Tom Sito's Animation Alamanac for Nov. 30, 2023

Birthdays: Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, William Enos Berkeley aka Busby Berkeley, Winston Churchill, Jonathan Swift, Shirley Chisholm, Gordon Parks, G. Gordon Liddy, Alan Sherman, Abbie Hoffman, Virginia Mayo, Ephram Zimbalist Jr, Richard Crenna, Robert Guilliame, Rex Reason, Mandy Patinkin, David Mamet, Shuggie Otis, Billy Idol, Joan Ganz Cooney the creator of Sesame Street, Dick Clark, Ridley Scott is 86, Ben Stiller is 58, Kaley Cuoco is 38, Henry Selick is 71

 

1869- Paris’ famed naughty nightclub the Follies Bergere opened. The home of the Can-Can, Toulouse Lautrec, Josephine Baker, Bricktop, and Maurice Chevalier.

1900- Oscar Wilde died of meningitis in a hotel in Paris. He was 46. His last words; "This wallpaper is appalling! Either it goes or I do.”

1922- The great actress Sarah Bernhardt made her last performance in Turin Italy. She was still considered sexy despite advanced age and a wooden leg.

100 years ago- 1923- Max Fleischer moved his Out of the Inkwell animation studio to big new offices in 1600 Broadway. 

1924- The first fax message sent. A photo of the Prince of Wales was wired across the Atlantic by radio transmission.

1940- Actress Lucille Ball married Cuban band leader Desi Arnaz. Together they pioneered the new art of Television production. They divorced in 1960 but remained lifelong friends.

1954- Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges of Sylacauga Alabama was hit by a meteorite. It shot through her roof, bounced off her radio and hit her on the hip. It gave her a nasty bruise and one heck of a story to tell. Broke her radio too. Today it is called Hodges Meteorite.

1968- “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes hit #1 in the pop charts.

1970- First day shooting on William Friedkin’s film The French Connection.

1974- The Missing Link. In a dry gully in Ethiopia Dr Donald Johannsen discovered the perfect skeletal remains of one of the earliest human ancestors, an ape that walked upright. Australiopithicus Afrancenis. He called it Lucy. Johannsen liked the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

1979- ESPN, the 24 hour sports channel began broadcasting.

1982- Michael Jackson’s second solo album Thriller was released. It becomes the biggest selling album in history.

1982- Nova Pictures is founded, but due to conflict with a PBS TV show of the same name they change theirs to TriStar Pictures. In 1994 TriStar was merged into Sony Pictures.

1985- Punk band The Dead Kennedys released their album Frankenchrist.

1987- John Lasseter’s Pixar short Red’s Dream released.

2003- Roy Disney Jr, the last serving member of the Disney family, was made to resign from the Walt Disney Company. It was claimed to be the standard retirement policy, but more likely he was forced out by the exec he himself hired to run the company in 1984- Michael Eisner. Roy built a successful grass root stockholders’ campaign SaveDisney.com. In 2005 it was Eisner who was compelled to retire. Roy Disney kept an emeritus board position until his death in 2009.

2010- Don Hahn’s doc Waking Sleeping Beauty was released on DVD.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 29, 2023

Birthdays: Gaetano Donizetti, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis), Louisa May Alcott, Chuck Mangione, Yakima Canutt, Gary Shandling, Cathy Moriarity, Don Cheadle, Joel Coen is 67, Jacques Chirac, Howie Mandell, Chadwick Boseman, Anna Faris is 47, Vin Scully

1890- The first Army-Navy football game held at West Point. Midshipmen beat the cadets 24-0.

1914- In the first years of animated films, one artist like Winsor McCay drew everything alone, and may have hired a cameraman or assistant. This day, John Randolph Bray's cartoon "Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa" debuted. Bray adapted Henry Ford's assembly line system to making animation, today known as the Production Pipeline. He created the job classifications of layout, animator, inbetweener, background painter, inker, blackeners (cel painters), and camera. In the 1920s the job of gag man (storyboarder), cleanup and checkers. After 1919, Bray shifted his studio focus from entertainment to technical and training films. J.R. Bray started the careers of Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, Max & Dave Fleischer, Dick Heumer, and Shamus Culhane. 

 

1932- Cole Porter’s musical The Gay Divorcee’ opened on Broadway.

1935- Physicist Edwin Schrodinger published his thought experiment “ Schrodinger’s Cat”.

1959- The Second Grammy Awards, broadcast for the first time on television. Bobby Darin’s rendition of Mack the Knife won top honors.

1961- NASA sent Enos the Chimp into orbit.

1963- A week after the Kennedy assassination, comedian Vaughn Meader announced he was giving up his act impersonating the slain president. Meader’s comedy album The First Family sold 7.5 million copies and won a Grammy in 1962, but now it just wasn’t funny anymore. Meader’s career faded, and he ended up managing a bar in Maine. He died of emphysema in 2004. When Lenny Bruce first took the stage after the Kennedy assassination, he opened his set with a long drag on his cigarette and sighed:” ….Man…. Vaughn Meader is really screwed!”

1972- Atari announced Pong, the first popular mass-marketed interactive game. 

1981- Actress Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and 

drowned. She was 43. Her husband Robert Wagner, and friend Christopher Walken were onboard having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning. 

1995- Pixar’s IPO stock offering after the success of Toy Story made Steve Jobs a billionaire.

2001- Beatle guitarist and composer George Harrison died of cancer. He was 58.

2017- Matt Lauer, the celebrity host of NBC’s Today Show, was fired after allegations of sexual misconduct with staffers.

2018- Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns opened. Directed by Rob Marshall.

Tom Sito's Animation Fun Facts for Nov. 28, 2023

Birthdays: Jean Baptiste Lully, William Blake, Frederick Engels, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Roehm, Brooks Atkinson, Berry Gordy the founder of Motown Records, Anton Rubinstein, Gary Hart, Vern Den Herder, Paul Warfield, Hope Lange, Paul Schaefer, Joe Dante, Michael Ritchie, Anna Nicole-Smith, Randy Newman is 80, Ed Harris is 74, John Stewart is 61

1870- Painter Jean Bazille was shot and killed while serving in the French Army fighting the Prussians. He was only 29. He had been one of the early leaders of the new movement called Impressionism. Had he lived he might have become as famous as Monet or Cezanne.

1895- The Chicago Times-Herald Race- the first American auto race. Two electric and four gas powered cars raced from Chicago to Evanston and back, 54 miles despite several inches of snow on the ground. The winner Car # 5 driven by inventor Charles Duryea reached a top speed of 7 miles an hour! Only one other car finished, the rest broke down. Duryea won $2,000, and caught a cold. 

1907- 23 year old Russian-Canadian scrap metal dealer Lazar Meir, now renamed Louis B. Mayer, bought an old burlesque house in Haverhill Massachusetts to show the new moving picture shows. Originally called The Gem, it was such a dump locals called it The Germ. Mayer renamed it The Orpheum, and on Thanksgiving Day opened with the film “ From the Manger to the Cross”. L.B. Mayer grew his film business to become MGM, and at the time of his retirement in 1950 was the most powerful man in Hollywood. The Motion Picture Academy was his idea.

1911- The Chevrolet Automobile Company founded by the brothers Chevrolet.

1919- Nancy Viscountess Astor became the first woman ever elected to the British Parliament. She succeeded her husband William Waldorf Astor as Conservative MP for Plymouth.  Although a fellow Tory, Lady Astor was the political as well as verbal nemesis of Winston Churchill.  She once said to him "Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee!" To which Churchill replied:" Madame if I were your husband, I would drink it!" 

1922- The first skywriting display. Former RAF pilot Cyril Turner wrote HELLO USA, CALL VANDERBILT 7-200 in the skies above New York City. 47,000 people immediately telephoned the Vanderbilt Hotel..

1925- First radio broadcast from the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville.

1926- California oil tycoon Edward Doheny went on trial for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal. That he and Harry Sinclair had bribed the Secretary of the Interior to lease them U.S. Navy strategic oil reserves. And like most millionaires, he was acquitted.

