Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for Aug 31, 2023

Birthdays: Caligula 12AD, Commodus 161AD, Amilcare Ponchielli, Eldridge Cleaver, Buddy Hackett, James Coburn, Itshak Perleman is 76, Van Morrison, Arthur Godfrey, Richard Baseheart, Rocky Marciano. Alan J. Lerner, Hugh Harman, Maria Montressori (of the Montressori Method of education), Hugh Harman, William Saroyan, Richard Gere is 73, Chris Tucker is 50. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1935- Disney cartoon Plutos’ Judgement Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1955- 1st sun-powered automobile demonstrated, Chicago, Ill.

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 30. 2023

Birthdays: Mary Shelley, Jacques Louis David, Huey Long, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Massey, Ted Williams, John Blondell, Nancy Kulp, Timothy Bottoms, Jean-Claude Killy, Shirley Booth, John Landis, Tug McGraw, Stephen Silver, R. Crumb is 80, Lewis Black is 75, Cameron Diaz is 51

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

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

1939- The last peacetime voyage of the HMS Queen Mary left Southampton evacuating Americans fleeing the impending war in Europe. Among the crowd was a large contingent of Hollywood stars like Robert Montgomery, Loretta Young, Bob Hope and Jack Warner who planned to attend the first Cannes Film Festival (postponed until 1946).

1939- The first Marvel comic book went on sale. Marvel comic #1, introducing The Human Torch and the Submariner.

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

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

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

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

1983- Lt. Guion Bluford, the first African American in Space, went up on the Challenger space shuttle. 

1992- Astronomers Jane Luu and David Jewitt discovered the Kuiper Belt. That out at the edge of our Solar System, where Pluto is, is a second asteroid belt of even more particles and debris. 

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 28, 2023

Birthdays: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Jack "King" Kirby. George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham- minister of James I, Sean O'Flagherty, Donald O'Connor, Charles Boyer, Karl Boehm, Bruno Bettleheim, Disney designer Ferdinand Horvath, Ben Gazzara, Janet Evans, Ron 'Louisiana Lightning' Guidry, Nancy Kulp, Daniel Stern, Shania Twain, anim historian Charles Solomon, Jack Black is 54, Rita Coolidge is 62. 

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

1850- Lohengrin, the first opera written by Richard Wagner, premiered in Weimar. The Third Act chorus “Treulich Gefuhrt” became famous for weddings as “Here Comes the Bride, All Dressed in White”. Wagner asked his friend Franz Liszt to produce the opera because he was in exile for his political views. Wagner himself did not see Lohengrin performed until 1861. 

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

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

60th Anniv 1963- Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the climax of the first ' Poor People's March 'on Washington”. Organizer A. Phillip Randolph conceived a poor people’s march taking weeks not unlike the Bonus Marchers of 1929. The sympathetic John F. Kennedy administration prevailed upon them to keep it to one day to reduce the chance of violence and maximize media exposure.  They had planned for 100,000 but they got 400,000. Movie stars like Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, James Garner, Paul Newman and Charlton Heston attended.

1990- Computer pioneer Sandy Lerner was fired from the company she founded- Cisco Systems.

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

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TOm Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 17, 2023

Birthdays: Man Ray, Martha Ray, LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson), Hegel, C.S. Forester, Hannibal Hamlin- Abe Lincolns first term vice president, Barbara Bach, Theodore Dreiser, Lady Antonia Fraser, Tommy Sands, Tuesday Weld is 80, Mangesuthu Buthelezi, Paul Rubens-aka Pee Wee Herman, Wayne Shorter

1814- poet Percy Shelley eloped with Mary, the only daughter of John Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft

1910- The first radio message sent from an airplane.

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

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

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

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

1955- The first Guinness Book of World Records published.

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

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

1964- The movie version of Mary Poppins premiered.

