Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 30, 2024

Birthdays: Buddy Rich, Lena Horne, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Hayward, Deanna Durbin, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, William Goldman, Martin Landau, Essa-Pekka Salonen, David Alan Grier, Vincent D’Onofrio, Monica Potter, Mike Tyson is 58, Michael Phelps, Rupert Graves is 61 

1856- In London, Charles Dickens does his first public reading from his works.

1936- Margaret Mitchell's bestseller “Gone With the Wind" first published.

1936- the 40 hour work week was made a federal law. 

1937- Congress voted to shut down the Federal Theater Project, the division of the government funded WPA that produced plays for Depression wracked poor people. The FTP produced cutting edge works of Orson Welles, Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill and at its height reached 25 million people. But conservative senators thought it had been taken over by lefties. Theater actors working in L.A. on a hit production of Pinocchio held a mock funeral for the puppet. Over its casket was the headstone FTP: Born 1934, Killed by an Act of Congress, June 30th 1937.

1940- Dale Messick takes over the Brenda Star comic strip and adds the trademark sparkles. Born Dalia Messick, she used her nickname Dale to throw off publishers who would reject samples they knew came from a woman.

1948- Bell Laboratories announced the Transistor, a possible substitute for radio-vacuum tubes. So early computers can shrink from the size of a building to the size of a bus. In 1980 the silicon chip reduced the same computing power to the size of your fingernail.

1950- The Goofy short Motor Mania released.

1953- The first Chevy Corvette rolled off the assembly line. Only three thousand were made that first year, all white with red interior, selling for $3,500. 

1971 – the movie Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was released. Directed by Mel Stuart, adapted from the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (who wrote the screenplay) and starring Gene Wilder. The Oompha Loompha song titling was done by a very early digital CGI technique called Scanimate.

1975- Just 4 days after divorcing Sonny Bono, Cher married rocker Gregg Allman.

1996 - Margaux Hemingway, considered the first modern Supermodel, committed suicide at 41. Her grandfather Ernest Hemingway committed suicide, and his father before him.

1989- Spike Lee’s movie Do The Right Thing opened. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 27, 2024

Birthdays: Swedish King Charles XII "the Madman of the North", Helen Keller, Norma Kamali, Charles Stuart Parnell," Captain Kangaroo" Bob Keeshan, Emma Goldman, Marine General Chesty Puller, Walter Johnson, Ross Perot, Isabella Adjani is 69, Lauren Hill, Alice McDermott, J.J. Abrams is 58, Tony Leung Chu Wai is 62, Toby McGuire is 49. Katherine Beaumont the voice of Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Wendy in Peter Pan 

1693 – The first woman's magazine "Ladies' Mercury" published in London.

1743- The English under George II defeat the French at Dettingen, and composer Georg Frederich Handel wrote in celebration the Dettingen Te Deum. 

1922 - Newberry Medal 1st presented for kids’ literature, the first winner was Hendrik Van Loon.

1935- Disney short Who Killed Cock Robin? Directed by Dave Hand. 

1949 - "Captain Video & His Video Rangers," debut on DUMONT-TV. The first Sci-Fi show made for TV.

1962- Daryl F. Zanuck showed up at the quarterly meeting of the exec board of 20th Century Fox, and in a celebrated corporate showdown, he wrested back control of the company he founded in 1935, but had since lost control of.

1966- TV soap opera Dark Shadows premiered. Barnabas Collins was the first vampire to have issues with his job, and so became the ancestor of the modern romantic vampires of True Blood, Interview With the Vampire, and Twilight.

1967- In London, Barclay’s Bank sets up an automated teller machine, which they called a Robot Teller, but we know today as the first ATM.

1973- Senior White House Counsel John Dean testified to the Watergate committee that President Richard Nixon maintained an Enemies List. The list ran from Senator Ted Kennedy and journalist Daniel Shore, to June Foray and Bill Scott, who did the cartoon voices of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose. 

1984- Hollywood introduced the PG-13 rating to indicate graphic violence, invented for the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

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986 -Labyrinth as released, fantasy directed by Jim Henson, written by Terry Jones, with concepts by Brian Froud. With David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly. The animated owl in the opening is the first ever digitally created rendering of an organic animal. Done by Bill Kroyer.

2008- Pixar’s WALL-E opened in theaters.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for June 26, 2024

Birthdays: Peter Lorre- born Laszlo Lowenstein, Pearl Buck, Abner Doubleday, Babe Deidrickson-Zacharias, Willy Messerschmidt, Claudio Abbado, Woolie Reitherman, Gregg LeMond, Vittorio Storaro, Colonel Tom Parker, Pat Morita, Chris Isaak, Derek Jeter, Paul Julian, Chris O’Donnell, Wallace Tripp, Makeup man Dick Smith (the Exorcist), Sean Hayes is 53

1496- Michelangelo Buonarotti arrived in Rome to look for work. Coming from the city of Florence he was treated like the citizen of a foreign country. 

1870- Atlantic City inaugurated its ocean side boardwalk; the first of it's kind in the US.

1888- Scots writer Robert Louis Stevenson shipped out from San Francisco to wander the South Pacific, and finally settle in Samoa.

1906- The first Grand Prix automobile race was held at Le Mans, France. The winner was Hungarian Ferenic Szisz with a top speed of 63 miles an hour! Szisz also was sporting those newfangled rubber tires on rims, which change faster than regular wooden wheels.

1916- The Cleveland Indians baseball team began the custom of players wearing numbers on their uniforms.

1922- Montgomery’s Country House opened in the Los Feliz Area of LA. Started by Walter van de Kamp and Lawrence Frank. In 1926 it changed its name to The Tam O’ Shanter. For a time it was also called The Great Scot. In the 1930s it was the nearest bar to Walt Disney’s Hyperion Studio, so animators called it “the commissary”. It is still in business today. Walt Disney’s favorite table is marked.

1924 - The Ziegfeld Follies opened on Broadway.

1925- Charlie Chaplin has a lavish Hollywood premiere for his new film The Gold Rush.

He had edited the film in secret in an upstairs hotel room in Salt Lake City to keep away from his first wife’s bill collectors.

1925- From his Soho London flat, John Logie Baird invented an early form of television. The Boob Tube has no one single Tom Edison-like inventor, but many claimants. The Englishman joined the ranks of others who claimed to have invented TV first, including Philo Farnsworth, Bell Labs, Vladimir Zworkin, and Dr. Lee DeForrest.

1927- The Cyclone Rollercoaster ride debuted at Coney Island Amusement Park. It was built on the site of the Switchback Railway, the oldest rollercoaster. 

1949- Fred Allen’s last radio show was broadcast.

1959- Disney short Donald in Mathamagic Land premiered with the film Darbie O’Gill and the Little People.

1961- John F. Kennedy makes his "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" speech at the Berlin Wall. He electrifies and inspires all Europe despite " ein berliner" really meant a local brand of jam donut. The proper way to say I am a Berliner is "Ich bin Berliner”. The crowd smiled but was polite. Today in tourist shops on the Unter Den Linden, you can buy a plastic donut with JFK’s speech coming from a hidden computer chip. 

1964 - Beatles release "A Hard Day's Night" album.

1965-"Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man " by the Byrds hits number one on the US pop charts. Bob Dylan wrote the lyrics. William Shatners version became the most well known.

1977 - Elvis Presley does his last public performance, in Indianapolis.

1984- Campy singer Tiny Tim married Miss Vicky on the Johnny Carson show during a live broadcast.

1997- a novel called "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," the product of five years’ work by a new writer named J.K. Rowling with her own drawings, was published by Bloomsbury in the UK with an initial print run of five hundred copies. It became a worldwide phenomenon. In 5 years J.K. Rowling was the richest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth II and Madonna.

2000- THE GENOME- Scientists announce they had cracked the human gene code and now had a rough sketch of how our DNA is assembled. Custom drugs could now be developed matching the DNA of an individual patient. It is called the biological equivalent of the landing on the moon.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for June 25, 2024

Birthday: George Orwell, Marc Charpentier, Lord Louis Mountbatten, General Hap Arnold, Cajun musician Clifton Chenier, Sidney Lumet, Walter Brennan, Willis Reed, George Abbott, Carly Simon, Alex Toth, Peyo (the creator of the Smurfs), Patrick Macnee, Jimmy Dyne-no-Mite Walker, George Michaels, Anthony Bourdain, Justice Sonya Sotomayor, Mike Myers is 61, Ricky Gervais is 63, 

June Lockhart is 99!