1942- THE COCONUT GROVE FIRE-The U.S. public was distracted for awhile from war news by reports of a terrible disaster in Boston. A fire broke out at a popular nightclub called the Cocoanut Grove and killed 492 people in only twelve minutes. The clubs decorations caught fire and created carbon monoxide gas and there were only two exits. Among the dead was western movie star Buck Jones. The tragedy created the first mandatory laws requiring public buildings to have fire exits opening outwards and safety testing of decorative materials.

1942- Fleischer Paramount cartoon short “Superman and the Mechanical Monsters” opened in theaters. For the first time we see Clark Kent change into Superman in a phone booth. In 2004 the cartoon was the inspiration for Kerry Conran’s scifi epic “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” With Jude Law, Gwynneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie.

1946- During the traditional Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in NYC,  Hollywood cameras filmed the Macy Parade scenes for the movie “The Miracle on 34th St.”Star Edmund Gwenn posed as Santa.  At this time, Hollywood movies were rarely filmed on location. But the studio had little faith the film would be a success, and did not want waste a lot of money building big sets on their lot. 

1947- Disney's cartoon "Chip and Dale".

1948- Hopalong Cassidy premiered on television.

1953- Cartoonist & writer Milt Gross died.

1989- Opposites Attract, Paula Abdul dancing with cartoon MC Skat Kat, was released. It became one of the most popular R&B & dance-pop singles of 1990 and won a Grammy. 

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for Nov 27, 2023

Birthdays: Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jimi Hendrix would have been 80, Bruce Lee-original name Lee Jun Fan, would have been 83, James Agee, Chaim Weizmann, Mobster Vito Genovese, Czech leader Alexander Dubcheck, David Merrick, Marshal Thompson, Robin Givens, Judd Nelson, Buffalo Bob Smith, William Fichtner, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is 66, Kathryn Bigelow is 72

1924- The First Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. The marvel of the parade were large displays that moved down the street thanks to small automobiles concealed under them. They seemed to "float", so they were called parade floats today.  The huge balloons were added in 1927. Originally after the parade the balloons were let go to float away into the sky. Macy’s offered a bounty to people who found them after they landed, usually in rural New Jersey. 

1932- Former Terrytoons animator Art Babbitt, now at Walt Disney, wrote to fellow  animator Bill Tytla, encouraging him to come out to California. "Terry owes you a lot and Disney has plans for a full length color cartoon!"

1936- Max Fleischer's cartoon featurette, "Popeye meets Sinbad the Sailor".

1953- Playwright Eugene O'Neill died of pneumonia, Parkinson's Disease, and alcoholism at 65. He had been writing on cardboard laundry shirt boards because he needed something large to write on because his hands trembled so violently. When O’Neill realized his end was near he tore up six plays he was writing because he wanted no one else to complete them. He was staying at the Shelton Hotel in Boston. As his father was an actor his family traveled frequently. O'Neill's last words were: "I knew it! Born in a hotel room, and goddammit, I'm dying in a hotel room! "

1957- The Hollywood Reporter announced NBC had purchased a season of cartoons especially made for TV by former MGM animators Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. They will be called “Ruff and Ready” and will debut in a half hour slot on Saturday Mornings.

1960 – Gordie Howe became the first NHL player to score 1,000 goals.

1963- The Beatles release the single “ I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

1967- The Beatles release Magical Mystery Tour.

1973- Conjunction Junction, by Jack Sheldon, first played on the TV show Schoolhouse Rock.

1973- According to the X-Files this was the night Fox Mulder’s sister Samantha was abducted by aliens.

1975- Ross McWhirter, publisher of the Guinness Book of World Records, was assassinated by the IRA.

2002- Disney’s animated feature Treasure Planet opened in theaters.

2013- Disney film Frozen premiered. Directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck. Let it Go! Let it Go!

Nov. 26, 2023

Birthdays: John Harvard 1607(founder of Harvard University), Bat Masterson, Eugene Ionesco, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Marian Mercer, Charles Schulz, Cyril Cusak, Eric Severaid, Rich Little, Sister Wendy Turnbull, Robert Goulet, Don Hahn.

1539- Fountains Abbey, the largest and richest Cistercian abbey in England, was surrendered to the officers of King Henry VIII.

1716- In Boston, the first African lion ever seen in America was put on exhibit.

1825- Kappa Alpha of Union College NY is established. The first college Greek Letter fraternity house.

1865- Charles Dodgson sent a handwritten copy of the manuscript of his fantasy Alice’s Adventures Underground to his 12 year old friend and inspiration Alice Liddell. He conceived the story three years earlier. He later published the book with his own money retitled Alice in Wonderland, under the pen-name Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland was one of the first books written solely to amuse children, and not to educate or discipline them.

1868- At first baseball games were played in a convenient cow pasture. Today the first baseball game was played in an enclosed field. It was in San Francisco at Folsom & 25th St..

1896- AA. Stagg of The University of Chicago invented the football huddle..

1917- The National Hockey League-NHL, was founded in Montreal. The first teams The Quebec Bulldogs, Ottawa Senators, Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Arenas, and Montreal Maroons.

1926- Potato chips, or crisps in the UK, were invented in the 1880’s by African American chef George Crum and served in restaurants and fairgrounds. This day Mrs. Laura Scudder was the first to put potato chips in a bag and sold them as a handy snack food. She sold them out of the back of her pickup truck until the business picked up. She ran her own company until 1959. 

1938- Walt Disney was raised in a hard-scrabble, struggling family. He promised his parents if he ever made good, he would take care of them. After Snow White made him rich and successful, he moved his parents out to Los Angeles and bought them a beautiful home in North Hollywood. This night faulty furnace leak filled their bedroom with carbon monoxide. The housekeeper found them in the morning and dragged them out onto the lawn. Walt Disney’s father Elias barely survived but his mother Flora died. This left Walt so shattered he could never talk about it after.

1940- Woody Woodpecker first appeared in an Andy Panda cartoon "Knock-Knock.’

1943- The Donald Duck short Home Defense was released.

1945- Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded KoKo, the first bebop Jazz single. Instead of big bands as was the fashion, they used a smaller quintet. The pianist at the session didn’t have his New York union card, so after his solo, Dizzy dropped his trumpet and did the piano backup to Birds’ solo. The song was from chord variations of an old Ray Noble song “Cherokee” that Bird and Dizzy knew. The term Bop came from an earlier Lionel Hampton hit “Hey-Bop-A-ReBop”. Jazz critic Ira Gitler picked up on the witty interplay between musicians, and wrote of the new sound as BeBop.

1965- France launched its first space rocket, the Dianant-1, into orbit.

1976- Sex Pistols Punk single “Anarchy in the UK” released.

1990- Acting on the example of Sony’s purchase of MGM-Columbia studios, Matushita (Panasonic) bought MCA- Universal studios for $6.6 billion. After a few fruitless years they sold it to The Bronfman’s Group, the distillers of Seagram’s Whiskey. 

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov 25, 2023

Birthdays: Lope de Vega, St. Pope John XXIII, Andrew Carnegie, Tina Turner, Joe Dimaggio, Carl Benz of Mercedes Benz, Virgil Thompson, Jeffrey Hunter, John Kennedy,Jr., Percy Sledge, Ben Stein, Ricardo Montalban, Bob Matheson, John Larroquette, Gloria Steinem, General Augusto Pinochet, Christina Applegate, Bucky Dent,  animator Bill Kroyer

1817- First sword swallower performed in the US.

1929- Alfred Hitchcock’s film Blackmail opened in London. It was the first full length talkie in Britain.

1949- Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer sung by Gene Autry hit number one on the music charts. The TV program by Rankin/Bass premiered in 1964.

1952- The stage adaptation of Agatha Christie’s mystery the Mousetrap opened in London’s West End and became one of the longest running plays in history.

1960- CBS canceled its remaining five radio soap operas, most of them now on television. 