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

    

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

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

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

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 26, 2023

 Birthdays:  Sir Robert Walpole the first British Prime Minister, Mother Theresa, Albert the Prince Consort, John Wilkes Booth, Guilliame Appollinaire who coined the term Surrealism, General Maxwell Taylor, Christopher Isherwood, McCauley Culkin is 43, Geraldine Ferarro, Dr. Lee DeForrest, Ben Bradlee, Barbet Schroeder, Branford Marsalis, Chris Pine is 43, Melissa McCarthy is 53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1961- The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto dedicated.

1964- The Tokyo subway system opens. 

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

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

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

1997- Special effects house Boss Studios, closed. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 25, 2023

Birthdays:  King Ludwig II the Mad of Bavaria, Walt Kelly, Bret Hart, Lola Montez (flamenco dancing mistress of Ludwig I, King of Bavaria), Alan Pinkerton, Clara Bow, Ruby Keeler, Monty Hall, Van Johnson, Willis Reed, Frederick Forsythe, Wayne Shorter, Billy Ray Cyrus, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim, Leonard Bernstein, Sean Connery, Gene Simmons, Anne Archer, Elvis Costello is 68, Tim Burton is 64, Claudia Schiffer is 52

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

1916- President Woodrow Wilson created the National Parks Service out of 35 separate departments.

100 Years Ago- 1923 Young filmmaker Walt Disney wrote to NY Producer M.J. Winkler, that he was no longer affiliated with The Laugh-O-Grams company in Kansas City.” I am establishing a studio in Los Angeles for the purpose of producing the new and novel series of cartoons I have previously written to you about.” This will become the Alice in Cartoonland series.       

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

1972- Blacula, starring William Marshall opened in theaters.

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

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

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

 

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

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

TOm Sito's Animation Fun Facts for Aug 14, 2023

 Quiz: What is a vole?

Birthdays: Jorge Luis Borges, William Wilberforce, Marlee Matlin, Yasir Arafat, Max Beerbom, Cal Ripken Jr, Joshua Lionel Cowan the inventor of Lionel toy electric trains, Kenny Baker-C3PO in Star Wars, Stephen Fry is 67, Durward Kirby- 1960s T.V. announcer, Duke Kahanamoku-1890- Olympic champion who popularized Surfing, Kirk Wise, Dave Chappelle is 51, Steve Guttenberg is 66

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

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

1939- Mr. Leslie Mitchell became the first British Television announcer.

1942- Walt Disney’s film Saludos Amigos received its world premiere in Rio De Janiero.

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

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

1973- One month after Bruce Lee’s death, his last film Enter The Dragon opened in the US to wild acclaim. It cost $800,000 to make and grossed over $140 million. It renewed interest in the late star and helped spawn the Chinese Martial Arts craze in the US. 

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

1995- Microsoft's Windows 95 introduced.

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

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

 

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 22, 2023

Birthdays: George Herriman the creator of Krazy Kat, Dorothy Parker, Claude DeBussy, Johnny Lee Hooker, Denis Papin 1647 inventor of the Pressure Cooker, Leni Reifenstahl, General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, Paul Molitor, Bill Parcells, Max Vilander, Carl “Big Yaz” Yazstremski, Dyanna Nyad, Deng Xiao Ping, Henry Cartier Bresson, Valerie Harper, Ray Bradbury, Cindy Williams, Kristen Wiig is 50

1715 – Handel’s "Watermusic" premiered on the Thames River to mark celebrations of the Peace ending the 15 year long War of Spanish Succession. 

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

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

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

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

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

1939- The first aerosol spray can.

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

1953- The French government closed the Devil's Island prison colony.

1976- The protest at the Seabrook Nuclear Plant in New Hampshire. The birth of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement.

