Friday, November 17, 2023

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.

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