1963- In his family home in Queens NY, young songwriter Paul Simon was deeply depressed by the assassination of President Kennedy. He locked himself in his bathroom and kicked around chords on his guitar. That night, he wrote “ Hello darkness, my old friend….”

1975- According to the movie Rocky, this was the date of the first prizefight portrayed in the film where we first meet Rocky Balboa.

1992- Walt Disney’s Aladdin opened in theaters.

1995- Legendary Corporate CEO Akio Morita retired as the leader of Sony. Under his guidance Sony went from a little postwar maker of electric rice cookers to the largest electronics company in the world. His official reason was he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while playing tennis. Some insiders said he was tired of dealing with the stress of managing Sony's Hollywood studios -MGM, Columbia, TriStar losing $2 billion. By the time Morita died in 1999, the Sony movie studios had pulled out of their slump and were on top with movies like Titanic and Men in Black.

2009- Disney’s Princess and the Frog, directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, opened.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov 24, 2023

Birthdays: Spinoza, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Scott Joplin, Zachary Taylor, Carrie Nation, Dick Powell, Garson Kanin, Cass Gilbert-the architect of the first skyscraper, Alvan Barkley-Truman’s VP, Forrest J. Ackerman, William F. Buckley, John Lindsay, Dale Carnegie- author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, Steve Yeager, Denise Crosby, Billy Connolly is 82

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1789- The first issue of France’s national newspaper Le Moniteur.

1904- Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen opened 291, the first art gallery dedicated exclusively to the art of photography.

1933- The RKO movie Flying Down to Rio released, meant as a starring vehicle for Dolores Del Rio, but what we remember is it is the first pairing of the famous dance team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

1937- The Andrew Sisters record their Boogie-Woogie version of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon”, an old Yiddish Klezmer song that was updated by Bennie Goodman.

1941- After suffering a strike and declining revenue because of the war in Europe, Walt Disney’s studio was in trouble.  Animator Ward Kimball noted in his diary for this day: “ 100 layoffs announced. Studio personnel from 1600 down to a Hyperion level of 300. Geez, It this the writing on the wall?” 

1947- THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST- 50 Hollywood moguls like Harry Cohn, Jack Warner and Dore Shary met at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to formulate a group response to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee anti-commie hearings that were targeting Hollywood. Besides the heat from the feds their stockholders were clamoring for them to get the Reds out! They agreed to enforce an industry-wide blacklisting of anyone refusing to cooperate with the HUAC Committee. Nothing was ever officially written down or published, if you were blacklisted you suddenly were unable to find any work. 

   Eric Johnston, spokesman for the Motion Pictures Assoc. said on this day: "As long as I live, I will never be party ot anything as unAmerican as a blacklist!”.

 Two days later on Nov. 26th he said: " We will forthwith discharge and never again knowingly employ a Communist. Loyalty oaths for the Entertainment Industry are now compulsory." Many Hollywood artists signed Communist Party cards in the 1930's when it was chic' to be lefty, and the Communists were the only open opponents of segregation and Hitler. Writer Bud Schulberg’s excuse was CP parties had the prettiest girls. Out of an estimated 15,000 entertainment workers only around 300 were ever actually proven to be Communists. Famous blacklist victims included Zero Mostel, Lillian Hellman, Lloyd Bridges, Dashell Hammett, Gale Sondergaard, Edward G. Robinson, Howard Da Silva, Ed Wynn, Sterling Hayden & Dalton Trumbo. Sidney Poitier was blacklisted for no other reason than he was friends with black activist-actor Canada Lee; 'Somewhere over the Rainbow' composer Yip Harburg was blacklisted for writing a song: “Happiness is a thing called Joe" which the committee took to mean Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. 

1950- The musical Guys & Dolls opened. “ I got da horse right here, his name is Paul Revere, I know a jock who tells me Never Fear, Can Do- Can Do..The Jock sez da horse can –do ”

1958- The musical film Gigi opened, music by Lerner & Lowe. Based on the writings of French author Collette, Collette herself had insisted young unknown Dutch actress Audrey Hepburn play the lead.

1958- Comedian Harry Einstein, known as Parkyakarkus, did his bit at the Friars Club. He sat down at amid the laughter and applause, put his head down and died of a heart attack. His son is comedian-filmmaker Albert Brooks.

1968- Hey Jude by the Beatles topped the pop charts while Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man headed the Country & Western listing.

1991- Freddy Mercury, lead singer of the rock group Queen, died of AIDS. He was 45.

1988- Mystery Science Theater 3000 premiered.

1998- America On Line bought their chief competitor Netscape.

1999- Pixar’s Toy Story 2. in theaters. 

2000- Catherine Zeta-Jones married Michael Douglas. 

2010- Disney’s Tangled released.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov. 23, 2023

Birthdays: German Emperor Otto I -972AD, Edward Rutledge, President Franklin Pierce, Krystoff Penderecki, Manuel DeFalla, William Henry Pratt better known as Boris Karloff, William Bonney better known as Billy the Kid, Roman Petrovich Tyrtof better known as Erte’, Arthur Marx better known as Harpo, George O’Hanlon the voice of George Jetson, Susan Anspach, Victor Jory, animator Ray Patterson, Vincent Cassel is 56, Joe Esterhaus is 80, Miley Cyrus is 30.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING (U.S.)  Since the earliest times societies had harvest festivals to give thanks to the appropriate deities that they're not going to starve that winter. A letter written in 1621 by pilgrim Edward Winslow described how Pilgrim Gov. Bradford and Miles Standish invited Massasoit and 90 of his Wampanoag people to a feast to celebrate their first successful harvest. The Indians brought several deer they hunted. Gov. Bradford, who later wrote a detailed history of the Plymouth colony, does not mention the event. The custom of Thanksgiving was a New England custom for decades thereafter.

In 1789 George Washington called for a thanksgiving celebration in late November to celebrate the new Constitution. But Pres. Thomas Jefferson thought Thanksgiving was the most ridiculous idea he ever heard of. He considered it a violation of the separation of church and state, as did Andy Jackson and Zachary Taylor. So, the holiday didn’t really become an annual custom until the Civil War. Sarah Hale was the editor of the Ladies Magazine who wrote the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb. She was the Martha Stewart of the mid 1800s. She had been lobbying the US Government to make the New England custom a national one. In 1864 after the great union victory at Atlanta, President Lincoln issued a decree that the last Thursday of November be set aside as a feast of national Thanksgiving. As blue clad troops chowed down on their turkey and chicken dinners, the Confederates withheld their fire in honor of the new Yankee holiday. Thanksgiving was declared by Presidential decree, usually a notice buried in back of a newspaper until made an official holiday in 1941. The first Macy’s Parade in NY was in 1924, the big balloons debuted in 1927.

1874- Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy first published.

1876- The first intercollegiate College Football association set up in Springfield Mass.

1889- The first Juke Box installed at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. Created by Louis T. Glass and William Arnold, it used Edison cylinders instead of records and cost 5 cents a play. Juke comes from Juke Joint, a slang term then for a cheap dance hall.

1897- Windsor Castle saw the first performance for Queen Victoria of a cinematograph moving picture. Her Majesty watched footage of the procession of her Diamond Jubilee taken in June. Also on the program was Monsieur Taffary's Calculating Dogs.

1903- Italian tenor Enrico Caruso made his debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in Verdi’s Rigoletto. The great singer loved drawing caricatures, collecting police badges, pinching ladies bottoms and doing practical jokes, like filling your hat with flour. Painter Norman Rockwell recalled when he was paying his way through school by being a Met stagehand, backstage Caruso liked to talk art with him and he asked about George Bridgeman’s class, the great anatomy teacher.

1936- The first florescent lighting tubes are installed in the U.S. Patent office.

1938- Bob Hope recorded his signature tune “Thanks for the Memory” for the movie The Big Broadcast.