1984 – The last Volkswagen Rabbit produced.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for Aug 21, 2023

Birthdays: Christopher Robin Milne-1920, King Phillip II Augustus of France- 1165, King William IV of England- 1765, Aubrey Beardsley, Count Basie, Wilt (Wilt the Stilt) Chamberlain, Friz Freleng, Kenny Rogers, Princess Margaret, Matthew Broderick, Vance Gerry, Basil Poliodouris, Steve Hillenberg the creator of Spongebob Squarepants, Peter Weir is 79, Kim Catrall is 67, Carrie Anne Moss is 56

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

1897- Ransom Eli Olds opened the Olds Auto Works in Detroit. The produced a new horseless carriage he called the Oldsmobile.

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

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

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

1929- Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo marry.

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

1935- Big band leader Benny Goodman was having a tough time. His band lost its radio gig when the show Let’s Dance was canceled. So, he and his musicians drove across the country in a small caravan of cars playing various venues on the road. They were told in small towns to stop playing that newfangled Swing music and stick to old standards. One manager in Denver told him:” Don’t you guys know any waltzes? ” By the time they arrived in Los Angeles this day they were thoroughly demoralized. But today when they set up in the Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood the crowd was immense! And these kids wanted to jitterbug to the new Swing music! So hit it, Jackson, Awl Reet, Awl Reet!  

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

1959- Hawaii became the 50th state.

1961- The British colonial authorities release Kenyan nationalist leader Njomo Kenyatta from prison. 

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

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

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

1987- The movie Dirty Dancing opened.

1989- The Voyager II space probe flew by the planet Neptune. It was discovered Neptune had a faint ring like Saturn and rotated on its side- south-north instead of west to east. Scientists speculated the atmospheric pressure to be so great that it could actually rain diamonds.

1995- Bill Gates announced Microsoft Windows 95.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 20, 2023

Birthdays: President Benjamin Harrison, Sukenoba Nishikawa, Bernardo O’Higgins, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, H.P. Lovecraft, Art Tatum, Issac Hayes, Connie Chung, Jacqueline Susanne, Rajiv Ghandi, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Joan Allen is 67, Fred Durst, Alan Reed -the original voice of Fred Flintstone, Slobodan Milosovic’, Animator Dan Haskett, Amy Adams is 49

1882 -Peter Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" premiered in Moscow. The composer said of all his works the two pieces he liked the least were the 1812 Overture and the Nutcracker Suite. Overture 1812 was Richard Nixon’s favorite classical piece.

1971. FBI documents prove this day the Nixon White House began to covertly investigate journalist Daniel Schorr because of his anti-war editorials. President Richard Nixon kept an enemies list of people he imagined to be opponents to his administration. It began with obvious liberals like George McGovern and Ted Kennedy, then expanded as far as June Foray the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 19, 2023

B-Days: Roman Emperor Probus (232AD), Orville Wright, Ring Lardner, Ogden Nash, Alfred Lunt, George Enesco, jockey Willie Shoemaker, Malcolm Forbes, Tipper Gore, Gene Roddenberry, Colleen Moore the It Girl, Jill St. John, Ginger Baker, Dawn Steel, John Stamos, Peter Gallagher is 67, Kyra Sedgwick is 58, Matthew Perry, Jonathan Frakes is 71, Bill Clinton is 77

1692- Salem Mass, The pilgrims executed four people as witches. One was a senile old woman who just looked scary like a witch, and another was a Caribbean servant named Tituba who liked to tell children ghost stories. Another hanged, Rev George Burroughs, was a distant ancestor of Walt Disney.

1891 - William Huggins described the astronomical application of the spectrum.

1892- New Jersey pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires introduced the first commercially produced bottles of a new drink he dubbed “Root Beer”. Root Beer from sassafras root had been a traditional recipe since colonial times, but Hires was the first to market it.

1909- The Brickyard is born. The first Indianapolis 500 auto race.

1933 The Walt Disney short Lullaby Land released. Directed by Wilfred Jackson.

1955 - WINS radio, announces it would not play "copy" white cover versions of black R&B.  DJs must play Fats Domino's "Ain't It A Shame," not Pat Boone's. In 1957 Little Richards “Tuttie-Fruitie” never got higher than 17th in the Billboard Charts, while Pat Boones version, by his own admission awful, went to number one.