1630 – The fork was introduced to American dining by Plymouth Gov Winthrop.

1835- Antoine Baron Gros was a celebrated painter under Napoleon and a friend of David and Ingres. But politics and tastes change. In a royalist postwar France dominated by Delacroix and Gericault, Baron Gros lived on in melancholy. He tried to bring back Neoclassicism but was deemed too old fashioned. This day the 64 year old artist drowned himself in the Seine.

1857- Writer Gustav Flaubert went on trial for “immorality” for his first novel Madame Bovary. He was acquitted and went on to write his next book Salammbo the Carthaginian princess who strangled herself with her own hair. 

1870- Richard Wagner's opera Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) premiered in Munich. 

1910- First performance of Stravinsky's ballet "Firebird" by Diaghilev and his Ballet Russe.  Stravinsky used to refer to the dancers as "A bunch of knock-kneed Lolitas".

1934- Milt Kahl's first day at the Walt Disney Studios. It was said he was the first artist to ever show Walt a real portfolio of drawings to get hired.

1940- Young actor, and liberal labor activist Ronald Reagan married his first wife, actress Jane Wyman.

1949- Chuck Jones Bugs Bunny short “Longhaired Hare” premiered. “Leopold!”

1951- After losing a power struggle to Dory Schary, Louis B. Mayer announced he was stepping down as head of MGM. Mayer in his time was the most powerful man in Hollywood. He kept an all-white office modeled after Mussolini’s in Rome. 

1951 - 1st color TV broadcast-CBS' Arthur Godfrey from NYC to 4 cities.

1953- The film Robot Monster premiered. It has attained cult film status as being one of the worst movies ever made. The lead actor only got the part of the monster because he owned a gorilla suit. Most of it was filmed in a gravel pit. After reading the reviews, the director Phil Tucker tried to kill himself.

1956- The last Packard automobile was produced.

1967- The "Our World" Beatles concert, the first television event to attempt a worldwide satellite linkup. They sing and record "All You Need is Love" live in front of an audience of 400.

1980- Disney’s film Herbie Goes Bananas, premiered.

1981- Bill Gates and Paul Allen file papers to incorporate their company Microsoft.

1982- Ridley Scott’s sci-fi film Blade Runner opened. 

2009- Singer Michael Jackson, called the King of Pop, died after his personal physician Dr. Conrad Murray administered a powerful sedative named Propofol to help him sleep and it stopped his heart instead. He was 50 and been performing on stage since the age of 5.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for June 24, 2024

Birthdays: Earl Kitchener, the Sirdar of Omdurman, Roy O. Disney, E.I. Dupont, Ambrose Bierce, Jack Dempsey, John Ciardi, Mick Fleetwood, Phil Harris- singer and voice of Baloo in Disney’s Jungle Book, Billy Casper, Michelle Lee, Claude Chabrol, Chief Dan George, Pete Hamill, Peter Weller, Sherry Springfield

1889- The Bank of Telluride Colorado was robbed by a former Mormon miner named Robert Parker, who now called himself Butch Cassidy. He teamed up with the Sundance Kid later.

1901- The first exhibit in a Paris salon on the Rue Lafitte of a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso.

1939- Pan-Am airlines began regular transatlantic passenger flights from New York to London.

1945- Meet the Press debuted on radio. Two years later it moved to television and it remains TV’s longest running program.

1947- THE FIRST MODERN UFO SIGHTING. A commercial airline pilot flying out of Seattle notices 6 silver disc shaped objects hovering over Mt. Reinier near Seattle. They then shot off at terrific speed. They are never identified nor explained. The pilot, Kenneth Arnold had impeccable credentials as an ex-combat Marine pilot and chamber of commerce member. The government response was to hit him with an IRS audit. The "flying-saucer" craze, with allegorical overtones to postwar atomic paranoia, swept the American imagination throughout the 1950’s.

1949 - "Hopalong Cassidy" became the first network western on television-NBC.

1963 - 1st demonstration of a home video recorder, at BBC Studios, London

1964- The movie “Robin and the Seven Hoods” opened. Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack friends play the Robin Hood story as Chicago gangsters. Mainly remembered for Frank singing “ My kind of town, Chicago is….”

1970 – The Mike Nichols movie "Catch 22" opened in movie theaters.

1973- Eamon de Valera resigned as President of the Irish Republic at age ninety. The American-born Irish patriot had been a guerrilla in the 1916 Easter Sunday Uprising and was president since 1932.

1994- Walt Disney’s The Lion King opened in regular theaters. 

1997- Brian Keith, actor (Family Affair, The Parent Trap), shot himself at 75. He was suffering from incurable emphysema and lung cancer and tired of fighting the disease.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 23, 2024

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Augustus, Josephine Bonaparte, Alan Turing, Bob Fosse, James Levine, Dan Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather, Joss Whedon, Dr. Alfred Kinsey the sex researcher, Edward VIII, aka the Duke of Windsor, Selma Blair, Justice Clarence Thomas, Josh Whedon is 61, Frances MacDormand is 64

1868- Christopher Latham Scholes patented the typewriter. In 1873, he sold his patent to the Remington Company, who up till now had only made rifles. 

1944- Disney short Springtime for Pluto released.

1944- Franklin Roosevelt's last fireside chat on the radio.

1963- In Disneyland the Enchanted Tiki Room opened with the first animatronics (the birds).

1972- Title IX passed by the US Government. It called for women’s collegiate sports to be funded equally as the men’s sports. 

1976- Work completed on Toronto’s CN Tower. Called then the world’s tallest free-standing structure.

1979- The Knack released the single My Sharona.

1989- Tim Burton’s film " Batman" opened.

1989- Disney’s Honey I Shrank the Kids opened with the Roger Rabbit short Tummy Trouble.

1995- Walt Disney’s Pocahontas went into general release.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 22, 2024

Birthdays: Captain George Vancouver, Eric Maria Remarque, John Dillinger, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mike Todd, Billy Wilder, Joe Papp, Bill Blass, Oskar Fischinger, Pistol Pete Maravich, Klaus Maria Brandauer is 81, Graham Greene is 72, Ed Bradley, Emmanuelle Seigner, Prunella Scales, Meryl Streep is 75, Konrad Zuse, Kris Kristofferson, Paul Frees, Matt Doherty, Elizabeth Warren, Animator Floyd Norman is 89.

1342 – According to JRR Tolkeins’ book the Hobbit, this day Bilbo Baggins returned to his home in the Shire, with the one true Ring.

1894 - Harry Houdini married Bessie Rahner. She remained devoted to him even after his death. Every Halloween for twenty years she held a séance to try and contact him.

1933- Max Fleischer promoted Lillian Friedman to be the first woman animator in American commercial animation. She animated a test of Betty Boop and with the help of a female camera operator, filmed it without a name slate. Then she had it screened in front of the crew at dailies. Dave Fleischer said "Hire that guy!" "It's a girl", he was told. So, Lillian Friedman (Astor) was hired at 25 dollars a week when the male animators were making up to $125.00. I asked her about this. She said "It was the Depression and I was supporting my husband who was out of work. I wasn't angry then, but I am angry now."

1941- Walt Disney assistant animator Bill Hurtz married Mary Whitney, one of Walt Disney’s secretaries. Hurtz later went on to become an award winning director at UPA.

1944- Congress passed the Rankin-Barden Servicemen’s Adjustment Act, better known as the "GI Bill" giving college and home loans to returning veterans.

1966 – The Mike Nichols film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened. Based on the play by Edward Albee and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. It was the first American movie to use four letter cuss words. Just a year before comedian Lenny Bruce had gone to jail for saying the same words, even though everyone including President Johnson swore in everyday parlance.

1969- Singer actress Judy Garland OD’s on sleeping pills. She was 47. Whether it was an accident or a suicide we will never know. 

1970- President Nixon signed the law lowering the voting age in the U.S. from 21 to 18.

1977- Walt Disney’s The Rescuers opened in theaters.

1978 - James Christy's discovery of Pluto's moon Charon announced.

1990- A signal of the end of the Cold War, "Checkpoint Charlie" the main dividing gate between East and West Berlin was dismantled. John Le Carre' and other spy novel writers mourned. There is a replica and a Cold War Museum at the site today.

