-conceived by invitro-fertilization is 45

1788- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony #40 in G minor.

1846 -The Spanish-Californios residents of pueblo Los Angeles chase the U.S. occupying force out of town a second time.

1871- The electric carousel was patented by Wilhelm Schneider, Davenport, Iowa 

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

1940- In Nazi occupied Paris, a Gestapo agent walked into the French offices of MGM studios and confiscated the six prints of "Gone With The Wind" sent from America. They were taken to Berlin for a screening for top Nazi officials. Gone with the Wind was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite movies. For the entire period of the Occupation, Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, hid a surviving print of Gone With The Wind under his bed. The day Paris was liberated, the Cinémathèque was reopened with the first public screening.

1946- MARTIN & LEWIS- Singer Dean Martin had met young comedian Jerry Lewis the year before at a club in New York City. This day in Atlantic City’s 500 Club they debuted as a team when Lewis suggested to the club owner that Martin would be a good replacement for a singer who called in sick. They became a major sensation, with movies, records and TV shows. They hired young writer Norman Lear and Ed Simmons to write for them.

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

1953- Chuck Jones’ "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".

1956- Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed for the last time as a duo at NY’s Copacabana. Exactly ten years from their first appearance.

1958- Jack Warner cheated his two surviving brothers Harry and Al out of their share of Warner Bros Studios. The three had agreed to all retire together and sell to an investor group led by a man named Sememenko. But by a pre-arranged deal with Sememenko, Jack then bought him out and named himself President of Warner Bros. When brother Harry read the news in Variety the next day, it gave him a heart attack. He lingered for a week then died this day. The family never spoke to their brother Jack again. His wife Rhea said “He didn’t die. Jack killed him.”

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

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

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

1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS. He had collapsed in France and he made the announcement while being treated at a French clinic. He was the first major public figure to acknowledge he had the mysterious new disease. People then were so afraid of this mysterious disease and how it was transferred, everyone’s initial response was to shun the sufferer. The French-American hospital insisted Hudson leave, so he called his friends Pres. Ronald and Nancy Reagan for an airlift to a U.S. military hospital. They ignored him. Rock Hudson had to pay out of his own pocket to hire a 747 airliner to fly him directly home to LA. 

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for July 24, 2023

Birthdays: Simon Bolivar, Amelia Earhart, Alexander Dumas fils, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Graves, Pat Oliphant, Bela Abzug, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ruth Buzzi, Lynda Carter is 72, Chief Dan George, Robert Hays, Gus Van Sant, Anna Paquin, Patty Jenkins, Elizabeth Moss, J-Lo Jennifer Lopez is 53

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

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

1938 - Instant coffee invented.

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

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

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

1969- After successfully landing on the moon and returning to Earth, Apollo 11 safely splashed down in the ocean.

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

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

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

1998- Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opened.

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

Tom Sito's ANimation Almanac for July 23, 2023

Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler, Jackson Beck the voice of Bluto, Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse, Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Slash, Marlon Wayans, Woody Harrelson is 63, Edie McClurg, Daniel Radcliffe is 35

1599- Michel Caravaggio received his first commission for a painting.

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

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

1927 – Reacting to a public finally tired of the Tin Lizzy Model T and increased competition, the Ford Motor Co sold the first Model A car.

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

1937 – Scientists at Yale University announced the isolation of the pituitary hormone.

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

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

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

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

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

1986 - Britain's Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson called Fergie. They divorced later and she moved to the US and became the spokesperson for Weight Watchers.

1999- The Inspector Gadget Movie starring Matthew Broderick opened.

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for JUly 22, 2023

Birthdays: Emma Lazarus, Eduard Hopper, Gregor Mendel, Alexander Calder, James Whale, Oscar De La Renta, Rose Kennedy, Vaughn Bode, Ruthie Thonpson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Jason Robards, Bob Dole, David Spade is 60, Terence Stamp is 86, Danny Glover is 78, Alex Trebek, Bobby Sherman, Don Henley, Alan Mencken is 74, Irene Bedard, William Dafoe is 68, John Leguizamo, Selena Gomez, Albert Brooks is 76- born Albert Einstein, a nice name, but already taken.