1957- The NY Giants baseball team voted to move to San Francisco.

1960- The Russians launched a Sputnik capsule into space with two dogs- Belka and Strelka, 2 rats and 40 mice. They recovered this orbiting zoo the next day. The first sending of life into space and returning them safely.

1973 - Kris Kristofferson wed Rita Coolidge.

1977- Groucho Marx, the last surviving Marx Brother, died at age 86. In his final years Groucho had rewrote his will in favor of his young personal secretary Erin Fleming. This spawned a furious legal battle between Fleming and the Marx family.

2004- Google stock first went public on the stock market.

2012- Director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Days of Thunder) jumped to his death off a bridge in Los Angeles. He was 68.

2335 – According to Star Trek the Next Generation, this is the birthday of William T Riker, in Valdez Alaska, first officer of the Enterprise.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug. 17, 2023

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Birthdays: Davy Crocket, Mae West, Marcus Garvey, Sam Goldwyn- born Schmuel Gelbfisz, Harry Hopkins, Monte Wooley, Boog Powell, Belinda Carlisle, Guillermo Vilas, V.S. Naipul, Jim Courier, Donnie Wahlberg, Belinda Carlisle, Maureen O’Hara, Sean Penn is 63, Martha Coolidge is 78, Robert DeNiro is 80

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

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

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

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

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

1960- George Pal’s The Time Machine opened in NY.

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

1979- Monty Python’s The Life of Brian premiered. Directed by Terry Jones. Just before principal photography was due to begin, a key sponsor got cold feet about the dodgy religious connotations and withdrew their funding. At the last-minute Beatle George Harrison stepped in and donated $3 million of the $4 million dollar budget. He said he just wanted to see it. “ It is the world’s most expensive theatre ticket.”

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for August 16, 2023

Birthdays: Fess Parker, Karl Stockhausen, George Meany, Charles Bukowski, Menachem Begin, Otto Mesmer the creator of Felix the Cat, Myron Grim Natwick the creator of Betty Boop, Hal Foster the creator of Prince Valiant, Kathie Lee Gifford, Edie Gorme, Bill Evans, Leslie Ann Warren, Angela Bassett is 65, Julie Numar is 90, Robert Culp, James Cameron is 68, Bruce Beresford, Steve Carrell is 62, Madonna, aka Louise Ciccone of Bay City Michigan, is 65

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

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

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

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

1954- First issue of Sports Illustrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2019- Animator Richard Williams died at age 86.

Animation Fun Facts for Aug 15, 2023

Birthdays: Napoleon Bonaparte, Leon Theremin- inventor of that weird electronic musical instrument that is in all those 1950s flying saucer movies, Samuel Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia 1685, Lawrence of Arabia, Ethel Barrymore, Huntz Hall, Bill Baird, Edna Ferber, Sir Robert Bolt, Rose-Marie, Linda Ellerbee, Gene Upshaw, Oscar Peterson, Shimon Peres, Mike “Mannix” Connors, Nicholas Roeg, Animator Dick Lundy, Julia Child, Anthony Andrews, Ben Afleck is 50, Debra Messing is 54, Jennifer Lawrence is 32. 

1843- Tivoli Gardens opened in Copenhagen. One of the oldest amusement parks in the world. King Christian said. “When people are amused, they don’t worry about politics.” Hans Christian Andersen was a frequent visitor. One hundred years later, Walt Disney visited to get inspiration for his Disneyland.

1848 - M Waldo Hanchett patented the dental chair.

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

1911- Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco shortening.

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

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

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

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

1958 - Buddy Holly wed Maria Santiago.

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

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

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

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

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

1973- Westworld with Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin opened.

1977- THE WOW SIGNAL- Project SETI- Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence- heard something.  It sounds like static to us, but it was a strong electromagnetic signal on a regular narrow band AM radio frequency emanating from deep space.  So far, it has never been adequately explained away or repeated. SETI scientist Jerry Ehmen noted in his log for that night “….wow!” 