2012- Pixar’s Brave came out. Written and directed by Brenda Chapman-Lima.

2012- Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter opened. 

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for June 21, 2024

Birthdays: Martha Washington, Alexander Pope, Berkeley Breathed, Al Hirschfeld, Al Martinez, Jean-Paul Sartre, Judy Holliday, Benazir Bhutto, Jane Russell, Mariette Hartley, Bernie Koppel, Rick Sutcliffe, Maureen Stapleton, Joe Flagherty, Juliet Lewis, Tony Scott, Chris Pratt is 43, Prince William the The Prince of Wales is 42. 

1871- The Los Angeles Star newspaper announced the first trainload of pretzels had reached town!

1893- The FERRIS WHEEL -George Washington Ferris, Jr. decided that the Columbia Exhibition, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery, needed to surpass the French Eiffel Tower (introduced in 1889 during the centennial celebration of the French Revolution). So he created his wheel so each compartment could hold 12 people plus a butler in a parlor-like atmosphere and rotate them 250 feet in the air.  People were afraid they would gasp for oxygen up so high, but it was a big hit anyway. 

1907 - E W Scripps founded United Press Agency.

1939- Eugene O’Neill’s wife Carlotta wrote in her diary- “Gene kept me up all night talking about his outline for a new play about his family”- The Long Days Journey into Night. It took him two years to write, and it almost killed him.

1947- To silence a jeering crowd of racists at a Brooklyn Dodgers-Cincinnati game, Kentucky native PeeWee Reese put his arm around Jackie Robinson. 

1948- The Mark I computer, built at the Victoria University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program this day. The first computer that could store a program and re-open it.

1948- Columbia Records introduced the 33 1/3-rpm long playing record, the LP. Inventor Peter Goldmark was annoyed that he had to change his 78 rpm records several times to hear just one Brahms Symphony. He decided to invent a way to fit all of a symphony on one side of a record.  His immediate supervisors told him to stop it because people would not throw away all their 78 rpm records to replace them with his. So Goldmark went over their heads to CBS chief William Paley and Paley loved the idea. RCA and David Sarnoff tried to compete with the 45-rpm record, but all it was good for was singles. The 33 1/3 dominated recording until replaced by the Compact Disc in the 1980’s.

1965- The Byrds release record Hey Mr. Tambourine Man. 

1978 - Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice's musical "Evita," premieres in London.

1988- Who Framed Roger Rabbit? premiered at Radio City Music Hall.  It opened generally three days later.

1991- Disney’s The Rocketeer premiered. Based on Dave Stevens comic book.

1996- Walt Disney’s animated Hunchback of Notre Dame opened in theaters.

1998- Paleontologists in Canada announced the discovery of the largest Tyrannosaurus turd ever found. The search intensified for a T-Rex with a relaxed look on his face.

2004- The first flight in the privatization of Space. Bert Routans’ company financed by Microsoft head, Paul Allen, sent SpaceShip1 up to the edge of the atmosphere. Test pilot Mike Nelvil was the first civilian astronaut.

2008- Pixar’s WALL-E premiered at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 20, 2024

Birthdays: Wolf Tone, Jacques Offenbach, Lillian Hellman, Errol Flynn, Audie Murphy,Andre Watts, Cyndee Lauper, Bob Vila, Chet Atkins, Stephen Frears, Brian Wilson, Robert Rodriquez, John Goodman, Martin Landau, John Mahoney, Nicole Kidman is 57

1936- Mickey short Moving Day premiered.

1940- Peruvian Artist Alberto Vargas signed a contract with Esquire Magazine to paint the ‘Vargas Girls’, glamour pin ups that made the magazine famous. He replaced artist George Petty who was demanding $1,500 a week. Vargas was paid $75 a week. When Esquire cut him loose, Hugh Hefner put him on salary at Playboy until he retired in 1978. Today an original Vargas goes easily for $350,000.

1941-Walt Disney's "the Reluctant Dragon" premiered, with cartoonist's pickets around the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Police actually have to close part of Hollywood Blvd. out of concern for what the rampaging animators might do. Future UPA producer Steve Bosustow drove up in a limo and picketed in tuxedo and top hat. His chauffeur was Maurice Noble, the designer of the Road Runner cartoons. Ironically the movie was part documentary about how wonderful life was working at the Disney studio.

1947- Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the gangster creator of modern Las Vegas, was shot while reading his evening paper in his Beverly Hills home. 

1948- The TV show "Toast of the Town" later to be “the Ed Sullivan Show” premiered. Sullivan's show was the showcase that brought new acts like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Senor Wences and the Rolling Stones into the average American living room. Prior to this, Ed Sullivan was a columnist and radio show personality.

1974- Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown opened.

1975- Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws opened, bringing back the monster-hit summer event movie. Universal called that summer, “The Summer of the Shark.” 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 19, 2024

Birthdays: Euclid, Blaise Pascal, King James I Stuart, Wallis Simpson Duchess of Windsor, Moe Howard, Lou Gehrig, Guy Lombardo, Mildred Natwick, Charles Coburn, Pat Butram, Louis Jourdan, Pauline Kael, Salman Rushdie, Dame Mae Whitty, Lucie Sloane, Ang Sung Soo Chi, Kathleen Turner is 70, Paula Abdul is 62, Zoe Saldana is 46, Gena Rowlands is 94.

240 BC- Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes, measuring the cast shadows made by sticks placed in the ground, first calculated the total circumference of the Earth. He was only off by a few miles.

1619- THE OLD GLOBE THEATER FIRE. During a performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, a prop cannon fired a salute that set afire the straw thatch on the roof. Soon the blaze consumed the old theater. Shakespeare, as a partner in the company that owned the Globe, paid to rebuild it.  He soon retired home to Stratford. Fifty years later, during Cromwell’s Puritan rule, the Globe was pulled down because the Puritans frowned on theatrical entertainment as ungodly.

1846-THE EARLIEST RECORDED BASEBALL GAME- The famous legend is that Abner Doubleday invented the game in 1839 but that's been mostly disproved. The sport evolved out of an old Anglo-Irish game called Rounders. No one is sure of the exact date the game was invented, but, on this day, a New York newspaper ran a notice of a "base-ball" game played by the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club and the New York Nines Cricket Club at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The cricketeers won 23-1. This was the first game played under Cartwright’s Rules.  Alexander Cartwright created a finite system of three outs and nine innings.  

Baseball spread nationwide because of the Civil War. When men of all the states would spend time in army camps, they learned to play “The Boston-New York Game”. After the conflict, they went to their homes in the various states and took the game with them. 

1921- Distributer Amadee van Beuren announced production of a new series of "Aesop’s Fables" cartoons to be done by former Bray director Paul Terry. Terrytoons studio is born.

1923 - "Moon Mullins," a Comic Strip, debuts.

1934- The Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, created.

1941 - Cheerios Cereal invented. Originally called Cheery-Oats, it was changed to Cheerios in 1945. 

1951-Happy Birthday Taz!  Devil May Hare, short by Bob McKimson, introduced the Tasmanian Devil.

1952 - "I've Got a Secret" debuts on CBS-TV with Garry Moore as host.

1956- The comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis announced their breakup.

1956- Don Bluth’s first day at the Walt Disney Studio. 

1960- Freedomland amusement park opened in the north Bronx, New York. Several of its designers like Harper Goff had worked on Walt Disney’s Disneyland. 

1963- The Ray Harryhausen fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts premiered.

1963- The Canadian Football Hall of Fame formed.

1973- The Rocky Horror Show stage show opened in London. The 1975 film version became a midnight cult classic. Writer Richard O’Brien himself played the doorman Riff-Raff. Let’s do the Time Warp Again.

1978 – Garfield the Cat, created by Jim Davis, 1st appeared as a comic strip.

1983- Don Bluth’s video arcade game Dragons Lair debuted.

1987 - Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream announced a new Ice Cream flavor, Cherry Garcia. Named for rocker Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. Today Jerry is gone, but Cherry Garcia rocks on.

1987 –David Geffen Records signed their 1st artist -Donna Summer.

1998- Disney’s Mulan went into wide release. .

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Yesterday’s Quiz: What does to call someone a pleb?

