Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 31, 2024


Birthdays: Liberace, General George H. Thomas the "Rock of Chickamagua", Sebastian Sperling Kresge the founder of S.S. Kresge stores, Milton Friedman, Sherry Lansing, Geraldine Chaplin, Kurt Gowdy, Dean Cain, Leon “ Bull “Durham, Primo Levi, Fred Quimby, animator Ken Harris,  Wesley Snipes is 62, and according to J.K. Rowling, today is the birthday of Harry Potter

Ted Cassidy who played Lurch in the Adams Family,


   

1922- Ralph Samuelson invented water skis.

 

1930- Radio mystery show “The Shadow” premiered. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…heh, heh, heh.” Orson Welles did the voice of the crime fighting Shadow for a year in 1937 for $185 a week.

1948- President Truman dedicated New York City’s second major airport Idlewild Field. In 1963 it was renamed JFK Airport.

1954- Steve Allen married Jayne Meadows.

1966- Birmingham Alabama held a massed rally to burn Beatles records after John Lennon casually joked that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus.


1962- Malaysian independence.

 

1968- In the wake of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, a schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman wrote Charles Schulz that he needed to add a black child to his Peanuts characters. This day Charles Schulz introduced Franklin, the first black character into his Peanuts comic strip.

  

1971- Apollo 15 astronaut went for a drive on the surface of the moon in their land-rover.

 

1992- Bebe’s Kids released, the first animated feature directed by an African American animator, Bruce W. Smith.

 

1992- The Robert Zemeckis’ comedy Death Becomes Her opened. With Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. It is the first film that widely used the new digital matte technique to replace traditional optical printing.

 

1995- The Walt Disney Company bought the ABC Network, the Discovery Channel and ESPN.

 

1999- Premiere of Brad Bird’s movie The Iron Giant.


2020- The Twitter accounts of famous people like former Pres Obama, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk were hacked for a sophisticated bitcoin scam. The person arrested was not a foreign agent or terrorist, but a 17 year old High School student from Tampa, Fla., named Graham Clark.

2022- George Jetson of the 1960s TV show The Jetsons was born. The show is set when George was age 40, in 2062. 


 

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 30, 2024


Birthdays: Georgio Vasari, Henry Ford, Emily Bronte', Casey Stengel, Roy Williams, Vladimir Zworykin, Arnold Schwarzenegger is 77, Ed "Kookie" Byrnes, Peter Bogdanovich, Delta Burke, Henry Moore, Anita Hill, Lawrence Fishburne is 63, Jean Reno is 76, Hilary Swank is 50, Christopher Nolan is 54, Lisa Kudrow is 61


1889- Start of the Sherlock Holmes mystery, the Naval Treaty.


1929 -The Hollywood Bowl musicians go on strike.


1932-Walt Disney’s “Flowers and Trees” the first Technicolor Cartoon. Disney had worked out a deal with Technicolor creator Dr. Herbert Kalmus to use his technique exclusively for two years to demonstrate larger Hollywood studios its quality.



1932- The first Los Angeles hosting of the Olympic Games in their brand spanking new Coliseum. Gold medalists in swimming Larry Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller, who later became movie stars. Another medalist, the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, began to teach the Californians about a new sport- surfing!


1935- The first paperback book. Andre Maurois 'Ariel, a Life of Shelley', published in this new form by Penguin Books of London.


1936- Producer David O. Selznick bought the movie rights to the best-selling novel “Gone With The Wind” from an ailing Irving Thalberg. The "boy genius" Thalberg was hoping that Selznick would ruin himself in the process of making this film. Thalberg was convinced that GWTW would prove to be a massive flop because "Costume dramas are box office poison."


1948 - Professional wrestling premieres on prime-time network TV (DuMont)


1954 - Elvis Presley joins Local 71, the Memphis Federation of Musicians.

1955 – Pres. Eisenhower signed the bill declaring "In God We Trust" to be the official motto of the USA replacing E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one). It had been on coins since 1864. This was around the same time "under God" was also added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

1959- Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor patented the integrated circuit.

1965- President Lyndon Johnson signs the Medicare Act and issues the first medicare card (#00001) to former president Harry Truman.

1966 - BATMAN: THE MOVIE, and based on the 1966 BATMAN television series, opened. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson and starring Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin,


1972- John Boorman’s thriller Deliverance, with Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty.


1986- Walt Disney released “Flight of the Navigator”, directed by Randal Kleiser, featuring early photo-real CG VFX done by Canadian studio Omnibus.


1988- The last Playboy Club in America closed. It was in Lansing, Mich. In 2006 Hugh Hefner opened a Playboy Club themed casino in Las Vegas.


1999- The Blair Witch Project opened in theaters. The low-budget indy became a huge hit due to an on-line grass roots campaign claiming that the footage of teenager encountering the supernatural was genuine. The first successful on-line publicity campaign.