1942- The movie CASABLANCA premiered. Based on a never produced musical, “Everybody Comes to Ricks’, Howard Koch and the Epstein Brothers adapted the play into one of the most memorable Hollywood love stories ever. It was never expected to be more than a rehash of the popular Charles Boyer film Algiers. (Dahling, come with me to zee Casbah…”). Humphrey Bogart told a friend about his new project “ Aw, its just some more shit like Algiers.” Bogie acted opposite Ingrid Bergman, although he had to stand on apple boxes to appear taller than his Swedish leading lady. 

During the famous scene where the French exiles drown out the singing Germans with a stirring rendition of le Marseillaise the Germans are singing Watch On the Rhine. The director wanted them to sing the Nazi party anthem The Horst Wessel Song but the Warner Legal Dept discovered it was copyrighted! We’re fighting nazis, but we don’t want them to sue us. All the people singing were actual European exiles living in Hollywood. 

At the time of filming the real Casablanca was still in a war zone so director Michael Curtiz and his art director Carl Jules Wyl had to fake what a North African French colonial city might look like. A decade later, while filming in Almeida, Spain, they took a ferry over to Casablanca to see how close they came. Driving around the city, Curtiz remarked “Carl, this doesn’t look anything like our movie!!”

1952- Animator Fred Moore, who drew Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and the Brave Little Tailor, died from cerebral injuries incurred in an auto accident in the Big Tujunga Canyon area of Los Angeles. He was 41.

1960- The Hollywood Walk of Fame is dedicated, featuring over 1,500 names- but not Charlie Chaplin, who was banned until 1972 because of his lefty political views. Chaplin was never a communist, but the right wing politicians simply assumed he was.

1963- The very first episode of Dr. Who premiered on the BBC TV. William Hartnell played the first Dr. Who. 

1985- The first commercial compact discs (CDs) go on sale.

1990- 37-year-old baseball catcher Bo Diaz was crushed to death by a large satellite dish he was trying to install.

2016- Disney’s Moana opened in theaters.

============================================================ Moon. 

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov. 22, 2023

Birthdays: French explorer Sieur de LaSalle, George Elliot- pen name for Mary Anne Evans, Benjamin Britten, Charles DeGaulle, Andre Gide, Wiley Post, Billy Jean King, Boris Becker, Geraldine Page, John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, Hoagy Carmichael, Rodney Dangerfield, Robert Vaughn, Tom Conti, Mark Ruffalo, Victoria Paris- porn star of such classics like Bimbo Bowlers from Buffalo, Stevie Van Zandt is 72, Jamie Lee Curtis is 65, Terry Gilliam is 83, Scarlett Johanssen is 39

1739- Georg Fredrich Handel premiered the oratorio Ode to Saint Cecilia’s Day.

1809- Baltimore native Peregrine Williamson was given a patent for a re-usable steel pen. This finally freed the western world from sharpening goose quills and other feathers to write.

1888- According to Edgar Rice Burroughs, this is the birthday of the boy who would become Tarzan.

1950- The Lowest Scoring Basketball game in NBA history. The Fort Wayne Pistons defeated the Minneapolis Lakers 19-18. They later became the Detroit Pistons and Los Angeles Lakers.

1957- The Miles Davis Quintet debuted.

1963- Aldous Huxley died. The author of Brave New World had inoperable cancer so his wife kept him high on LSD,

1965- The musical The Man of La Mancha opened on Broadway. “ To Dream, the Impossible Dreaaammm…”

1980- Screen goddess Mae West died at 87. He apartment suite at the Ravenswood in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles has been lovingly restored, since the owner claims her ghost nagged him to put her furniture back!

1985- Apple ended a long lawsuit with Microsoft and Hewlett Packard that allowed them to share the visual characteristics of the Macintosh displays in their Windows software.

1986- 20 year old Mike Tyson knocked out Trevor Berbick to become the youngest Heavyweight Champion of the World.

1

993- Sir Anthony Burgess died at age 76. The author of A Clockwork Orange had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and told he had one year to live, back in 1959, 34 years ago.

1995- Pixar’s Toy Story opened, the first all CG movie, and the first true CG hit.

2005- Microsoft Xbox 360 goes on sale.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov 20, 2023

Birthdays: Robert F. Kennedy, Maya Plisetskaya, Gene Tierney, Dick Smothers, Bo Derek, Sean Young, Richard Dawson, Estelle Parsons, Barbera Hendricks, Duane Allman, Chester Gould the creator of Dick Tracy, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Benoit Mandlebrot, Alastair Cooke, Ming Na Wen, President Joe Biden is 81 

1795- Beethoven’s opera Fidelio premiered. He rewrote the overture four times and still wasn’t happy with it. So, he rewrote it once more and published the other four as the Leonore Overtures.

1875- Henry James published his first novel Rockwell Hudson.

1894- Prince Ananias premiered, the first operetta of Victor Herbert.

1947- The longest running television show in history- Meet the Press, premiered. And it is still on today.

1958- On the TV show Playhouse 90, John Frankenheimer presented “The Old Man” the first show shot and edited completely on videotape. Videotape had been around since 1951 but was used primarily for in-studio live news shows and variety segments.

1992- Sections of the oldest part of Windsor Castle were destroyed in a terrible fire.

1994- Rock & Roll star David Crosby received a new liver.

1998- Several state governments and the US tobacco industry reached a landmark settlement arising from lawsuits over smoking illnesses. The trial killed off once and for all ads featuring The Marlboro Cowboy and Joe Camel, a cartoon character that at one point was as recognizable to children as Donald Duck.

1998- Pixar’s film A Bugs Life was generally released.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 19, 2023

Birthdays: King Charles I of England, President James Garfield, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Roy Campanella, Tommy Dorsey, Ted Turner is 85, Calvin Klein, Indira Ghandi, Dick Cavett, Larry King, Kathleen Quinlan, Alan Young -Mr. Ed’s friend, Ahmad Rashad, Allison Janey is 64, Meg Ryan is 62, Jodie Foster is 61, Terry Farrell

1703- The "Man in the Iron Mask" died in Pignerole prison. Louis XIV had him locked up for forty years. He was first mentioned in Voltaire's History of the Age of Louis XIV as having a velvet mask, which writer Alexandre Dumas changed to iron for dramatic effect. No one ever discovered who he was or why his face was covered. Speculation was that he was everyone from an Italian diplomat, to the son of Oliver Cromwell, to a twin brother of King Louis XIV himself. It made for great literature, but he remains a mystery.

1941- Princess Iron Fan, by Wan Guchan and Wan Laiming, opened . Considered the first Asian animated feature film. 

1942- In a concentration camp in Poland, author-artist Bruno Schulz was executed. The author of “Street of Crocodiles” last act was being forced by a Gestapo officer to paint images from Brothers Grimm fairytales on his son’s bedroom wall before he was shot.

1959- Jay Ward's television show 'The Adventures of Rocky and his Friends' debuts. 

1969- The great soccer champion Pele scored his 1,000 goal.

1998- Film Director Alan J. Pakula was one of the Hollywood community who preferred living in New York City. This day he was driving on the Long Island Expressway when he was killed in a freak accident. A large truck kicked up in its tires a discarded piece of steel pipe. It flipped it through Pakula’s windshield, killing him instantly.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 18, 2023

Birthdays: Armelita Galli-Curci, Karl Maria Von Weber, W.S. Gilbert, Johnny Mercer,

Astronaut Alan Shepard, Louis Daguerre, Brenda Vaccarro, Eugene Ormandy, George Gallup, Warren Moon, Pam Dawber, Rocket Ishmail, Delroy Lindo, Kevin Nealon, Owen Wilson is 56, Chloe Servigny is 50

It’s hand drawn animation day! See below- 1928.

1718- Francois Voltaire’s first play Oedipe, premiered in Paris. 

1865 Mark Twain's first story "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' published.

1883- THE DAY WITH TWO NOONS. Congress adopted William Allen’s plan to divide the United States into standardized time zones, corresponding to timetables set by the transcontinental railroads. At noon in New York City, the bells of Saint Paul’s Church tolled. Ten minutes later, several blocks away, the bells of Trinity Church on Wall St. tolled noon Eastern Standard Time, 11:00AM Central Time, 10:00AM Mountain Time and 9:00AM Pacific Time. And so it has been ever since. 