Answer: Roman for plebian, the lowest class.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for June 18, 2024

Birthdays: M C Escher, Charles Gounod, James Montgomery Flagg, Kay Kayser, William Lassell 1799- English astronomer who discovered Neptune's moon Triton,  Richard Boone,  Jeanette MacDonald, Key Luke, Isabella Rosselini, E.G. Marshall, Roger Ebert, Eduard Daladier, Carol Kane, Sammy Kahn,  The Quay Brothers, Paul McCartney is 82

1879 - W H Richardson, an African American inventor, patents the baby buggy or perambulator.

1892 - Macadamia nuts first planted in Hawaii.

1898 - 1st amusement pier opens in Atlantic City, NJ

1900- The Dowager Empress of China Xiao Chin Xi (Cixi) called for the killing of all foreigners during the Boxer Rebellion.  She committed the Chinese Imperial Army to the expulsion of all the European colonialist powers. Empress Xiao Chin Xi was the first person the western press called The Dragon Lady, later used by Milt Caniff in his comic strip Terry & the Pirates. 

1903 - 1st transcontinental auto trip began in SF. Arrived in NY 3-month later.

1913- composer Cole Porter graduated from Yale.

1923- The first Checker Cab was manufactured in Chicago. The big, boxy, durable Checkers were the most famous American city taxicabs until phased out in the 1980s.

1931- New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art had in its collection a little blue statue of a Hippo from the tomb of the Egyptian Steward Senbi from the Twelfth Dynasty. People nicknamed it Willie. This day an article about Willie with a color picture appeared in Punch Magazine. Soon museum craftsmen who usually do restoration work made little replicas of Willie that they gave as gifts to donors and eventually started selling to the public. The massive retail business in museum reproductions and merchandise we have today all began with little Willie the Hippo.

1959 - 1st TV telecast transmitted from England to US.

1967- At the Monterey Pop Rock festival Jimi Hendrix electrified the audience then finished his set by burning and smashing his guitar on stage. Until then musicians didn’t behave in such a way towards their instruments. Ravi Shankar was particularly shocked.

1969- Sam Peckinpah’s film “The Wild Bunch” opened. With William Holden, Warren Oates, Robert Ryan and Ernest Borgnine.

1980 –"We are on a mission from God." John Landis movie " The Blues Brothers" with Dan Ackroyd & John Belushi premiered.

1983- Sally Ride became the first U.S. woman in Space. Russian Valentina Tereshkova had gone up in 1963.

1999- George Lucas film Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The first mainstream film shot completely digital.

2021- Pixar’s Luca opened, directed by Enrico Casarosa.

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Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 17, 2024

Birthdays: King Edward I "Longshanks", John Wesley the founder of the Methodists, Igor Stravinsky, Don Graham, Wally Wood, Ralph Bellamy, Dean Martin, Barry Manilow, Joe Piscopo, Newt Gingrich, Martin Bormann, Jason Patrick, Ken Loach, Greg Kinnear is 60, Venus Williams, Thomas Haden Church is 64, Will Forte is 54

1823- Charles Mackintosh patented the waterproof rubberized raincoat. In England, a raincoat is still called a Mackintosh.

1885- The pieces of the Statue of Liberty arrive from France. Some assembly required...

1893- Cracker Jacks invented by RW Reuckheim. Their name came from Teddy Roosevelt sampling the caramel corn, and exclaimed “These are Crackerjack!”- popular slang back then for something very good.

1919 - "Barney Google" cartoon strip, by Billy De Beck, premiered.

1933-Disney short Mickey’s Mechanical Man.

1946- The first mobile telephone was installed in an automobile in St. Louis, Missouri.

1964- The first Universal Studios tram car tour. Carl Laemmle had been inviting tourists in for a nickel to sit in bleachers and watch movies be filmed as early as 1915.

1968- Ohio Express’ single “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I got love in my Tummy” went gold.

1994- THE WHITE BRONCO CHASE- Movie actor and Hall of Fame football player O.J. Simpson was wanted for questioning about the grisly murder of his second wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her boyfriend Ron Goldman. This day OJ tried to escape. He and his football friend Al Cowlings led police on a strange slow-speed pursuit for two hours around the freeways of Los Angeles as the world watched amazed on live television. He eventually was convinced to surrender. OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder in a controversial trial, but found guilty in a civil wrongful death suit. 

2005- The Miyazaki directed hit Howl’s Moving Castle opened in the U.S., dubbed by Pixar and Pete Docter. 

2016- Pixar’s Finding Dori opened, the sequel to Finding Nemo, directed by Andrew Stanton

Tom Sito's animation almanac for June 16,2024

Birthdays: Stan Laurel, Willy Boskovsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Nelson Doubleday, Brian Eno, animator Pete Burness, Martha Graham, Erich Segal, Jack Albertson, Helen Traubel, Ron LeFlore, Tupac Shakur, Laurie Metcalf, Sonia Braga is 75, John Cho is 52.

Happy Father's Day- It was organized by the Spokane Washington members of the local YMCA and Spokane Ministerial Assoc. Father’s Day was celebrated for 1st time in 1910

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1657- First recorded mention in London of chocolate for sale. Xocolatl was served by the Mayans and Aztecs as early as 900AD. Mayans called it The Food of the Gods. Xocolatl was served to Hernando Cortez by Montezuma in 1517 but it was pretty bitter stuff, served like hot cocoa and with chili peppers. The Spaniards tamed chocolate with sugar and kept the formula a secret for 100 years. The Dutch figured it out and added milk for Milk Chocolate.  Sir John Sloan the British chemist invented a formula as well. The Mayans also gave Europeans the first Vanilla beans.

1884 - On Coney Island Amusement Pier the Switchback Railway, the country’s first roller coaster began operating.

1902- A musical play of L Frank Baum’s fantasy story The Wizard of Oz premiered at Chicago’s Grand Opera House. Like Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the play was a bigger success than the original book. The shows director had heavily rewritten the story for the stage, but its success made Baum philosophical. “ The audience decides what it wants.”

1903 – The Pepsi Cola Company formed.

1904- "Blume's Day" all the actions in James Joyce's "Ulysses" takes place on this one day in Dublin. This day Dubliners dress up as characters from the book and do readings.

1920- International Telephone and Telegraph incorporates- IT&T.

1932- Broadway star Mae West heads west for Hollywood to make movies.

1939- Bandleader Chick Webb died at age 30. Webb was an unlikely pop star, a crooked backed, tuberculate little person who played drums. But his band The Chick Webb Orchestra pioneered the new Jazz form called Swing Music and inspired the Big Band Sound. One of Webb’s last actions before succumbing to his debilitating health problems was to make a star out of 19-year-old street singer named Ella Fitzgerald.

1943- 54 year old actor Charlie Chaplin married his fourth wife, 18 year old Oona O’Neill. She was the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill. In Hollywood, Chaplin’s nickname in was “Chickenhawk Charlie” for his fondness for underage girls. Oona did remain his wife until the end of his life in 1971.

1947 –The 1st regular broadcast network news show began-Dumont's "News from Washington”. Other networks did brief headline reports, but this was the first all news program,

1951- Chuck Jones short, “Chow Hound”. Don’t forget the gravy.

1952- The CBS television comedy My Little Margie premiered. It starred Gale Storm and Charlie Farrell. 

1955- Disney’s Lady and the Tramp premiered.

1959- Actor George Reeves, who played the 1950s television Superman, went upstairs after a dinner party and shot himself with a Luger pistol.  

1960- Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Psycho" premiered. Based on a novel by Robert Bloch. A fan told Bloch that since she’s seen the film, she hasn’t been able to take a shower. Bloch smiled, “ Well, then it’s a good thing I didn’t have her killed on the toilet.” 

1963- Cosmonaut Valentina Tereschkova was the first woman to go into space.

1966-YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT… The Supreme Court handed down the ruling Miranda vs. Arizona, overturning the conviction of an Ernesto Miranda, who was jailed after he was tricked into confessing an assault of a Phoenix woman. This ruling established the famous Miranda Rights, read to every suspect upon arrest. Ernesto Miranda was retired and convicted again and was stabbed in a bar fight in 1972.

1967- The film “The Dirty Dozen” debuted. 