1598- This day William Shakespeare listed on the Stationers Register, a sort of copyright service, his new play called The Merchant of Venice.

1893 –In Colorado, Katharine L. Bates wrote the song "America the Beautiful".

1921- Artist Man Ray arrived in Paris determined to go Dada!

1958- Plan 9 From Outer Space directed by Ed Wood, opened. It has the reputation as the worst movie ever made. Wood coaxed elderly movie star Bela Lugosi to star in it, but halfway though the film he died. Wood shot the remainder of Lugosi’s scenes with his chiropracter wrapped in a cape covering his face. 

1965- Cary Grant married Dyan Cannon.

1967- Jimi Hendrix quit as the opening act for the Monkees.

1977- Walt Disney’s film "The Rescuers" featuring the last work of Disney master animator Milt Kahl.

1989- Nintendo released in America the Gameboy. Designer Gunpei Yokoi designed it and the unique cross shaped directional fingerpad to replace a joystick control. Nintendo loaded Tetris on to it and it became a worldwide phenomenon. Gunpei Yokoi was killed in a car accident outside Kyoto in 1997.

1996- The Daily Show premiered on Comedy Central. John Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn in 1999 and made it famous. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 21, 2023

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

1917- Ford introduced their first truck, the Model TT. It weighed one ton and had a new innovation not in regular automobiles, a reverse gear.

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

   

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

1959- Judge Frederick van Pelt-Bryan ruled that D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not pornography and therefore could be sent through the U.S. postal system.

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

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

The actors hit the bricks twice more, in 1988, 2000, 2008. And now in 2023.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 20, 2023

Birthdays: Petrarch, Sir Edmund Hilary, Lord Elgin, Quaker Anne Hutchinson, Natalie Wood, Theda Bara the Vamp, Diana Rigg, Dick Lucas, Carlos Santana, Lord Reith- the first Director General of the BBC. Carlos Alarzaqui, Giselle Bunchen is 43, Sandra Oh is 52, Harrison Ellenshaw is 78 

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

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

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

1879- Joel Chandler Harris published in the Atlanta Constitution "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus". The first Uncle Remus stories. In Georgia Harris collected the stories from interviewing African American storytellers in the slave quarters. They felt comfortable speaking with him because he was the illegitimate son of an Irish immigrant. Pres. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

1976- The Viking I probe successfully landed on Mars.

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 19, 2023

Birthdays: Edgar Degas, Samuel Colt, Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Bert Kwouk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vicki Carr, Max Fleischer, Lizzie Borden, Ille Nastase, George McGovern, Brian Harold May of Queen, Atom Egoyan, Anthony Edwards, Campbell Scott, Dal McKennon- the voice of Gumby, Ben Franklin in Ben and Me, and Archie in the Archies, Benedict Cumberbatch is 47

1799- THE ROSETTA STONE DISCOVERED. During Napoleons campaign in Egypt several soldiers digging a latrine, uncover a black basalt slab with several forms of writing all over it.

 In 1821 Francois Champollion figured it out. The stone was the key to translating Egyptian hieroglyphics, sort of an ancient Babelfish. The document in honor of Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy is written three times. Once in Hieroglyphs (sacred letters of Ancient Egypt), then in Hieratic (governmental cursive type, a simpler form of Hieroglyphs used for texts unrelated to the Temple and Religion) and in Coptic, the same Egyptian language written in Greek letters. Since Champollion knew Greek, and had contacts with Egyptian Christian priests who spoke Coptic. The rest was easy.

Before the Rosetta Stone people thought Egyptian hieroglyphics were just magical symbols, but after the stone’s discovery the long mute voice of Ancient Egyptian civilization was heard again. Prayers, Literature and Poetry could now be understood. 

It was like the discovery of a long dead world.  

1878- In New Mexico Territory the climax of the Lincoln County Wars, a feud between cattle barons and smaller independent ranchers. John Tunstall's attorney Big Jim McSween and his men including outlaw Billy the Kid were surrounded by a large force of rancher Murphy’s men backed up by militia with a Gatling gun and a small cannon. The Murphy men set the house on fire and shot the defenders as they rushed out. Billy the Kid blasted his way out to freedom. Big Jim McSween tried to surrender but was shot down. 