1889- Richard Strauss completed his orchestral tone poem Tod und Verklarung, Death and Transfiguration. The 29 year old created a musical illustration of what it felt like to die and your soul ascend to glory. Fifty-nine years later in 1949, as 85 year old Richard Strauss lay dying, he said to his wife, “Yes! It is exactly the way I saw it…”

1902- THE TEDDY BEAR BORN-The Washington Evening Star published a story of how President Teddy Roosevelt while hunting couldn't bring himself to shoot a grizzly bear cub. Cartoonist Cliff Berryman illustrated the incident with one of his signature “dingbat” bear cubs in a gesture of  “oh no!” Brooklyn toymaker Morris Mitchcolm sewed a doll from the illustration in the newspaper and sent the first one to the White House. Mitchcolm did so well with the sale of Teddy Bears he founded the Ideal Toy Company.

1928- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MICKEY MOUSE- At Universal’s Colony Theater in New York, Walt Disney’s cartoon "Steamboat Willie" debuted before a movie called Gang War. The first major sound cartoon success and the official birth of Mickey Mouse. Two earlier silent Mickey's were being completed, but when Walt saw Al Jolson speak in The Jazz Singer, he held those two shorts back so the sound experiment could go ahead. At this time Walt Disney had just 11 employees. 

1963-The first push button telephones go into service. By 1980 they pretty much replaced the rotary dial phones.

1968- Mattel introduced Hot Wheels toy cars in stores.

1970- At the Lakeside School in Seattle, a young kid named Bill Gates was first shown computer programming.

1985- Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin & Hobbs debuted.

1988- Disney’s Oliver & Company released.

1988- Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time was released.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for Nov 17, 2023

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Vespasian 9 A.D, Il Bronzino, August Ferdinand Moebius-1790 the inventor of the Moebius Strip. Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, Rock Hudson- real name Roy Sherer, Walt Peregoy, Peter Cook, Isamu Noguchi, Lauren Hutton, Tom Seaver, Gordon Lightfoot, Les Clark, Lee Strasberg, Shelby Foote, Sophie Marceau, Martin Scorcese is 81, Lorne Michaels is 79, Danny deVito is 79

1839- Oberto premiered, an opera written by a new composer named Guisseppi Verdi. ( Joe Green). The great composer would go on to write Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata.

1875- Russian psychic Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott found the American Theosophical Society.

1876- Peter Tchaikovsky’s musical rhapsody the Marche Slav premiered.

1891- Polish pianist Ignaz Paderewski made his American debut at Carnegie Hall. Paderewski created the cliché image of the temperamental classical musician with long flowing hair. Classical music became known as longhair music.

1926- The Chicago Black Hawks played their first game, beating the Toronto St. Pats 4-1.

90th Anniv. 1933- The Marx Bros classic Duck Soup premiered.

1934- LBJ marries LadyBird. For you born after the 60's, President Lyndon Baines Johnson married Claudia Alta Taylor whom he nicknamed LadyBird Johnson. Their daughters were LucyBird and LindaBird, so everyone in the family had the initials LBJ.

1968- THE HEIDI GAME- NBC was broadcasting a football game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. The game was running late and would interfere with the broadcast of the movie "Heidi".  The network heads felt with the Jets leading 32-29 with 65 seconds left, why disappoint the kiddies?  So they pre-empted the rest of the game to start the movie. Oakland won 43-32 in a miracle comeback scoring the final touchdown in the final nine seconds. The embarrassed programmers had to answer nationwide firestorm of complaints from outraged football fans. So, to this day on television, no matter how boring a football game is, it is seen to its very end.

1978- This night, our world was rocked by a disturbance in The Force more powerful than the destruction of Alderon, It was "The Star Wars Holiday Special", a two-hour comedy variety show on CBS, with Harrison Ford, Beatrice Arthur and Nelvana’s animated cartoon. To this day, even Mark Hamill jokes about how dumb it was.

1989- Don Bluth's animated film All Dogs Go to Heaven premiered. 

1994- The Sony Corporation posted a $2.7 billion dollar loss from its first year owning a Hollywood movie studio. Yet despite a lot of industry jokes ( “What’s the difference between Sony Pictures and the Titanic?-answer: The Titanic had entertainment.”) By 1996 the studio was on top with blockbusters like “Men in Black”

2002- Premiere of Disney’s Treasure Planet.

2019- The first reported case of CoVid 19 was reported in Wuhan China. It grew to become a global pandemic not unlike the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. So far it has killed 6.9 million people around the world, 1,320,000 in the USA.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov 15, 2023

B-Days: Georgia O'Keefe, Bill Melendez, Irvin Rommel the "Desert Fox", Avrial Harriman, Daniel Barenboim, George Bolet, William Pitt the Elder, Veronica Lake, Beverly D'Angelo is 72, Mantovanni, Ed Asner, Sam Waterson is 83, Otis Armstrong, Petula Clark is 91

1754- First use of the modern trombone. It was played at a child's funeral.

1881- The American Federation of Labor AF of L formed under the leadership of former cigar-maker Samuel Gompers. In 1951 they merged with the CIO.

1907- The comic strip A. Mutt by Harry “Bud” Fisher debuted in the San Francisco Chronicle. The name was later changed to Mutt & Jeff. It was the first 6 day consecutive daily newspaper strip. The strip was so popular that its creator Harry “Bud “ Fisher became a celebrity, and negotiated the first large backend deal. He became the first millionaire cartoonist.

1920- The League of Nations held its first meeting in Geneva.

1926- FIRST NETWORK BROADCAST- NBC hooked up 20 cities across America and Canada for a radio program "The Steinway Hour" with Arthur Rubinstein.  It came from the Steinway building penthouse on 57th St. in Manhattan.

1934- Animator Bill Tytla started work at Walt Disney's on a trial basis for $150 a week. He would create Grumpy the Dwarf, The Devil in Fantasia and Dumbo.

1937- The U.S. Congress gets air-conditioning.

1958- Movie star Tyrone Power was filming a sword duel with George Sanders on the film Solomon and Sheba. He paused and told the director “ I have to stop, I don’t feel well”. He then dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 44. His father Tyrone Power Sr. had also died on a Hollywood movie set in 1931 of a heart attack,

1965- Walt Disney announced he planned to build a second Disneyland, this one in Orlando Florida.

1977- The Bee Gees soundtrack for the film Saturday Night Fever came out. 

1989- Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid opened. 

1990- It was revealed that the Grammy winning pop group Milli Vanilli didn’t sing on their own album but lip-synced to the music. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 14, 2023

Birthdays: Robert Fulton, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Claude Monet, Aaron Copeland, McClean Stevenson, Jarahwahal Nehru, Mamie Eisenhower, Brian Keith, 

Louise Brooks, Ellis Marsalis, Harrison Salisbury, Dr. Condoleeza Rice, Yanni,

 P.J. O'Rourke, George Petrovic' called KaraGeorge "Black George" Serbian nationalist 1762, Astrid Lungren the creator of Pippi Longstockings, William Stieg, Laura San Giacomo is 61, Patrick Warburton is 59, Zhang Yimou is 72, King Charles III is 75

1851- Herman Melville's novel "Moby Dick, or the Whale” was first published in the U.S. by Harper & Row. Before petroleum products, homes were illuminated by oil from refined whale blubber. This made hunting whales a lucrative trade for New Englanders. Herman Melville was inspired by a report of an albino whale named Mocha-Dick who had sunk seven ships off the coast of Java and was reported to have " a hide white as wool.” Melville also knew of a New Bedford whaling ship Essex that was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale in 1839.

For the famous author of Typee and Billy Budd, Moby Dick was a critical and financial disaster. What's now considered one of the greatest works of American literature was ridiculed in its time. Melville, broken in spirit, sank into obscurity and finished his life as a customs agent for the Port of New York. When he died, he was so forgotten the New York Times misspelled his name in it's obituary. 