1979- Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now” opened. Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, young Harrison Ford and even younger Lawrence Fishburne. Animation director Ronnie Del Carmen (Inside Out) got his first job as a student painting scenery.

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for August 14, 2023

Birthdays: Gary Larson, Erwin "Magic" Johnson, Lina Wertmuller, David Crosby, Alice Ghostly, Buddy Greco, Nehemiah Persoff, The 20's Parisian nightclub singer Bricktop, Dick Lundy, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, C.S. Watson, James Horner, Rene Goscinny, Wim Wenders, Emmanuele Beart, Halle Berry is 57, Mila Kunis is 40, Steve Martin is 78

1457- The first printed Gutenburg Bible finished. One agent of Gutenberg’s bringing the first shipment of bibles to Paris was arrested for witchcraft by the locals.  They thought it was humanly impossible for one person to make so many identical books without the aid of black magic.

1873 - "Field & Stream" magazine began publishing.

1908- The first international beauty pageant held in Kent, England.

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

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

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

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

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

1962 - NASA test pilot Joseph Walker takes the X-15 supersonic plane to 60,000 ft.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

2126- Get your catchers mitts out! Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass very close by the Earth.

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Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 13, 2023

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

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

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

1942-  Disney's Bambi opened in theaters nationwide. Today the film looks quaint but in its time artists felt it was as realistic as artists could attain. Designer Rico LeBrun had a hunter friend bring in a real deer he shot in the Sierras. LeBrun set up drawing and anatomy sessions to study the dead animal. But LeBrun was so inspired by the opportunity he refused to dispose of the carcass even after several days it began to smell badly and attract flies. Finally the other animators waited until LeBrun had left for lunch and tossed the rancid thing.

1946- MGM cartoon Northwest Hounded Police. One of the best examples of the 'Tex Avery Take" - used since in films like The Mask, Roger Rabbit and Casper.

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

1960- French West Africa declared independence from France and became the nations of Chad and the Central African Republic. 

1967- The World’s Fair at Montreal Canada, Expo-67 Held the opening reception of its World Exhibition of Animation Cinema. Famous animators from around the world gathered in a special reception. Opening night featured a screening of Disney’s Dumbo, and animator Bill Tytla was saluted. Attendees included Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, June Foray, Art Babbitt, Walter Lantz, Dusan Vukotic’, Bruno Bozzetto, Dave Fleischer and more.

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 12, 2023

Birthdays: King George IV, Cecil B. DeMille, The alien Alf- 1757, Cantinflas, Buck Owens, Edith Hamilton, Diamond Jim Brady, screenwriter William Goldman, Mtsislav Rostropovitch, Xenia Sharpe (educator who invented the children’s reader Dick & Jane) Kathy Lee Bates-the author of the song America the Beautiful, Klara Schickelgruber- Hitlers mom, Dominique Swain, Pete Samprass, Sam Fuller, John Casale-I'm not Fredo, George Hamilton is 84, Casey Affleck is 48.

1658- Happy Birthday NYPD! The first city police force in America was set up in New Amsterdam 

1833- The City of Chicago was founded. Chicago is an Indian word meaning “wild onions”.  The site of Chicago had been mentioned by explorers like LaSalle since 1688, and a man of African-European descent named Jean Baptiste Pont du Sable homesteaded on the site in the 1780s. He has been called the Founder of Chicago.

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

1898- Annexation Day in Hawaii. The U.S. formally took over the Kingdom of Hawaii. The government of Queen Liliokalani had been overthrown by a group of Yankee sugar plantation owners led by Sanford Dole and handed over to U.S. gunboats in the harbor.

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

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

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

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

1958- A Great Day in Harlem-  Photographer Art Kane, working for Esquire Magazine, arranged a group photo of 57 of the most important figure in Jazz music and the Harlem Renaissance all standing together on one stoop in Harlem, NY. Count Basie, Thelonius Monk, Maryann McPartland, Sonny Rollins, Gene Krupa and more.