1899- “The Newsies Strike” Hundreds of poor children in NYC who survived by selling penny newspapers, banded together and went on strike against William Randolph Hearst and Josef Pulitzer's newspaper empires. Despite lots of drama and threatened violence, Hearst and Pulitzer  eventually both gave in to their demands.

1900- The first line of the Paris Metro underground dedicated. Ligne 1 Porte Vincennes.

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

Popular Songs" Malinda's Wedding Day is #1

1932- writer Daphne du Maurier married General Frederick Browning.

1934- The Walt Disney studio signed a deal with the Lionel toy train company to produce a Mickey and Minnie wind up handcar. The sales were so good it actually saved the Lionel company from going bankrupt. 

1941 - British PM Winston Churchill launched his "V for Victory" campaign. By coincidence the letter "V" in morse code corresponded with the opening notes of Beethoven ‘s 5th symphony "Dit-Dit-Dit Daaah." making it the musical theme of the BBC overseas radio service war news. 

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

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

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

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

 

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for July 18, 2023

Birthdays: William Makepeace Thackeray, Chill Wills, Nelson Mandela, James Brolin, Elizabeth McGovern, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Hume Cronyn, Red Skelton, Hunter H. Thompson, Clifford Odets, Paul Verhoeven, John Glenn, Syd Mead, Vin Diesel is 56

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 17, 2023

Birthdays: James Cagney, John Jacob Astor I, Hyacinth Rigaud, Bernice Abbott, Chill Wills, Brian Trottier, Phoebe Snow, Daryl Lamonica, Prof. Peter Schickele a.k.a. PDQ Bach, Earl Stanley Gardner the creator of Perry Mason, Art Linkletter, Phyllis Diller,

Diane Carroll, animator Willie Ito is 89, David Hasslehoff is 71, Donald Sutherland is 88

1841 - British humor magazine Punch first published.

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

1937- the Nazis open an art exhibit of banned artworks and artists called Entartete Kunst- Degenerate Art. Works of Dali and Duchamp, Grosz, Lippschitz, Kandinsky and Miro, with appropriate insults underneath. The next day Hitler dedicated the Great German Art Collection, having cleansed the German art world for National Socialist art, mostly bad deco-greco nudes and dumb Nordic medieval fantasy scenes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1988- A home video tape was released of actor Rob Lowe having sex with two underage girls in his hotel room.

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 16, 2023

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

Orville Redenbacher, Roald Amundsen, Sunny Tufts, Barbera Stanwyck, Reuben Blades, Mary Baker-Eddy the founder of Christian Science, Phoebe Cates, Will Farrell is 57

.

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

1932- Cecil B. DeMille shot the scene in his film Sign of the Cross where Claudette Colbert took a bath in asses milk. Legend has it that DeMille insisted on real milk in the bath and that by the second day the hot studio lights had curdled it to a smelly cheese. But production notes show the scene was all shot in one day. DeMille always got away with sexy semi-nude scenes by putting them in biblical settings. After all, who would criticize a morality tale from the Good Book? 

1935- The first parking meter set up in Oklahoma City.

1936 - 1st x-ray photo of arterial circulation, Rochester, NY

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

1953- The story begins of a murder confessed by insurance investigator Walter Neff into a Dictaphone in the 1944 movie Double Indemnity. 

1954- Groundbreaking for the construction of Disneyland.

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

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

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

1969- Apollo 11 blasted off for the Moon.

1994- Comet Schoendacher-Levy 6 impacted with the Planet Jupiter, giving scientists a spectacular ringside seat to the processes of the creation of the Universe.

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 14, 2023

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

1882- BILLY THE KID SHOT- Fort Sumner New Mexico sheriff Pat Garrett hid in a closet in the Kid's hotel room and shot him in the back as he was sitting on the bed, taking his boots off. Billy's last words were:" Who's there?"  Backshooting was how Billy killed most of his victims. Billy was 21. After blasting away, Pat Garret panicked and scrambled out into the street without waiting to see if his shots had their effect.  

