Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for Dec 19, 2023

Birthdays: King Phillip V of Spain (1683), Edith Piaf, Edwin Stanton, Tip O'Neil, Cicely Tyson, Sir Ralph Richardson, Robert Urich, Robert Sherman, Jennifer Beals is 60, David Susskind, Fritz Reiner, Mel Shaw, Alyssa Milano is 51, Jake Gyllenhaal is 43

1914- Earl Hurd patented animation 'cels' (celluloids) and backgrounds. Before this cartoonists tried drawing the background settings over and over again hundreds of times or slashed the paper around the character and tried not to have it walk in front of anything. By the late 1990’s, most cels & cel paint were replaced by digital imaging, except in Japan, where some traditional paint continued. 

1918- Robert Ripley began his "Believe It Or Not" column in the New York Globe.

1919-The premiere of E.C. Segar’s comic strip “The Thimble Theatre”. The original characters were Olive Oyl, her brother Castor Oyl, and her original boyfriend Ham Gravy. Ten years later Popeye the Sailor appeared, as well as J. Wellington Wimpy, Alice the Goon and the Jeep. 

1932- BBC Overseas Service Radio broadcasts began. Originally called Empire Broadcasts. The sound of the chimes of Big Ben heard around the world. Despite gloomy predictions from the BBC's director-general John Reith - "The programs will neither be very interesting nor very good", the broadcasts received praise, and were further boosted by the support of a Christmas message from King George V (the first ever) to the Empire a few days later.

1957- The musical ‘The Music Man’ starring Robert Preston first debuted. "Seventy Six Trom-bones in the Big Parade…"

1958- First airing of the Disneyland TV holiday special “ From All of Us, to All of You.”

1971- Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ premiered. Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess. In America the film received an X Rating, more for the violence than the sexual situations. The sensation over the film caused so many incidents of urban violence, that with Kubrick’s permission, it was banned in England for three decades.

1974- The first personal computer went on sale. The Altair 8800, named for the planet in the 1955 sci-fi movie classic Forbidden Planet. The computer came in a kit that you had to build and it cost $397. The next year, two kids at Harvard named Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a programming language for it called BASIC.

1986- Frank Oz’s movie version of the Ashman-Mencken musical Little Shop of Horrors.” This film convinced Disney to hire them to write the music for Little Mermaid.

1997- MTV dropped airing the rap song Smack My Bitch Up, by Prodigy.

2001- Peter Jackson’s film ‘The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring’ first opened. It was the first film to use the software Massive, which created hundreds of digital figures to recreate whole armies attacking and retreating.