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

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

`

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

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

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

2008- TV entertainer and producer Merv Griffin died at age 82. The creator of shows like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Merv Griffin Show, his last post on his website was " I was planning to go on vacation, but this is not the destination I intended."

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 11, 2023

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

1866 - World's 1st roller skating rink opens (Newport RI)

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

1909-The first S.O.S.-'Save Our Ship' Morse signal sent by the liner S.S. Arapahoe off Cape Hatteras North Carolina.

1932- The original Rin Tin Tin died. The German shepherd dog was the first animal movie star. Legend was he was rescued from a WWI battlefield by a doughboy named Lee Duncan who called him "Rinty". Later in Hollywood people joked he was more spoiled than any human star. Before sound he was the main moneymaker of struggling little Warner Bros studio. Jack Warner called him “Our little rent check.” When the Academy Award was created in 1927 there was a semi-serious discussion whether to give the very first Best Actor Oscar to Rin Tin Tin. 
In 1967 Warners admitted they had bred 16 duplicate dogs in case anything happened to him.

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

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

1946- Playwright Moss Hart married Miss America Kittie Carlisle. 

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

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

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

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

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

1973- American Graffiti opened nationwide. Despite good previews Universal exec Ned Tannen hated the film and threatened to shelve it or cut his losses by sending it direct to TV. Francis Ford Coppola, coming off his Godfather success, offered to buy the rights to the movie and take it elsewhere. Tannen backed down. American Graffitti cost $777,000 to make. And it made $140 million. Making George Lucas a serious Hollywood player. Ned Tannen’s name was used as the bad guy bully Biff Tannen in Back to The Future.

1995- The Walt Disney short Runaway Brain, featuring Mickey Mouse, premiered. Directed by Chris Bailey and written by Tim Hauser.

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

2014- Comedian/Actor Robin Williams committed suicide in his San Francisco home.  He had been battling depression and could feel something was wrong with his body. It was later discovered he had Diffuse Lewy Body Dementia, a form of early onset Alzheimer’s. Then incurable. He was 63.

Tom Sito's animation alamanac for Aug 10, 2023

Birthdays: Alexander Glauzunov, Billie Holiday, Eddie Fisher, Leo Fender, Herbert Hoover, Polish King Jan III Sobieski, Norma Shearer, Rhonda Fleming, Jimmy Dean, Justin Theroux, Rosanna Arquette is 64, Antonio Banderas is 63

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

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

1928- Calvin Coolidge dedicated the cornerstone of the monument at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. The last time a President of the United States rode a horse to attend an official event. 

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

1962- Amazing Fantasy comic #152 hit the newsstands, introducing a new character called The Amazing Spiderman, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko.

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

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

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

1978- Ford announces a recall of its Pinto series car after tests prove when bumped from behind the auto’s gas tank explodes into flames.

1979- Britain's first official nudist beach opened at Brighton.

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

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

2001- Warner Bros film Osmosis Jones opened in theaters. directed by Piet Kroon and Tom Sito

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 9, 2023

Birthdays: King Henry V of England, John Dryden, Sir Issac Walton-author of the Compleat Angler, Melanie Griffith, Whitney Houston, David Steinberg, Bob Cousy, Jill St. John, Robert Shaw, Robert Aldrich, Sam Elliot is 79, Gillian Anderson is 55, Pamela Travers –the creator of Mary Poppins, Marvin Minsky, Eric Bana is 57, Audrey Tautou is 47, Philippe Bergeron is 64

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

1896- Actors Equity formed, the first actors union. 

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

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

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

1929- Hollywood theater mogul Alexander Pantages was convicted of assaulting a young woman in a broom closet. The conviction was later overturned. The young woman, Eunice Pringle, later admitted that Joe Kennedy, who was trying to buy out Pantages' theatre chain for his RKO, paid her $10,000 to falsely accuse Pantages of rape. It was the first successful defense case of attorney Jerry Geisler, who became famous for getting movie stars and other Hollywood elites out of trouble with the law. The word in the studios when a movie star was naughty was “Get me Geisler!” 