2018- Brad Birds’ The Incredibles 2 opened in theaters.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 15, 2024

History for 6/15/2024
Birthdays: Edward the Black Prince of England, Rachael Donelson Jackson- Andy Jackson’s First Lady, Edvard Grieg, Saul Steinburg, Mario Cuomo, Jim Varney, Wade Boggs, Waylon Jennings, Xaviera Hollander the Happy Hooker, Jim Belushi, Neil Adams, Roger Chiasson, Michael Barrier, Dale Baer, Ice Cube is 55, Neil Patrick Harris is 51, Courtenay Cox is 60, Helen Hunt is 61, Lang Lang is 42

1938- The Fair Labor Standards Act passed. 

1945- Judy Garland married director Vincente Minnelli. Lisa Minnelli was the result.

1948- Abbott & Costello meet Frankenstein premiered.

1951- Comedian Lenny Bruce married a stripper named Honey Stuart.

1969- The country music comedy TV show Hee-Haw premiered as a summer replacement for the Smothers Brothers Hour. Hee Haw ran with high ratings but CBS cancelled the show anyway. This was because CBS chief Bill Paley disliked country music.  CBS had so many shows like Mayberry RFD, Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Hee-Haw, that insiders joked that CBS stood for the Country Broadcasting System. Hee-Haw had the last laugh, going on to a successful syndication run for decades. 

1977- Everybody Disco! KC and the Sunshine band release “I’m your Boogie Man”.

1983- Rowan Atkinson’s The Black Adder TV comedy premiered on BBC.

1985 Studio Ghibli was founded, headed by the directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki. The studio was founded after the success of the 1984 film NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND written and directed by Miyazaki for Topcraft and distributed by Toei Company. The name Ghibli was coined by Hayao Miyazaki in reference to the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli airplane. The Italian noun "ghibli" is based on the Arabic name for the sirocco, or Mediterranean wind, the idea being the studio would "blow a new wind through the anime industry".

1990- Warren Beatty’s movie version of Dick Tracy opened. Accompanied by the second Roger Rabbit short Roller Coaster Rabbit. Directed by Rob Minkoff.

30 Years Ago 1994- Walt Disney’s The Lion King premiered. 

1999- In San Diego, Nicholas Vitalich was arrested for slapping his wife with a large tuna.

2002- Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was knighted.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 14, 2024

Birthdays: Tomaso Albinioni, Fighting Bob LaFollette, Margaret Bourke-White, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sam Wanamaker, Cliff Edwards the voice of Jiminy Cricket, Dorothy McGuire, Burl Ives, Gene Barry, Jerzy Kosinski, Diablo Cody is 45, Donald Trump is 78.

1816- Writers Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley were spending the summer at the Villa Deodati on Lake Geneva. This day among the revels, drinking, partner swapping and opium taking, Byron suggested they all write a ghost story. Byron told a tale of a vampire, Polidori. But the real winner was Shelley’s wife, 19-year-old Mary. She invented a story of a Swiss scientist who created an artificial man. She called it Frankenstein. It was published in 1819.

1822- Charles Babbage presented a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society in London proposing to build a "Difference Engine" a machine that could calculate equations and print the results-i.e. a computer. His early machine required 8,000 moving parts. Countess Ada Lovelace wrote the first program for it. After ten years and a small fortune it never quite comes off, but today it is considered the ancestor of the computer. In the 1930s MIT’s Vannevar Bush and Cambridge’s Alan Turing both used Babbage’s writings as their starting off point.

1834- Isaac Fischer Jr. of Vermont invented sandpaper. .

1865- A group of Englishmen climbed the Materhorn Mountain in Switzerland, inventing the sport of mountain climbing. 

1940- The German Army goose-stepped down the Champs Elysees into Paris. The Nazi propaganda that night broadcast from Radio Berlin declared" The decadent, democratic Paris of Jews and Negroes is gone, never to rise again!!" Marc Chagall and Jean Renoir (son of Auguste) fled the city on bicycles with their paintings strapped to their backs. German Jewish writers H.A. and Margaret Rey left on bicycles they had to repair from spare parts. In the basket of one bicycle was a manuscript for a new children’s book they had written. Curious George. 

1951- Univac I, built by John W, Mauchly and J. Prosper Eckert Jr. of the Remington Rand Company to be the first U.S. commercial built electronic computer, went online for the census bureau in Philadelphia.

1954- The U.S. government ordered the adding of the words "Under God" to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.

1957- Nelson Mandela married Winnie Mandela.

1959- Three new rides are debuted at Disneyland in Anaheim. The first monorail the Disneyland-Alweg Monorail System, Matterhorn Mountain, and the Submarine Voyage.( the submarine ride had been running since June 5). Disney publicity declared Disneyland now has the third largest submarine fleet in the world!

1977- Skinny Carnaby Street fashion model Twiggy got married to Michael Whitney.

1983- The Pioneer 10 space probe left its orbit around Jupiter and headed off into deep space. NASA lost all contact in 1997. Pioneer 10 is expected to reach the solar system of the star Ross 246 in the Constellation Taurus in the year 34,600 AD. 

1989- Elderly actress Zsa Zsa Gabor was arrested for slapping a Beverly Hills policeman who was writing her a traffic ticket.

1990- Warren Beatty’s film Dick Tracy premiered at Disneyworld. And opened generally the next day.

1995- MP3.  The researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits decided to use "mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Development on this technology started in 1987. By 1992 it was considered far ahead of its time. MP3 became the generally accepted acronym as the popular standard for digital music on the on the Internet.

2001- The Oxford English Dictionary admitted the slang expletive of Homer Simpson "D’OH!" into its august pages.

2024- Pope Francis met with American comedians Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Jimmy Fallon and Jim Gaffigan.

Tom Sito's animation fun facts for June 13, 2024

Birthdays: Gnaeus Agricola- 40AD, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W.B. Yeats, Red Grange, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Sayers, Ralph Edwards, Paul Lynde, Tim Allen is 71, Darla Hood, Ally Sheedy, Simon Callow is 72, Christo, Ralph McQuarrie, Malcolm McDowell is 81, Stellan Skarsgard is 73, the Olsen Twins are 38, Chris Evans is 43.

1858- THE BIG STINK- The population of metropolitan London had been outgrowing its sewage system. The Thames was London’s main sewer, as well as its source of drinking water. But nobody realized how bad it was until the unusually hot summer of 1858. Today the temperature reached the 90f, and the stink from the river got so bad it broke up a meeting of the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Ministers ran out of Parliament holding handkerchiefs to their noses. 

1905- The workers of the Russian city of Odessa go on strike and the Czar's troops shoot them down on the Odessa steps. This causes the Battleship Potemkin's sailors to mutiny.   Twenty years later Sergei Eisenstein made a famous film of the incident.

1920-The US Government ruled Americans cannot mail their children through the Parcel Post System.

1927- Wall St. tickertape parade for Charles Lindbergh.

1941-The American Federation of Labor, the AF of L called for a nationwide boycott of all Disney products and films. This was to support the Disney Cartoonists strike.

1958- Frank Zappa graduated Antelope Valley High School.

1982- Bill the Cat first appeared in the comic strip Bloom County.

2010- Pixar’s Toy Story 3 premiered.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 12, 2024

Birthdays: Egon Scheile, John Roebling the builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, Uta Hagen, Chick Corea, Sir Anthony Eden, Jim Nabors, Vic Damone, David Rockefeller, Irwin Allen, Marv Albert, Arthur Fellig- better known as Weegee, Sherry Stringfield, George Herbert Walker Bush, Anne Frank, Clyde “Jerry” Geronimi, Richard Sherman of the Sherman Bros

1616- Pocahontas, now called Lady Rebecca Rolfe, landed in England with her husband and son Thomas. 

1912- Archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt uncovered the bust of queen Nefertiti, the beauty icon, and the wife of King Akhenaten more than 3,300 years ago. It was created by the artist Thutmose of Amarna around 1345 B.C. Ludwig Borchardt did not have permission to take it to Berlin. He downplayed its importance to Egyptian authorities, then smuggled it out of the country. 

1936- Cooperstown's Baseball Hall of Fame dedicated on the supposed 100th anniversary of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball. We now know that date to be fiction, but it was a good party anyway. Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson were the first inductees. Doubleday was a Civil War general and the composer of the bugle call "Taps", first called General Doubleday’s Lullaby.

1949- The first LA parking ticket.

1952- Chief auto designer for Chevrolet Maurice Olley completed work on a sports car originally code-named the Opel, but later released as the Corvette.