Billy had such a lethal reputation that a small crowd stood in fear outside his room for nearly an hour until they were sure the Kid wasn't just playing possum but was really dead.  Even though Garrett was practically illiterate, he wrote several best-selling books on the incident, heavily embellished by pulp ghostwriter Ned Buntline. Eventually Pat Garrett too was shot in the back, this time in an argument over ownership of some goats.

1892- Civil War veterans who were wounded in service were awarded an additional $50 pension by the government. Female nurses of that conflict were awarded a $12 pension. Political satirist and combat veteran Ambrose Bierce returned the money with the note" Thank you, but this was not part of the original contract when I signed on to become an assassin for my Country."

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

90th Anniversary 1933- Well Blow Me Down!- Max Fleischer's first "Popeye the Sailor" cartoon debuted. The character was first created by Elzie Segar for his Thimble Theater comic strip. Based on a eccentric old neighbor who smoked a pipe and liked to get into fights. Vaudevillian Red Pepper Sam provided his salty mumbles throughout the post-sync track. Fleischer soon realized the improvised mumbling was funnier than the written dialogue. When Sam asked for more money than Max Fleischer thought he was worth, he replaced him with assistant animator Jack Mercer, who remained his voice until his death in 1984.

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

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

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

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

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

1969- The movie Easy Rider premiered.

1997- Johnny Bravo premiered on TV.

2015- After a nine-year voyage, the space probe New Horizon made a closer flyby of the planet Pluto than any spacecraft had ever done. Scientists has dismissed Pluto as a shapeless rock asteroid. Horizon showed Pluto was perfectly round, had an ice cap, and even a slightly blue atmosphere. 

Tom Sito's animation almanac for July 13, 2023

Birthdays: French Admiral Bailly de Suffren, Cheech Marin, Father Flannagan, Bob Crane, Cameron Crowe, Woye Solenka, Dave Garroway, Chef Paul Prudhomme, Michael Spinks, Film special effects artist Jim Danforth, Dr. Erno Rubik inventor of the Rubik’s Cube, Patrick Stewart is 83, Harrison Ford is 81, Tom Kenny the voice of Spongebob Squarepants is 62, Mike Ploog is 81, Computer artist Lillian Schwartz is 96

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

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

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

1925- Walt Disney and Lillian Bounds marry. She was one of Disney’s first employees hired. Lillian was one of the first female animation ink & paint artists. She would also cover the secretaries front desk on occasion. After Walt’s death she was central to the creation of the Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown and the Disney Family Museum in SF.

1930- Six thousand people in formal evening wear crowded into London’s Albert Hall to hear a special message from Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. It was extra special, because everyone knew Conan-Doyle died five days ago.  Arthur Conan-Doyle was an advocate of spiritualism. He declared if anyone could get a message through from beyond the grave, he would.  An empty chair was placed on stage in hopes of his apparition would take a seat. Hymns were sung and after long embarrassing silences, a clairvoyant medium cried out that she could see Sir Arthur.  Most saw nothing and thought it was all a big humbug. 

1930 – David Sarnoff the head of the NBC radio network said in the NY Times," The new invention of Television would be a theater in every home". Sounded crazy back then. Critics said it would require one room of the house be darkened, and they doubted people would just sit still that long. Television did not to really catch on until twenty years later.

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

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

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

1981- Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits opened.

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 12, 2023

 Question: What was a potlatch ceremony and who did them?

Yesterday’s question answered below: Among medieval peddlers at your door, what was a rag & bone man?

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 History for 7/12/2023 

Birthdays: Gaius Julius Caesar, Henry David Thoreau, Impressionist painter Eugene Boudin, Oscar Hammerstein, Kirsten Flagstad, Andrew Wyeth, Pablo Neruda, George Eastman, Milton Berle, Cheryl Ladd, Van Cliburn, Buckminster Fuller, George Washington Carver, Josiah Wedgewood- of Wedgewood china and pottery, Michelle Rodriguez, Richard Simmons, Krysty Yamaguchi, Bill Cosby is 86, Ben Burt- George Lucas’ sound effects guru who created the sounds of Darth Vader and R2D2, is 75.

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

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

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

1914 – Young reform school graduate Babe Ruth makes his baseball debut, as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

1928 - 1st televised tennis match.