1883- Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island, or, the Mutiny on the Hispaniola, first published. He wrote a friend,” It's quite silly and horrid fun – and what I want is the best book about Buccaneers that can be had"  Stevenson gave us our image of a typical Pirate of the Spanish Main. His book told us about peg legs, pet parrots, skull and crossbones flag, treasure maps, and the song “ Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of rum!”  

1883- London’s World newspaper printed an exchange of telegrams between writer Oscar Wilde and painter James MacNeil Whistler. “ When you and I are together we never talk about anything but ourselves.”-Wilde. Whistler:” No, no, Oscar. When you and I are together we never talk about anything except me.”

1889- Inspired by Jules Verne's book Around the World in Eighty Days, New York World reporter Nellie Bly, real name Elizabeth Cochrane, set out to travel the world in the declared time. She did it in 72 days. 

Nellie Bly was considered by Victorian society scandalously independent. She was a war correspondent, she had herself committed to a lunatic asylum to report on mistreatment of the mentally ill, she went up in a balloon and was the first woman to descend to the bottom of the sea in a diving bell- bathysphere.

1922- Happy Birthday B.B.C. the British Broadcasting Companies first regular radio service 2LO goes on the air with general election results. 

1937- SPAM introduced! Shoulder-Pork And haM.

1943- When Bruno Walter was too ill to conduct the New York Philharmonic, 24 year old Leonard Bernstein was asked to assume the baton. Bernstein became an overnight sensation.

1959- In Holcomb Kansas, two men broke into a farm home and murder four people. The subsequent trial and execution was attended by writer Truman Capote, who wrote the book “In Cold Blood”.

1960- Anthony Mann began shooting the film El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren.

1963- Volcanoes push up out of the sea the island of Circe, now part of Iceland.

1967- Jack Warner, the last surviving Warner Brother, sold his stake of Warner Bros and it’s huge film library to a Canadian company called Seven Arts. 

1968- Frank Sinatra announced that the smog and air pollution in Los Angeles had gotten so bad that he was moving out to the desert in Palm Springs. 

1991- At ILM, the creation of the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park were going to be done in traditional stop motion animation, like Ray Harryhausen used to do. Two CGI animators, Steve “Spaz” Williams and Walter Dippe’ did a quick test of a moving T-Rex on their own time and this day left it out for review as Spielberg’s producers chanced by. They loved the test and showed it to Steven who declared it all had to be done in CGI. The resultant success of Jurassic Park was the turning point in the digital revolution in modern media.

1998- Pixar’s A Bugs Life Premiered.

1998- Colorful and eccentric NBA basketball star Dennis Rodman married beautiful supermodel Carmen Electra. There was some doubt at first as to the validity of the story as Rodman admitted he was blind drunk throughout and didn’t remember the ceremony. They divorced shortly after.

2016- Disney’s Moana premiered.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov. 13, 2023

Birthdays: Saint Augustine 354 AD, King Edward III of England, Robert Louis Stephenson, actor Edwin Booth, Oskar Werner, Jean Seberg, Jack Elam, Judge Louis Brandeis (the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Alexander Scourby, Hermoine Badderly, Eugene Ionesco, Garry Marshall, Mel Stottlemyre, Joe Mantegna is 76, Jimmy Kimmel is 56, Gerald Butler is 55, Whoopi Goldberg- born name Caryn Johnson is 68

1789- Ben Franklin wrote " Nothing is certain except Death and Taxes."

1842- Today Lewis Carroll noted in his diary:" Began writing the fairy tale of Alice. Hope to be done by Christmas..." 

1868- Giacomo Rossini died at 68. He retired at 37 from performing and lived on royalties. It was said he became so lazy he laid about in bed all day. One day when writing a concerto his score dropped to the floor as he leaned over to fill his glass. Rather than bend down to pick it up, he took a fresh sheet and wrote a sonata. He still could do a nice piece on occasion, like The Fantastic Toy Shop. Born on leap day Feb 29, at 68, he listed his age as 16.

1874 -At the sesquicentennial celebrations of the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Green invented the Ice Cream Soda.

1940- Walt Disney's 'Fantasia' premiered at the Broadway Theater in NYC. As Walt put it, "this'll make Beethoven!"  Frank Lloyd Wright's opinion was, 'I love the visuals, but why did you use all that old music?" 

1953- An Indiana judge ordered his local school district to remove any school books with references to the character Robin Hood. All the "take from the rich and give to the poor" it was obvious to the judge that the medieval rogue of Sherwood Forest was a Communist.

1971- ABC TV. movie "the Duel" premiered. It starred Dennis Weaver as a hapless motorist on a lonely freeway menaced by an anonymous, unseen truck driver. The movie was directed by a young protégé of Lew Wasserman, named Steven Spielberg.

1971- Walt Disney’s The Aristocats opened.

1978- Mickey Mouse got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

1986- Directors John Huston, Martin Scorcese and Woody Allen denounced the fad promoted by Ted Turner of computer colorizing classic Black & White films like the Maltese Falcon. Supposedly one of the last things Orson Welles said on his deathbed was "Keep Ted Turner and his crayons away from my movies!" Ted got the message and shifted his money to digital restoration and building channels like TCM.

1991- Disney's animated film Beauty and the Beast opened, the first animated film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

1997- Julie Taymor’s staging of The Lion King musical had its official Broadway debut. It had opened earlier in Minneapolis for a trial run.  She became the first woman director to win a Tony award.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov 10, 2023

Birthdays: Martin Luther, William Hogarth, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Francois Couperin, King George II of England, Frederick Schiller, Claude Rains, Carl Stalling, Tim Rice, Richard Burton, Roy Scheider, Ann Reinking, MacKenzie Phillips, Russell Means, Sinbad, Brittany Murphy, George Fenneman-Groucho Marx’s TV announcer, Enrico Morricone, Tracey Morgan is 54, Neil Gaiman, Animator Sue Kroyer

1880- Old Civil War general and New Mexico territorial governor Lew Wallace got his first novel published, and it came out pretty good- Ben Hur.

1950- Paramount's "Mice Meeting You" The first Herman and Katnip cartoon.

1951- The first long distance telephone call without needing an operator to make the connection.

1953- Disney’s short “ Toot Whistle, Plunk and Boom” released.

1969- The children’s education show SESAME STREET premiered on PBS TV. The world is introduced to Bert & Ernie, Cookie Monster, Grover, Big Bird and Mr Hooper.

1981- Pioneering French film director Abel Gance died at age 92. Shortly before his death he saw his great widescreen 1925 epic movie Napoleon restored by British historian Kevin Brownlow and produced by Francis Ford Coppola with a live audience. At Radio City Music Hall, Brownlow stretched a telephone cord out on stage so the old man could hear the wild cheers of the NY audience.

1982- The Vietnam Veterans Wall designed by Maia Lin opened to the public in Washington D.C,

1991- Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast premiered at the El Capitan.  Directed by Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale.

1995- Carolco, the Hollywood studio that produced many hits like Terminator 2 Judgement Day, Rambo, Basic Instinct, and Total Recall declared bankruptcy after producing $115 million dollar megaflop "Cutthroat Island".

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 9, 2023

Birthdays: English King Edward VII, Hedy Lamarr- born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Stanford White, Marie Dressler, Ed Wynn, Ann Sexton, Spiro Agnew, Tommy Dorsey, Dr. Carl Sagan, Whitey Herzog, Dorothy Dandridge, Dr. Herbert Kalmus the inventor of Technicolor, Lou Ferrigno is 71, Sisqo

1911-The first Neon sign illuminated.

1964- First "Wizard of Id" comic strip published.

1953- Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning and liver failure in New York City, after downing 18 straight shots of whisky. He was 39. There's actually some debate as to whether or not Dylan Thomas intended to drink himself to death.  Scholars have recently suggested that he was a diabetic and died of hypoglycemia.  Whatever the actual agent of Thomas' demise may have been, the coroner wrote on his death certificate under the cause of death, "Insult to the brain."