1956- Singer/activist Paul Robeson testified to The House UnAmerican Activities Committee. He was called in after he refused to sign an affidavit that he was not a Communist.  Robeson told the committee,” My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it, just like you. And no Fascist-minded people, just like you, will drive me from it. Is that clear?” They had earlier asked baseball star Jackie Robinson to denounce Robeson, but instead he denounced Jim Crow laws.

1962- Edward M. Gilbert, the "Boy Wizard of Wall Street," loses $23 million for his firm E.L. Bruce Flooring, then embezzles $2 million more and escaped to Brazil.

1962- In Modesto California, a teenage film student named George Lucas was almost killed in a car accident.

1963- Twentieth Century Fox premiered the Elizabeth Taylor -Richard Burton epic CLEOPATRA. Costing $44 million, $400 million in modern money, four times more than the average film, it remains in comparable dollars the costliest disaster in movie history. The cast was put up at the swankiest hotels in Rome for months of shooting, and Liz Taylor had to have her chili from Chasens restaurant in Beverly Hills flown in. Director Joe Mankewicz said "Cleopatra was the toughest three pictures I ever made!" When Liz Taylor saw the finished film, she threw up. 

Fox had to cut 2,000 jobs and almost went bankrupt. The area of LA known as Century City with its huge shopping mall used to be the Fox backlot before Cleopatra. On the plus side, Andy Warhol said Cleopatra was the most influential movie of the 1960s because suddenly every woman had to have heavy black eyeliner, light lipstick and Egyptian style straight bobbed hair and bangs.

1981- Steven Spielberg’s movie Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered.

1991- In the Philippines, the volcano Mount Pinatubo erupted for the first time in 600 years.

1999- Disney’s Tarzan premiered. Directed by Chris Buck and Kevin Lima.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 11, 2024

Birthdays: Ben Johnson, Richard Strauss, Jacques Cousteau, Nelson Mandela, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Joe Montana, John Constable, Gustav Courbet, Vince Lombardi, Adrienne Barbeau, William Styron, Chad Everett, race car driver Jackie Stewart, Gene Wilder, Hugh Laurie is 65, Shia LeBoeuf is 38, Peter Dinklage is 55

1790- In Hawaii this is King Kamehameha Day in honor of the king who united all the Hawaiian Islands under one rule.

1878- At a small track at the Palo Alto Stock Farm, English photographer Edweard Muybridge did the first of his Animal Motion Studies. He lined up 25 cameras and filmed California Governor Leyland Stanford’s favorite mare Sallie Gardner at a full gallop. He invited the press, so none could accuse him of doctoring the photos later. They proved that when a horse was in full gallop, all four hooves leave the ground.

1927- Charles Lindbergh Day. After his historic flight, the young aviator was welcomed home to America by President Coolidge and huge throngs of well-wishers at Washington’s Navy Yard. Battleships boomed, bands blared and two dirigibles floated overhead. The radio announcer covering the event did one of the very first coast-to-coast broadcasts. He reached thirty million people. 

1928 - Alfred Hitchcock's 1st film, "The Case Of Jonathan Drew," is released

1934- the first Mandrake the Magician comic strip.

1936- Shy, quiet, 30 year old Texas writer Robert E. Howard had created the powerful warriors Conan the Barbarian, Kull and single-handedly defined the genre we now call Sword & Sorcery. This day after he learned his mother was dying and would never regain consciousness, he went into his garage and blew his brains out. Some say he had an Oedipal fixation, others that he always intended to end his life and was waiting to spare his mother the pain. On his typewriter he left a short message: "All fled, all done, so lift me upon the pyre. The feast is over and let the lamps expire."

1937 –" Getta’ yu tutsie-frutsie Ice Cream!" the Marx Brothers' "A Day at The Races" premiered.

1939 – President Franklin Roosevelt hosted King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the White House. There, the rulers of the British Empire ate hot dogs for the first time. 

 

1955- The deadliest day at Le Mans. During this running of the famous 24 hour car race a Mercedes crashed into an Austin Healy at high speed and the cars disintegrated, spewing flaming metal debris into the dense crowd of spectators. 85 died and 100 more were hurt.

1959 – The US Postmaster General banned D H Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover as pornography. He was overruled by US Court of Appeals in March 1960. 

1964 - Chicago police break up a Rolling Stones press conference.

1964 - Manfred Mann recorded Do Wah Diddy Diddy.

1966 - "Paint It, Black" by The Rolling Stones peaked at #1 in the pop charts.

1966 - Janis Joplin played her 1st gig in San Francisco.

1977 - Main Street Electrical Parade premiered at Disneyland.

1979- John Wayne died after a long struggle with cancer. He was 73. Many believed his condition began as a result of filming the movie "The Conqueror" near the Nevada Atomic Test site. Half the crew of that film including all the stars and director died of cancer.  When Wayne made a final appearance at the Academy Awards two months earlier, he purchased a small size tuxedo to hide his emaciated frame, but he was still too thin even then. So, he filled it out by wearing a scuba wetsuit underneath. 

1984- In the freewheeling economy of the 1980’s tycoons conducted hostile takeovers of companies by buying most of their stock on margin. When Wall Street corporate raider Saul Steinberg announced he intended to target the ailing Walt Disney Company for takeover, CEO Ron Miller paid him $23 million just to make him go away. The Disney shareholders are outraged at this payment of "greenmail’ and demanded Miller’s resignation, which some say was exactly what Roy Disney had planned.

1993 –Steven Spielberg’s "Jurassic Park" opened. The film set a box office record of $931 million. It was begun with modelers and puppeteers about to do the dinosaurs with go-motion and clay. But after seeing tests using the new 3D CGI –computer graphic imaging software, Steven ordered all of ILM to do it digitally. Jurassic Park was the Jazz Singer-type event that clinched the digital takeover of Hollywood and set the standard for all future special effects films.

2002- Fox TV’s show American Idol premiered.

2002- Lilo & Stitch premiered.

TOM SITOS ANIMATION ALMANAC FOR JUNE 10,2024

Birthdays: Charles James Stuart “The Old Pretender”, Yamaoka Tesshu (1832- Japanese swordsman), Judy Garland, Saul Bellow, Hattie McDaniel, Frederick Loew (of Lerner & Loew), Howlin’ Wolf, Maurice Sendak, animator Dorse Lanpher, animator Harald Sieperman, Gina Gershon is 62, Leilee Sobieski is 41, Jean Triplehorn is 61, Jurgen Prochnow, Elizabeth Hurley is 58, the late Prince Phillip Duke of Edinburgh. 

1776- The great English actor David Garrick went on stage for the last time, playing in a benefit for The Decayed Actor’s Fund.

1847 –The Chicago Tribune begins publishing

1860- The Comstock Lode- Near Virginia City Nevada, Old Pancake McGaughlin hit a vein of silver so big and pure that it will eventually yield $300 million dollars worth of ore and make millionaires of men like William Randolph Hearst's father.

1865- Wagners opera Tristan und Isolde premiered in Munich. 

1902 - Patent for the window envelope granted to H F Callahan.

1910- The first Krazy Kat comic strip- Cartoonist George Herriman was doing a strip for Hearst called "The Family Upstairs". He was amused at the idea of a friendship between a cat and a mouse. So, Herriman put them in the corner playing marbles while the family quarreled. First an office boy and later editor Arthur Brisbane suggested they have their own strip. The immortality of the denizens of Coconino County follows, loved by the likes of H.L. Mencken, e.e.cummings, and Jacques Kerouac. Krazy herself explains:" It's wot's behind me that I am."

1921- Babe Ruth became top HR champ with #120 runs passing then champ Gavy Cravath. But the Bambino was just getting warmed up.  

1926- Artist Antonio Gaudi was run over by a streetcar while crossing in front of his famous cathedral in Barcelona. Construction begun in 1886, The Cathedral Sagrada Familia is still scheduled for completion in 2026.

1939 - Barney Bear, cartoon character by MGM, debuted..

1944- A USO troop was entertaining soldiers in Normandy from the back of a truck but they lacked a piano player. They called out to the G.I. audience if anyone could play. A shy cattle rancher’s son from Modesto California came up and played. He did so well his colonel ordered him out of the line and told him to form his own G.I. band. Dave Brubeck’s jazz career began.

1947- Sweden’s Saab motorcar company introduced its first model car. Saab in neutral Sweden had made planes and tanks for World War Two, but after the war was over, they recognized that combat was not a growth industry and they switched to autos.

