Friday, May 24, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for May 24, 2024


Birthdays: Jean Paul Marat, Queen Victoria, Walt Whitman, Emmanuel Leutze, Tina Turner, Priscilla Presley, Patti LaBelle, Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong is 86, Peter Ellenshaw, Gary Burghoff is 8, Kristin Scott Thomas is 64, Alfred Molina is 70, Jim Broadbent is 75, John C. Reilly is 61, Bob Dylan is 83, 

WB animator Art Leonardi is 93.



1590- In Rome, construction of the great Dome of Saint Peters Basilica completed.


1830 –The poem "Mary Had A Little Lamb," was written.


1844- Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message. From Washington to Baltimore it said: "What Hath God Wrought?" The message was from the Bible- Numbers 23:23.

Samuel Morse considered himself an artist first and did a little inventing to pay the bills. He heard a French inventor had speculated about the idea of telegraphy so he decided to build a working model and invented the Morse code system of representing letters with dots and dashes. Members of Congress and octogenarian former First Lady Dolly Madison were present at the ceremony.  By the decade’s end, twenty thousand miles of telegraph wire crisscrossed the country. 


1850- America’s first nationwide newspaper/magazine Harpers Weekly began.


1899 - 1st auto repair shop and car garage opened. The Back Bay Cycle and Motor Company of Boston.


1929- The Marx Brothers first movie comedy” The Coconuts” premiered.


1935- The first Baseball night game- Reds vs. Phillies.


1941- Paramount Pictures seized direct control of the Fleischer Studio in Miami. They allowed Max and Dave Fleischer another 26 weeks to complete their projects in house but as Paramount employees. They had to sign “resignations in blank” to be exercised at Paramount’s discretion when the 26 weeks were up. Soon Dave quit and Max was fired that December. The studio was re-organized as Famous Studio under Max’s son-in-law Seymour Kneitel and moved back to New York in Jan 1943. 


1950- Married movie star Ingrid Bergman shocked American morality by having an open love affair with neorealist film director Roberto Rosselini. This day they were finally married but the outcry of conservatives about this “Apostle of Degradation” was such that her image needed a makeover. So, she played Saint Joan of Arc.


1954 - IBM announces vacuum tube "electronic" brain, a computer that could perform 10

million operations an hour.


1958 – United Press & International News Service merge into United Press International.


1976 - 1st commercial SST Concorde flight to North America -London to Wash DC.


1989- In Los Angeles, a spectacular fire destroyed the Art-Deco-Moderne all-wood landmark, the Pan Pacific Auditorium. 


1991- Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise opened. 


1991- Ron Howard’s Backdraft opened.


1999- Tim Sweeny invented the animation/vfx software Unreal Engine.



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