1965- "WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT?" The first Great East Coast Blackout. A transformer near Rochester shorts out and the surge overloaded station after station until the entire eastern seaboard from Boston to Delaware is in darkness for 12 hours.  

1966- In London, John Lennon went to an art exhibit and first met a Japanese avant-garde artist named Yoko Ono.

1981- The Screen Actor's Guild under President Ed Asner voted emergency moneys for striking PATCO air traffic controllers fired by the former SAG president, now U.S. President, Ronald Reagan.

1979- National Public Radio goes on the air. The first US national news show with women as anchors. It was also the first news program in stereo.

2003- Looney Tunes, Back in Action, directed by Joe Dante, released. 

2004- The Jones Soda Pop Company of Seattle announced its new creation – Mashed Potato Flavored Soda. This was to follow up on their success last year of Roast Turkey and Gravy Soda.

2004- Mozilla-Firefox 1.0 started up.

2012- Steven Spielberg’s’ film Lincoln with Daniel Day Lewis premiered.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov. 8, 2023

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Nerva, Bram Stoker, Sir Edmund Halley, June Havoc, Margaret Mitchell, Joe Flynn- Captain Binghampton in the 60’s TV sitcom McHales Navy, Ricky Lee Jones, Bonny Raitt, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, Ester Rolle, Katherine Hepburn, Parker Posey is 55, Gretchen Mol is 51, Tara Reid, Norman Lloyd

1880- Famous actress Sarah Bernhardt made her American stage debut in La Dame aux Camelias. She made a further ten tours of the US, all billed as Farewell Appearances.

1910- Patent for the first insect electrocutor. FHZZZZITT !

1929- New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened.

1939- Pinks Hot Dogs in LA started by Betty and Paul Pink.

1943- The first one man show of American abstract painter named Jackson Pollock. Pollock later created his brushless dripping form of painting that earned him the nickname:” Jack the Dripper”.

1952- The Supreme Court upheld a 1922 ruling that Baseball a sport, not a business. Therefore it is exempt from anti-trust laws.

1956-The Ten Commandments opened in theaters. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Much of the animated effects like the pillar of fire were done by freelancing Disney effects animators like Joshua Meador. 

1965- The Days of Our Lives soap opera first premiered on TV.

1966- Former actor and SAG president Ronald Reagan elected Governor of California trouncing two-term incumbent Pat Brown. Uber-Conservative Reagan declared a tough line with the hippies of Haight Ashbury and Berkeley. 

1966- Doctors at St. Josephs Hospital removed one of Walt Disney’s cancerous lungs, but discovered the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes and liver. They determined he did not have long to live. 

1973- Walt Disney’s animated Robin Hood premiered.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov. 7, 2023

Birthdays: Francesco Zubaran, Madame Curie, Rev. Billy Graham, Leon Trotsky –born Lev Bronstein, Albert Camus, Al Hurt, Dean Jagger, Joni Mitchell, Joan Sutherland, Judy Tenuda, Clive Barnes, Lindsay Duncan, Morgan Spurlock, Lucille LaVerne, the voice of the Wicked Queen in Disney’s Snow White.

1865- The London Gazette is founded.

1874- Cartoonist Thomas Nast first drew The Republican Party as an elephant. 

1899-The play Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekov, premiered at the Imperial Art Theatre in Moscow, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski.

1937- Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels sent an emissary to Paris to try to talk Marlene Dietrich into coming home. But Germany’s greatest movie star hated the Nazis and all they stood for.

1951- Frank Sinatra left his wife to marry hot moviestar Ava Gardner.

1956- Eugene O’Neill’s biographical masterpiece play “Long Days Journey into Night” first premiered.

60th Anniversary 1963- The movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” premiered at Hollywood’s new Cinerama Dome theater.

1980- Movie star Steve McQueen died of cancer at age 50. 

2007- Walt Disney Pictures Enchanted premiered at the Odeon West End in London.

2014- Walt Disney’s Big Hero 6 opened. The short Feast preceded it.

Tom Sito's Animation almanac for Nov. 5, 2023

Birthdays: Gen. Benjamin "Spoons" Butler, Eugene V. Debs, Art Garfunkel is 82, Roy Rogers, Tatum O'Neill, Elke Sommer- born Baroness Elke von Shletz is 83, Ike Turner, Vivien Leigh. Will Durant, Joel McCrea, Sam Shepard, Yoshiyuki Tomino, John Berger, Robert Patrick is 66, Tilda Swinton is 63, Disney animator Mike Gabriel

1895- Invention of the Car Clutch.

1913- William Mulholland's great aqueduct starts bringing water 200 miles from Northern California to L.A. by the force of gravity alone. Without the extra water L.A. would never have grown any larger than 180,000 people. (L.A. Times estimate.) His address to the people of LA at the dedication concluded, “There it is. Take it.”

1937- Disney's silly symphony The Old Mill debuted. The first film featuring the multiplane camera technique.

1938- Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings premiered.

1940- President Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected to an unprecedented 3rd term. His defeated Republican opponent- Wendell Wilkie, who became the butt of jokes in many Looney Tunes.

1955- This is the date in 1955 that Marty McFly travels to in the film Back to the Future. 

1975- Mormon lumberjack Travis Walton was abducted by aliens and experimented on for five days, then returned to his home in Snowflake, Arizona. The encounter was seen by seven adult men, who were his co-workers. Walton published a bestseller Fire in the Sky, that was made into a movie.

1979- National Public Radio’s news show Morning Edition started.

1994- 45-year-old fighter George Foreman capped off an amazing comeback by becoming the oldest person ever to win the Heavyweight Championship of the World. 

1999- A man was arrested in Minneapolis for stealing and keeping 150 shopping carts in his apartment.

2004- Pixar's The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird premiered. 

Tom Sito's Animation Fun Facts for Nov. 4, 2023

Birthdays: Will Rogers, Art Carney, T.S. Sullivant, Disney director Ben Sharpsteen, Treg Brown,Loretta Swit, Martin Balsam, Gig Young, Darla Hood, Joe Neikro, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ralph Maccio, Andrea McArdle, Walter Cronkite, Matthew McConnaughy is 53, Laura Bush, Kathy Griffin, Aardman animator Peter Lord is 70.

1918- Wilfred Owen, one of the great English poets, was killed in combat in World War I, only six days before the final armistice.

1927- HOWARD CARTER OPENED THE TOMB OF KING TUT. Other royal tombs had been opened before but they had always been cleaned out centuries ago by grave robbers. King Tut-Ankh-Amon’s was the first unspoiled Pharoah's tomb to be discovered in modern times. The site was discovered under a house built for workers excavating the tomb of King Ramses IV. 

There was King Tut’s Curse guarding the door, and a few folks like Lord Carnarvon did go to an early grave: allegedly from scratching a zit and getting blood poisoning. Legend has it the same zit was found on King Tut's mummy! But Howard Carter, the man who broke the seal, rifled the tomb and did everything but stick his fingers in Tut's ears, lived to a merry old age and even pocketed a few artifacts he didn't feel like sharing with the British Museum. They were later returned by an embarrassed family descendant.

1931- One of the pioneering trumpet innovators of the new music called Jazz was Buddy Bolden. He was one of the first soloists to improvise within the body of a song, and so doing paved the way for the greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. But by 1931 Bolden was forgotten. This day he died broke in the Louisiana Home for the Insane. His family couldn't even afford a Dixieland Band to play at his funeral.

1939- Packard introduced the first air-conditioned automobile.

1945- Cartoonist Al Hirschfeld first inserts his daughter Nina’s name into one of his cartoons. It was for a Broadway musical review “ Are You With It?” with Johnny Roberts.

1952- UNIVAC, the first business computer, accurately predicted Dwight Eisenhower would win in a landslide. This when regular polling showed a strong lead for Adlai Stevenson. The first computer projected results for an election.