1957- “Tom Terrific and Manfred the Wonder Dog” cartoon debuted on the Captain Kangaroo show.

1967- A week after finishing shooting the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Spencer Tracy sat in his kitchen one morning making himself a cup of coffee. He then had a heart attack and fell over stone dead. He was 67. His partner Katherine Hepburn found his body. She was so upset she was not able to watch the movie Guess Who’s Coming for years after..

1995-110,000 people jam Central Park in New York to see Disney's Pocahontas, up to then the largest audience ever to attend an animated movie premiere. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 9, 2024

Birthdays: Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cole Porter, John Bartlett of Bartletts Familiar Quotations, Boy George O’Dowd, Les Paul, Burl Ives, Lash LaRue, Happy Rockefeller, Robert MacNamara, Major Bowes, Carl Neilsen, Jerzy Kosinski, Pierre Salinger, Steffy Graff, Marvin Kalb, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, physicist who formulated Coulomb's Law, Dr. Alois Alzheimer, Michael J. Fox is 63, Johnny Depp is 61, Natalie Portman (born Neta-Lee Hershlag) is 43

Today is the Rom

1834 - Sandpaper patented by Isaac Fischer Jr., Springfield, Vermont

1839 – The first Henley Regatta held

1847 - Robert von Bunsen invents the Bunsen burner.

1860- DIME NOVELS & PULP FICTION.  Mr. Erastus Beadle published the first dime novel, Maleska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Anna Stephens. Sometimes called the Penny Dreadfuls, pocket-sized stories printed on cheap pulp paper became popular reading. They fantasized the West, extolling two-gun chivalry and virtuous maidens, roaring desperadoes and wild savages. This early form of mass media made celebrities out of characters like Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Black Bart, Billy the Kid and Belle Starr.

1918- Louella Parsons began her Hollywood Gossip column. Louella became one of the most powerful and widely read columnists in Hollywood’s golden age. Stories say Louella got as much pull as she did in the Hearst newspaper empire for helping cover up the killing of director Thomas Ince as well as trying to stifle the release of Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane. There is a story that Disney animator Frank Thomas spotted her being mean to a waitress while holding court at the Brown Derby. That inspired him to make her the model of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland.

90 Years ago 1934- Happy Birthday Donald Duck! Walt Disney's short cartoon "The Little Wise Hen". 

1934- The film The Thin Man with William Powell. Myrna Loy and Asta the dog went into general release.

1938 - Chlorophyll isolated by Benjamin Grushkin

1938 - Dorothy Lathrop wins the 1st Caldecott Medal for outstanding children’s books.

1941- First day shooting on the film, the Maltese Falcon. It was John Huston’s first directorial effort. The story had already been made into a movie twice before, so nobody had high hopes for it. The studio budget was so low, Humphrey Bogart had to wear his own suits on camera.

 

1942 - Anne Frank began her diary.

1943- The Internal Revenue Service introduced the Pay-As-You-Go system of tax collection, or today we know it as tax withholding from your paycheck.

1950- After all appeals fail the first of the Hollywood Ten, screenwriters Dalton Trumbo, Philip Dunne, Alvah Bessie, Waldo Salt, Edward Dymytrk, David Ogden Stewart, Ring Lardner and John Howard Lawson are sentenced to prison. In the L.A. Municipal Jail one felon greeted the writers with a smile and said: "Hi Ya, Hollywood Kids!”

1953 - Elvis Presley graduates from L.C. Humes High School in Memphis, Tennessee.

1973- The thoroughbred horse Secretariat ridden by Ron Turcott won the Belmont Stakes, taking the first Triple Crown since Citation did it in 1948.  He won it by an amazing 31 lengths!  Secretariat was sired by Bold Ruler, the 1957 Preakness winner. The Triple Crown is three high stakes races. The Kentucky Derby is a mile and 1/4 (called by horseman "the classic distance"), the Preakness is slightly shorter at a mile and 3/16ths, and the Belmont, as reported, is a mile and 1/2.  So the second race is actually shorter than the first.  The big deal is that they all take place in only five weeks, which is asking a great deal of three-year-old colts.

1976 – Chuck Barris’ the" Gong Show" premiered. Where’s Jean-Jean the Dancing Machine?

1989 - Queen Elizabeth II knighted Ronald Reagan. 

2006- Pixar film Cars released.

2160 - Montgomery Edward Scott, called Scotty or Mr. Scott, born in Aberdeen, Scotland, the engineer of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. “ Cap’n, Ah dunna know how much more the engines can take!”

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 8, 2024

Birthdays: Robert Schumann, Frank Lloyd Wright, Barbara Bush, Admiral David Dixon Porter, Leroy Neiman, Emmanuel Ax, Alexis Smith, Nancy Sinatra, Boz Scaggs, Jerry Stiller, Dana Wynter, British cricketeer Ray Illingsworth, Juliana Margulies, Kanye West, Joan Rivers, Keenan Ivory Wayans is 66. Disney director Gary Trousdale is 64

1786- A New York newspaper advertised that a Mr. Hall of Chatham was currently selling the new Italian confection called Iced Cream. First reference to Ice Cream in the Americas.

1886- King Ludwig II, ruler of the second largest independent German State, Bavaria, was declared legally insane by his cabinet and put under arrest. Ludwig the Mad bankrupted his treasury building wild anachronistic castles like Neuschwanstein and the Blue Grotto, as well as Richard Wagner’s concert hall at Bayreuth. Ironically, these buildings are today among Germany’s top tourist attractions.

1889 –The Red Car cable car began service in LA.

1889 - Start of the Sherlock Holmes Adventure "Boscombe Valley Mystery"

1900 - Start of Sherlock Holmes story the "Adventure of 6 Napoleons"

1912- Carl Laemmle formed Universal Pictures Studio.

1946- Bob Clampett's cartoon 'Kitty Kornered' premiered, one of the earliest of Sylvester the Cat. “ I like cheese…” SMACK! 

1948 - "Milton Berle Show" Uncle Miltie- premiered on NBC TV.

1949- During the Hollywood Blacklist, today an FBI report named actors Paul Muni, Frederick March, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Robeson and Dorothy Parker as reds. They had no proof, mostly anonymous accusers.  Robinson was blacklisted, but never called upon to testify before the committee to clear his name. He said, “It’s like I was accused of being a rabbit. I am not a rabbit, but how do we know if you cannot prove you’re not a rabbit?” 

1950- Universal pictures released 'Winchester '73', the first film in which the star James Stewart negotiated for a backend percentage of the profits. Stewart's agent was Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA and mentor of Steven Spielberg.

1962- Twentieth Century Fox fired Marilyn Monroe for her erratic, druggy behavior on the set of “Something’s Got to Give” and cancelled the picture. Monroe went into a tailspin that would lead to her suicide four weeks later. Even after her death, Fox sued her estate for $80,000. 

1966- The American football leagues NFL and AFL announce their merger.

1968 - Rolling Stones release "Jumpin' Jack Flash".

1969- "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," last aired. The show was canceled by CBS, not for bad ratings, but because its format highlighted liberal and anti-Vietnam War performers like Buffy Saint-Marie, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.  Producer Tommy Smothers was constantly battling nervous network executives to let Seeger sing songs like “Big Muddy”, a direct criticism of U.S. war policy. Finally, when former President Lyndon Johnson personally called CBS chairman Bill Paley to complain, the show was yanked.  Ratings or not.

1969 - Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor replaced Brian Jones.

1983- The films "Trading Places," & "Gremlins," premiered.

1984-Ivan Reitmans’ film "Ghostbusters" premiered. Who you gonna call..?

1984- Donald Duck officially became a member of the Screen Actors Guild- SAG.

1986- NBC was bought by General Electric. David Letterman joked about now having to interview toaster ovens on his show. 

2018- John Lasseter, director of hit movies like Toy Story, stepped down from the leadership of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation due to “Me-To” harassment complaints made against him.

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 8, 2024

Birthdays: Pope Gregory XIII, Beau Brummel, Paul Gauguin, Chick Corea, George Szell, Tom Jones, Jessica Tandy, James Ivory, Virginia McKenna, Prince, Kendall O’Connor, Liam Neeson is 72, Bill Hader, Dean DeBlois

1927- A daredevil named Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly climbed on top of a flagpole on top of a bank in Newark, New Jersey, and sat there for eight days straight. This stunt was covered by the media almost as much as Charles Lindbergh’s flight. It made a national craze for flagpole-sitting.