1936- Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. Host head of state Adolph Hitler refused to shake hands with him. 

1942- The premiere of Walt Disney’s Bambi.

1944- Antoine Du Saint-Exupery, the author of the Little Prince, died when he crashed his fighter plane. For many years the official story was his plane crash was an accident. In 1998 experts found an old German journalist named Horst Rippert who confessed that as a Luftwaffe pilot he shot him down in air combat. He didn’t know it was Saint-Exupery and was an admirer of his writing. The main protagonist of The Little Prince was an aviator who crashed his plane.

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

1960- Near Cuernavaca Mexico, Harvard professor Timothy Leary took some magic mushrooms and experienced his first hallucinogenic trip. He called it “ a conversion.”

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

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

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

1969- The Haunted Mansion attraction opened at Disneyland.

1975- Hurricane Belle destroyed the gulf coast. 

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for August 8, 2023

Birthdays: Emiliano Zapata. Esther Williams, Gene Deitch, Dino DeLaurentis, Keith Carradine is 73, Rory Calhoun, Mel Tillis, Martin Brest, Peter Weir, Connie Stevens, Patricia Arquette, Dustin Hoffman is 85, Lee Unkrich is 56, Mamoru Oshii is 72

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

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

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

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

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

1964 - Rolling Stones 1st Dutch concert.

1973- Ralph Bakshi’s Heavy Traffic released.

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

2008- The Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony, using 20,000 dancers. As director Zhang Yimou said “Hey, we’ve got the people…”

Tom Sito's Animation Alamanac for Aug 7, 2023

 Quiz: What is the difference between a missile and a ballistic missile?

Yesterday’s answer below: What is an “eminence grise”.

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History for 8/7/2023

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Constantius II, Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene, Mata Hari, Rassan Rolling Kirk, Dr. Ralphe Bunche, Nicholas Ray, Dr. Richard Leakie, Grandma Moses, Stan Freberg, James Randi, Billy Burke aka Glenda the Good Witch, Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, Garrison Keillor, Animator Rudy Ising, David Duchovny is 63, Charlize Theron is 48 

1919- the First Actor’s Equity Strike.

1931 Jazz trumpeter Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke, died at 29 of drink and drugs. Bix along with his idol Louis Armstrong was considered one of the first jazz musicians to popularize the solo-riff, where in the body of a song the soloist would depart from the arrangement and improvise, like a cadenza in classical music. 

1933-The first "Alley-Oop" comic strip.

1968- James Brown recorded “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”, at the Vox Studios in Los Angeles. The single became a clarion call for the Black Power movement in the U.S. 

1970 - Christine McVie joined the band Fleetwood Mac.

1970 – The first computer chess tournament.

1974- French daredevil Phillipe Petit strung a tightrope between the two 110 story towers of NY’s World Trade Center and walked across it. As New Yorkers watched in amazement, Petit kept his concentration by carrying on a conversation with the buildings. 

1979- THE RUNAWAY WARS. Hollywood Cartoonist’s Union launched a strike against studios sending their animation jobs overseas. 

1981- The Heavy Metal movie opened. Directed by Gerald Potterton.

2007- Leo Montulli, a programmer for Netscape, invented internet cookies. Do you accept them?

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for Aug 6, 2023

Birthdays: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Daniel O'Connell "the Liberator", Dutch Schultz (real name Arthur Fleigenheimer), Louella Parsons, Lucille Ball, Robert Mitchum, Andy Warhol, Hoot Gibson, William B. Williams, Michelle Yeoh is 61, M. Night Shyamalan, Melissa George, Soliel Moon-Frye 

1926- Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel.

1926- Warner Brothers Studio premiered its motion picture sound on disk system. The film was Don Juan with John Barrymore the Great Profile.  It didn’t really have much impact until they made the "Jazz Singer" with Al Jolson a year later.