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

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

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

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

1990- TV series Northern Exposure premiered.

2015- In Disney World Florida the exhibit The Magic of Disney Animation was closed down.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for July 11, 2023

Birthdays: Robert the Bruce, John Quincy Adams, Sir Thomas Bowdler, E.B. White, Yul Brynner, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leon Spinks, Tab Hunter, Giorgio Armani and Martin Scorcese are both 80, Sela Ward, Kimberly “Little Kim’ Jones, Stephen Lang is 71

1855- An earthquake knocked down Los Angeles -again.

1906- Nordisk Films in Copenhagen founded. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1972- Beautiful actress and peace activist Jane Fonda toured Hanoi, North Vietnam. At one point she was photographed seated at an anti-aircraft gun. The same kind used to shoot down US planes. For that she was labeled “Hanoi Jane” and condemned by veterans’ groups for the rest of her life, even into her 80s. She said, “That was the worst decision of my life”. 

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

1979- The world held its breath and covered their heads as the first U.S. space station SKYLAB fell back to earth. 77 tons of space debris in 500 pieces falling around Australia and the Indian Ocean. Luckily it didn’t hit anyone, although chunks were imbedded in an office building in Perth.

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 10, 2023

Birthdays: John Calvin, Marcel Proust, James McNeill Whistler, Nicholas Tesla, Carl Orff, Camille Pissarro, Adolphus Busch the founder of Budweiser, George DiChirico, Jacky "Legs" Diamond, Arlo Guthrie, Jake LaMotta, Joe Shuster- one of the creators of Superman, Fred Gywnne, David Brinkley, Arthur Ashe, Queen Camilla, Jessica Simpson is 43, Chiwetel Ejiofor is 46.

1588- French philosopher Michel de la Montaigne spent one night in the Bastille prison. The Bordeaux native had arrived in Paris in the midst of the nasty political fight between Huguenots and Catholics and was arrested as a traitor. Queen Mother Catherine de Medicis ordered his prompt release.

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

1881 -Jesse James robbed his last bank, The Davis and Sexton Bank of Iowa. Then he changed his name to Mr. Howard and tried to live quietly with his wife Zerelda Mimms in Missouri. He called her “Z”. 

1890- Wyoming became a state.

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

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

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

1976- Another victim of the computer revolution. the last wooden slide rule produced. The K&E company gave it to the Smithsonian.

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 8, 2023

B-Dazes: Jean de LaFontaine, John D. Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller, Kathe Kollwitz, Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, Louis Jordan, Billy Eckstine, Steve Lawrence, Percy Grainger, Cynthia Gregory, Phillip Johnson, Kim Darby, Marty Feldman, Roone Arledge, Kevin Bacon is 65, Billy Crudup,  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Angelica Huston, Raffi , Jeffrey Tambor

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

1835- The Liberty Bell cracked. It rang for the Declaration of Independence and was being rung for the death of Chief Justice John Marshall.

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

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

1911- Burbank incorporated as a city. 

1918- A young American ambulance driver serving in Italy during World War I was badly wounded by a mortar shell. As he was being carried off, he was also hit by machine gun fire. Doctors removed 37 pieces of shrapnel and bits of glass from his body. His name was Ernest Hemingway. His long recovery and love affair with his nurse he later worked into his novel "A Farewell To Arms".

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

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

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

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

1998- An original 1477 William Caxton copy of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" became the world's most expensive book when it was sold for £4,621,500 to billionaire oil heir Paul Getty.

Tom Sito's ANimation ALmanac for July 7, 2023

Birthdays: Joseph Jacquard- of the Jacquard Loom 1752, Gustav Mahler, Satchel Page, Ringo Starr is 83, Doc Severinsen, Robert Heinlein, William Kuntsler, Gian Carlo Menotti, animator Ken Harris, Shelley Duval is 74, Ted Cassidy-Lurch in the Adams Family, Michelle Kwan, David McCullough, Pierre Cardin, and according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this is the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. John Watson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's ANimation Almanac for July 6, 2023

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

Nancy Reagan, Sylvester Stallone is 77, Merv Griffin, Janet Leigh, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sebastian Cabot, James Bodrero, The Dalai Lama, LaVerne Andrews of the Andrews Sisters, Geoffrey Rush is 72, Ned Beatty, President George W. Bush is 77, Fifty Cent is 48, Jennifer Saunders is 65.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1965 - Rock group Jefferson Airplane formed.