1930- Mines Field was rededicated as Los Angeles Municipal Airport. (LAX)

1937- Screen goddess Jean Harlow, the original Platinum Blonde, died of kidney failure. She was only 26.

1942- Japanese troops stormed the beaches at Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians Islands, Alaska, the first foreign soldiers on U.S. soil since the British redcoats in 1814.

1946- In 1939 the BBC had begun broadcasting on the new medium of television. On Sept 3rd, they interrupted a broadcast of the 1933 Walt Disney cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premiere to announce the declaration of war with Germany, WW2. They shut down for the duration. Seven years later, on this day, BBC-1 television restarted back up with this announcement. “ Good Afternoon. Well now, where were we?” And they started by running the same Mickey cartoon again.

1954- Scientist Alan Turing helped break the WWII German Enigma Code and is considered one of the fathers of the computer. Some people referred to early computers as Turing Machines. He predicted one day computers would be able to think like humans, and one day we would play games on our computers. But when Turing was revealed to be gay, he lost his top security clearance and was sentenced to a mental institution to undergo chemical castration. He was convicted with the same law used to jail Oscar Wilde in 1895. Alan Turing was a fan of the Disney film Snow White. This day he laced an apple with cyanide and bit into it. He was 42.

1955- The TV quiz show, The $64,000 Question premiered.

1975- This day Sony announced the first home videotape playing system, the Betamax. They were about $25,000 each, but we were promised as they became more popular the price would come down. 

1993- Rockstar Prince celebrated his birthday by changing his name to a funny symbol no keyboard can reproduce and no one can say. He did it because of a dispute with Warner Records who said because of his contract he could not issue recordings under his own name. In 2000 he switched back to Prince.

2002 –Kim Possible premiered on TV.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for June 6, 2024

 Quiz: What does it mean when you say something is complete Bedlam?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Jim Henson created The Muppets. Where did the name Muppets come from?

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History for 6/6/2024

Birthdays: Diego Velasquez, Pierre Corneille. Alexandre Pushkin, Nathan Hale, John Trumbull, Thomas Mann, The Dalai Lama, Klaus Tennestedt, Bjorn Borg, Richard Crane, Dr. Karl Braun, Walter Chrysler, Isaiah Berlin, Aram Khachaturian, Jason Issacs, Angelo Moriondo 1851, inventor of the expresso machine, Sam Simon (Simpsons Producer), Sandra Bernhard is 69, Paul Giamatti is 57, Aaron Sorkin is 63

1797- The Lake Poets meet. In the Coxwolds region of England Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked across a field and visited William Wordsworth in his cottage. This began one of the great collaborations in literature. Coleridge had just finished the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The married Mr. Coleridge even had a platonic affair with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, and later Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Susan Hutchinson.

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1844 –George Williams formed the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in London, for lonely young men working in the new urban factories to have an alternative to pubs and dance halls.

1884- Nikola Tesla arrived in the United States. 

1929- Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’ surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou ( The Andalusian Dog) premiered at the Teatre des Ursulines in Paris. All the modernist artists were present like Picasso, Andre Breton and Jean Cocteau. Bunuel had filled his pockets with rocks, in case the crowd hated the film and he needed to defend himself, but it was warmly received.

1933-The first Drive In movie opened in Camden, New Jersey. 25 cents a car. Richard Hollingshead, a young entrepreneur, devised a way to offer comfortable movie watching to the public by experimenting in his own driveway.

1939- Playright Eugene O’Neill had hit a dry spell of no writing and dread of his impending Parkinsons disease. This day he got the inspiration to sketch out outlines for two plays- The Iceman Cometh, and Long Days Journey into Night.

1941- Actor George Raft wrote a memo to studio head Jack Warner reminding him of his contractual commitment to send Raft only good quality scripts. The latest he got: " The Maltese Falcon" he thought was “a lousy substandard idea, that has no chance." Humphrey Bogart did the film instead.

1942 –Adeline Grey does the first nylon parachute jump in Hartford Conn.

1949- Comic strip character Joe Palooka gets married to Ann Howe.

1949- BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING- George Orwell's book about technological tyranny -1984 was first published. Orwell's working title was "The Last Free Man", but the publisher thought it too depressing to sell. So, Orwell picked the date 1984, who's only significance was that it was the year he was writing 1948- reversed.

1952- Disney short Susie, the Little Blue Coupe, directed by Clyde Geronimi. From a story by Bill Peet. The anthropomorphized cars became the inspiration for Pixar’s Cars movies.

1955 - Bill Haley & Comets, "Rock Around the Clock" hits #1.

1959-The Submarine Voyage attraction opened in Disneyland's updated Tomorrowland. The 8 vessels are named Nautilus, Seawolf, Skate, Skipjack, Triton, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Ethan Allen.  Originally painted to look like USN nuclear subs, after the VietNam war they repainted them a less militaristic explorer yellow.

1972 - David Bowie released "Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust"

1984- In Moscow, 29-year-old mathematics Professor Alexey Pajitnov invented the game Tetris. 

1991 - NBC announced Jay Leno would replace retiring Johnny Carson, winning out over David Letterman. Letterman moved over to CBS.

2007- The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim California, named for a Walt Disney comedy movie, won the Stanley Cup after defeating the Ottawa Senators. It is the first Stanley Cup won by a west coast team since 1925.

2015- American Pharaoh won the first Triple Crown horse race in 37 years.

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for June 5, 2024

Birthdays: Socrates, Pancho Villa, Thomas Chippendale -furniture maker, Igor Stravinsky, Little archduchess Anastasia Romanov, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Dean Acheson, Bill Moyers is 90, Hopalong Cassidy (born William Boyd 1995), Tony Richardson, Lancelot Ware the founder of Mensa, Jimmy Murakami, Harold Whitaker, Kenny G., Spaulding Gray, Ron Livingston is 57, Mark Wahlberg is 53

1455- Poet Francois Villon gets thrown out of Paris again, this time for stabbing a priest in a bar fight. 

1502- LEONARDO GETS A JOB- This day Leonardo Da Vinci was hired by Cesare Borgia as a military engineer. Borgia was the son of Pope Alexander VI, and wanted to conquer Italy for Holy Mother Church. The artist-scientist Leonardo had promised Borgia he could design horrific war making machines like tanks, flame-throwers and poison gas. Most of these things were unrealistic for the technology of the time, so Borgia employed him drawing maps of the topography of the lands he intended to conquer. After a few months Pope Alexander died, and the new Pope Julius kicked out Cesare Borgia.  Leonardo went back on Renaissance LinkedIn.

1816- The Year Without a Summer- Volcanic explosions in Indonesia and the Caribbean threw so much ash into the atmosphere that large parts of the U.S. recorded winter temperatures throughout the summer months. This day in New England it was 83 degrees, then it plunged to 42, then the following day saw ten inches of snow. Still, Currier and Ives had more time to paint those cute sleigh ride scenes...

1876- At the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, Americans first discovered an exotic new food- Bananas.

1964 - Davie Jones & King Bees debut "I Can't Help Thinking About Me," The group disbanded but Davie Jones went on to success after changing his name to David Bowie.

 

1976- In a wine competition outside Paris, California wines won for the first time. Santa Magdelena Chardonnay for whites and Stags Leap Cabernet for the red. It marks the moment when the dominance of French wines was broken, and California wines went from being a joke, to world class status.

1989- Toronto’s Skydome Stadium opened. Home team Blue Jays lose to the Milwaukee Brewers 5-3.

1998- Walt Disney’s Mulan premiered at the Hollywood Bowl. Directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft.

1998- Reuters and ABC News erroneously reported the death of 96 year old Bob Hope. Arizona Congressman Robert Stump announced the comedian’s death on the floor of the Congress, to the great surprise of Bob Hope, who was eating breakfast while watching TV at the time.  Bob Hope lived four more years, dying at age 100.

2000- Pixar short “For the Birds” designed and directed by Ralph Eggleston, premiered at the Annecy Festival in France.

2010- The Dr. Who episode where the Doctor (Matt Smith) takes Vincent van Gogh in the Tardis to the present day to see his paintings hanging in the Louvre.