1955- In Arizona, Willie Bioff, union official who tried to hijack the Hollywood unions (Including the Disney cartoonists) for Frank Nitti's gang, had turned informer and was in the federal Witness Protection plan. This day he got into his car, turned the key in his Ford pickup and exploded. 

1963- The Beatles were part of the Queens Royal Command performance in London. John Lennon told the audience: " Will the people in the cheap seats clap their hands? And the rest of you, would you please just rattle your jewelry."

1977- The Incredible Hulk TV show starring Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby, first premiered as a made for TV movie.

1980- Yomiuri Giants baseball great Saduharu Oh retired after hitting 868 homeruns in his 22-year career. 

1989- Grand Day Out, introduced the world to Wallace and Gromit.

1993- The Topanga-Malibu fires., Huge brush fires burned expensive homes in Malibu. The fires reached from the Santa Monica Mountains down to the ocean. Eyewitnesses said the 30 foot flames were reflected in the sky and water turning everything orange and the landscape looked more like Mars.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Nov 3, 2023

Birthdays: The Roman writer Lucan 39AD, John Montague the Earl of Sandwich, Jubal Early, Walker Evans, William Cullen Bryant, Stephen Austin, Bronco Nagurski, Andre' Malraux, Vincenzo Bellini, Bob Feller, Karl Baedeker author of the guidebooks, Ken Berry, Michael Dukakis, Gustav Tenngren, Lulu, Osamu Tezuka, Jim Cummings is 70.

1836- Southern California ranchero Juan de Alvarado rallied local ranchers to overthrow corrupt territorial Governor Juan de Micheltorena sent from Mexico City. One of his followers was Pio Pico, who would become a general in the Mexican War. The story of Alvarado may have been an early inspiration for Zorro.

1883- Outlaw Black Bart held up his last stagecoach. He liked to rob the Wells Fargo strongbox and leave behind poems. “ I’ve labored long and hard for bread, for money and for riches. But too long on my corns you’ve tread, you fine-haired sons of bitches!- Black Bart poe-8.”  Eventually Wells Fargo agents tracked him down to man named Charles Bowles and he did 6 years in San Quentin.

1888- Jack the Ripper killed his last victim, a prostitute named Mary Reilly.

1930- Amadeo Giannini changed the name of his San Francisco based Bank of Italy to the Bank of America.

1948 -The Chicago Daily Tribune prints the famous premature headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” based on early poll returns. Truman himself was so sure he’d lost the election he went to bed early. When he awoke he discovered he had won and he had a ball mocking the newspapers and doing nasal imitations of hostile news correspondent H.B. Kaltenborn. 

1956- The movie The Wizard of Oz, with Judy Garland, was released in theaters in 1939, it did lackluster box office. This day it was first broadcast on television. Almost 40 million people tuned in that night. It has been run every year since. Possibly the most viewed TV movie ever. 

1957-SPACE DOG- The first living thing sent into orbit, a Russian dog named Laika. She was a stray found on a Moscow street. She never came back but died in space, but she probably was satisfied knowing she made history- woof. 

1966- President Lyndon Johnson signed the Truth in Packaging Act, which required all packaged foods to print their real ingredients on the label.

1971- The first UNIX manual released. 

1971- Carly Simon married James Taylor.

1974- Hello Kitty created by Yukio Shimizu for Sanrio Prod.

1976- Carrie starring Sissy Spacek opened in theaters.

1977- Disney's Pete's Dragon starring Helen Reddy and Red Buttons. 

1979- T.V. sitcom Different Strokes premiered.

1981- WALLY WOOD was one of the most influential cartoonists of the 1950’s and 60’s. His amazing versatility enabled him to draw everything from superhero comics to very cartoony to playfully naughty girls like Sally Forth. He drew EC Comics, the Mars Attacks series, Mad Magazine, Weird Science, THUNDER Agents and much more. He had done an infamous drawing of the Disney characters having sex that was so good, people assumed it was done by a rogue Disney animator. But hard living and deadlines took their toll. Suffering from a stroke, and failing kidneys, Wally Wood put a 44 cal pistol to his right temple and pulled the trigger. Today police found his remains. 

2006- Dreamworks/Aardman film Flushed Away, directed by David Bowers.

Tom Sito's Animation Fun Facts for Nov. 2, 2023

Birthdays: Daniel Boone, Pres. James Knox Polk, Jean Chardin, Luchino Visconti, Ray Walston, Giusseppi Sinopoli, Burt Lancaster, Pat Buchanan, Steve Ditko, Ray Walston, Stephanie Powers, k.d. lang, David Schwimmer is 57

Today is the traditional day for Dio de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It derives from the Aztecs, who believed the life you are now living is a dream. When you die, you awake to your real life.

1904- London newspaper The Daily Mirror first published.

1928- The Little Carnegie Theater in New York opened. Until its closing in 1982, it was one of the premiere art-house cinemas.

1932- Young star Katherine Hepburn first shines in the film A Bill of Divorcement, co- starring with John Barrymore.

1936- The School of Industrial Arts founded in New York City. Four art teachers began it in an old building that once housed a WPA theater project. In 1960 it became The High School of Art & Design, a magnet public school for commercial artists. 

1947- Howard Hughes pilots his monster wooden airplane, the Hughes H-1 Hercules, known as “The Spruce Goose" for it's only test flight, one minute over Long Beach Harbor. Two hundred tons, Eight engines, a wingspan longer than a football field, it was conceived as an aid to win World War II, but was not ready until long after the war ended.

1950- 94 year old writer George Bernard Shaw died of injuries sustained from falling out of an apple tree he was pruning. His dying words were:" Oh well, it will be a new experience, anyway."

1966- Walt Disney stopped into St. Joseph’s Hospital for pre-op x-rays for an old polo injury to his neck. Examining the x-rays doctors discover a cancerous tumors covering most of his left lung. They recommend immediate surgery, but Walt left to work at the studio a few more days.

2001- Pixar’s Monsters Inc. opened.

2012- Walt Disney’s Wreck it Ralph opened in theaters. Appearing in front of it was the short Paperman, by John Kahrs.

2016- Ending generations of frustration, the Chicago Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians 8-7 in ten innings to win one of the more exciting World Series of baseball. The last time the Cubs won a world series was in 1908.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Nov. 1, 2023

Birthdays: Marie Antoinette, President Warren Harding, Stephen Crane, Marcel Ophuls, Benevento Cellini, Larry Flynt, Walter Matthau, Fernando Valenzuela, Lyle Lovett, Willie D, Rick Allen of Def Leppard, animator Retta Davidson, Jenny McCarthy is 51, Toni Collette is 51, animator Will Finn, director Brenda Chapman-Lima

                                               Brenda Chapman, Tom Sito, James Baxter

1895- Emil and Max Skladowsky set up a Bioscope projector in Berlin's Wintergarden. The Birth of German Cinema.

1920- The first issue of American Cinematographer.

1925- Gabriel Leuville, called Max Linder, was the first international movie star. Before the Great War, audiences flocked to see his suave debonair character. Before Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, Max Linder created the style of cinema slapstick comedy. When WWI broke out, he patriotically enlisted in the army. He survived the war, but the experience left him chronically depressed with PTSD. This day in Austria, Max and his 18 year old wife Corrine committed suicide together, leaving a 16 month old daughter. 

1939- Rockefeller Center in New York City opened.

1946- THE FIRST NBA BASKETBALL GAME- The first professional game was the New York Knicks 68, the Toronto Huskies 66. The first basket was scored by Ozzie Sheckmann.

1968- To replace the outmoded Hays Commission Production Code, the Motion Picture Ratings System was introduced-"G, M, R, and X"- Later PG, PG-13, R and NC-17".

1978- The movie version of the bestselling book “Watership Down” premiered. Martin Rosen and John Hubley directing. John Hubley died after only completing the first ten minutes of the film.

1988- Jeff Goldblum married Gena Davis. They divorced several years later. They are both over 6 feet tall.

2003- Walt Disney’s feature Brother Bear opened in theaters.