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

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

1970- THE HIPPIES ATTACKED DISNEYLAND- A nationwide call for civil disobedience at the famous American-establishment tourist spot was called for August 6th. Called "Yippie Day" Yippies were considered more radical than Hippies. 750 long haired, denim clad young teens filtered into park. Once in they quickly massed, then invaded the Wilderness Fort in Frontierland. There they raised the Vietcong flag, passed out marijuana to tourists and chanted "Stop the War! Free Charlie Manson!" They were finally expelled with great difficulty by park security and the Anaheim police. In the 1980’s Disney was almost invaded by Nazi skinheads, but this time they were ready.

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

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

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

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

2009- Director John Hughes died of a sudden heart attack at age 59. He had directed hits like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Planes Trains and Automobiles and more.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 5, 2023

Birthdays: Guy de Maupassant, Amboise Thomas, William- first black child born in British America, Neil Armstrong, John Huston, Robert Taylor, Conrad Aiken, Roman Gabriel, Selma Diamond, Patrick Ewing, Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Loni Anderson, John Saxon, Jonathan Silverman is 52

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1961- The theme park Six Flags over Texas first opened.

1962- GOODBYE, NORMA JEAN. Marilyn Monroe found nude in bed, dead of barbiturate overdose. She was 36. Whether you think the starlet overdosed by accident, suicide, or was done in by the Mafia, the Kennedys, a Svengali like personal physician, lovesick lesbian physical therapist or space aliens, it is still a mystery. 

1964 - Actress Anne Bancroft & Comedian Mel Brooks wed.

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

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

1980- The Osmond Brothers break up.

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

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

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

. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 4, 2023

Birthdays: Percy Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen, Nicholas Conte' 1755-inventor of the modern pencil and the conte'-crayon, Louis Armstrong, William Pater, Dr. Alexander Schure, Richard Belzer, Franco Corelli, Elizabeth-England's late Queen Mum, Roger Clemens, runner Mary Decker-Slaney, Dr. Alex Schure,  Billy-Bob Thornton is 69, former President Barack Obama is 62

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

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

1921 The Motion Picture Fund created.

1922- In honor of the passing of Alexander Graham Bell, all 13 million telephones in the United States observed three minutes of silence.

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

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

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

1995-“Babe” a charming movie about a little talking pig written and directed by George Miller and Chris Noonan. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug 3, 2023

Birthdays: British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Elisha Otis inventor of the elevator, John T. Scopes- the teacher accused in the Monkey Trial, Habib Bourguiba, Ernie Pyle, Gene Kelly, Lenny Bruce, John Landis, Jay North, Dolores Del Rio, Leon Uris, Ann Klein, Martha Stewart, Corey Burton, Tony Bennett, Martin Sheen is 83, John C. McGinley is 64

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

1823- English Poet Lord Byron arrived in Greece, burning with a desire to help the Greeks attain independence.

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

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

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

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

1949 -The National Basketball League is founded. 

1963 –Unemployed television producer Alan Sherman used to make friends laugh with songs he improved at the piano. They encouraged him to publish an album. Called “My Son the Folksinger” it contained the hit “Sarah Backman, Sarah Backman, Hows By You?” A song from his third album, My Son the Nut, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, Here I am at, Camp Granada” and became a sensation.

1966- While celebrating his 40th birthday, Comedian Lenny Bruce died of a herion overdose. The groundbreaking raunchy comedian who coined the term “T & A” was arrested in 1964 and charged with obscenity for using the "F" word in his act. President Johnson and his opponent Senator Barry Goldwater would swear frequently in private, but comedians were only supposed to make mother-in-law jokes.  

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

1975- The Louisiana Superdome stadium was dedicated. The first dome stadium. Some football coaches like Mike Ditka of the Chicago Bears were skeptical:” Football is meant to be played in snow and mud. Dome stadiums are for Roller Derby!”  

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

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