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

1996- Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump opened in theaters.

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

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for July 5, 2023

Birthdays: P.T. Barnum, Beatrix Potter, Mrs. Sarah Siddons, Jean Cocteau, Admiral David Farragut, Len Lye, George Pompidou, Shirley Knight, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Milburn Stone (Doc on Gunsmoke), Warren Oates, Bill Watterson, Henry Cabot Lodge IV, Eva Green is 44, Huey Lewis is 73, Edie Falco is 60, Animator-educator Dave Hilberman

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

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

1933- Germans began building the Autobahn, a system of highways that became the envy of the world. The Bauhaus designers of the autobahn invented the ideas we take for granted today- the Cloverleaf Exit, Blending Lanes and the central meridian.

1935- The Wagner Act passed congress, decreeing all American workers have the right to collective bargaining and to form unions. When Walt Disney fired Art Babbitt and caused the DIsney Strike, it was in defiance of the Wagner Act.

1943- Betty Grable married bandleader Harry James.

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

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

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

1989- The first episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld.

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

2002- International Professional Women’s Tennis had become dominated by two amazing American sisters, Venus and Serena Williams. This day Serena defeated Venus to win Wimbledon. Of 17 Wimbledon Women’s singles since, the Williams sisters won 14 of them. 

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for July 4, 2023

Birthdays: Jean Pierre Blanchard the balloonist-1753, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Calvin Coolidge, Rube Goldberg, Louis Armstrong, Edward Walker the inventor of the Lava Lamp, Mayer Lansky, Tokyo Rose, Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Emerson Boozer, Neil Simon, Mitch Miller, Gina Lollobrigida, George Steinbrenner, Ann Landers, Ron Kovic, Geraldo Rivera, Victoria Abril is 64, Pam Shriver, Rene Laloux, Gloria Stuart, Malia Obama, Eva Marie Saint is 99

1848- The Communist Manifesto published by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1933- In San Francisco Bay, the work began on the Oakland Bay Bridge.

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

1966- President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act.

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

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

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

1981- UPA producer Steve Bosustow passed away.

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

1982- Ozzie Ozbourne married Sharon Ozbourne. 

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

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

2012- The Higgs-Boson is a subatomic particle. It existed only in theory until in 

this day, the CERN Large Hadron Collider announced they had observed one. 

2022- Kazuki Takahashi, the millionaire creator of the manga craze Yu-Gi-Oh, drowned off the coast of Okinawa while trying to rescue a young American girl swimmer caught in a rip current. He heroically saved the girl, when a freak wave took him. He was 60.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for July 3, 2023

Birthdays: King Louis XI of France "the Spider King"1423, Franz Kafka, Mr. Preserved Fish -New York Congressman 1819, Dave Barry, Leos Janacek, John Singleton Copley, Ken Russell, Tom Stoppard, George Sanders, Peter Fountain, Yeardley Smith, Tom Cruise is 61, Kevin Hart is 43

1931- The Cab Calloway Orchestra recorded 'The St. James Infirmary Blues."

1937- In California the Del Mar Racetrack opened.  Owner Bing Crosby personally welcomed the first customers to his track. Called “ Where the Surf Meets the Turf.”

1943- Chuck Jones short Wackiki Rabbit debuted.

1969- Brian Jones, having been kicked out of the Rolling Stones just days before -- drowned in his swimming pool.  His home was once the estate of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne. 

1969- On the same day, John and Yoko Lennon were almost killed in a car crash, along with John's son Julian and Yoko's daughter Kyoko.

1971- The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison, was found dead of a heart attack in his bathtub in Paris. He was 28. 

1971- In Sweden, the first laser eye surgery was performed.

1985- Robert Zemeckis’ film Back to the Future opened. 

1991- James Cameron’s Terminator 2 Judgement Day, premiered.

1996- Independence Day, by Roland Emmerich opened.

2002- Powerpuff Girls the Movie, premiered.