 

Monday, July 29, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 29, 2024


Birthdays: Alex de Tocqueville, Benito Mussolini, Clara Bow, Natalie Wood, Paul Taylor, Sig Romberg, Dag Hammarskjold, Peter Jennings, Michael Spinks, Maria Ouspenskaya, Dave Stevens creator of the Rocketeer, Ken Burns is 70, Booth Tarkington, David Warner, Steven Dorff, Professor Irwin Corey, William Cameron-Menzies, Peter Jennings, William Powell, Will Wheaton is 52

 

 

1890- Near Auvers-sur-Oise, artist Vincent Van Gogh went behind a hay bale and was shot. He lingered for two days and died of blood poisoning. He was 37. His brother Theo was so distraught he died six months later of a brain disease and melancholia. Recent scholarship says Vincent did not commit suicide but was accidentally shot by a delinquent kid playing with his father's gun. Vincent told the police he committed suicide to protect the child from being imprisoned.

 

1920 - 1st transcontinental airmail flight from NY to SF.

 

1922- In Kansas City, Walt Disney released his first Laugh-o-Gram short- Little Red Riding Hood, animated by Rudy Ising. 

 

1938- Three Missing Links- a Three Stooges comedy with the boys as cave men and Ray Crash Corrigan in a gorilla suit.

 

1942- Orson Welles left Rio De Janiero after RKO fired him and stopped production of "It's All True". RKO also had “the Magnificent Ambersons” re-cut to a more acceptable 90 minutes and fired the executive producer first who brought him to Hollywood.


 

1946- In Los Angeles, Jazz great Charlie Parker had learned of the death of his baby daughter back in New York. He showed up for a recording session so drunk and high his producer had to hold him up in front of the mike. Later that night he fell completely apart, ran naked down the street, set fire to his hotel room smoking in bed. The cops had to shake him violently to wake him, he fought with them and they beat him up and threw him in jail. He was committed to the Camarillo Mental Hospital. 

 

1948- Former Disney assistant-animator Hank Ketcham’s comic strip "Dennis the Menace," 1st appeared.

 

1952 - 1st nonstop transpacific flight by a jet.

 

1957-Happy Birthday NASA! President Eisenhower signed the bill creating the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, or NASA to oversee the space program, separate from the military. 

 

1957- The Tonight Show with Jack Paar as host premiered. 

 

1962- The film “Dr No” premiered, introducing the world to the suave spy James Bond 007.  They first considered Cary Grant, David Niven, Patrick McGoohan, and James Mason, who all turned them down. So, the producers chose young Scots actor Sean Connery. Ian Fleming wrote of the choice, “Disaster!!” Fleming always imagined Bond would resemble band-leader Hoagy Carmichael. Sean Connery had just starred as the villain in a Tarzan film, and the producers wanted him to film the sequel. He asked for a time off to go do, “a little spy picture.”

 

1965 - Beatles movie "Help" had its Royal World premiere at the London Pavilion in the West End. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon in attendance. The film actually opened a month later. People said the movie was filmed “in a haze of marijuana smoke” and most people on the film didn’t know what was next as they were writing it as they went along. 

 

1974- Mamas and the Papa's chubby singer Mama Cass Eliot died of a stroke, not as was widely believed from choking on a sandwich. She was 32.


 

1981- Prince Charles of England married Lady Diana Spencer.  The ill-fated fairy tale wedding was seen around the world on live television. Unknown to Di at the time was Prince Charles was already romantically involved with Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles.

 


1989- Miyazaki’s film Kiki’s Delivery Service premiered in Japan.


 

 

Sunday, July 28, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 28, 2024


Birthdays: Beatrix Potter, Jacqueline Kennedy, Richard Rogers, Ibn al’ Arabi- philosopher 1165, Marcel Duchamp, Rudy Vallee. Sally Struthers, Peter Duchin, Vida Blue, Joe E. Brown, Jim Davis the creator of Garfield, Frankie Yankovic the Polka King, Elizabeth Berkley, Earl Tupper the inventor of Tupperware, Hugo Chavez

 

 

1858- The French photographer Nadar went up in a balloon and took the first aerial photograph.

 

 

1867- The Daughters of St. Crispin, the first women's labor organization.

 

1896- Happy Birthday Miami! The City of Miami incorporated.

 

1882- Parsifal, the last opera of Richard Wagner was produced at Bayreuth. As a way to ensure its financial solvency Wagner left instructions to never tour Parsifal but it should forever stay at Bayreuth. This lasted a few decades. 


 

1932- The movie White Zombie with Bela Lugosi opened. 

 

 

1933- The first singing telegram. It was delivered to singer Rudy Valee by Western Union operator appropriately named Lucille Lipps.

 

 

1948- In honor of the death of D.W. Griffith, all Hollywood studios observed three minutes of silence.

 

1948- The Premiere of " Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" For you hardcore film trivia fans this film is the only other time than the original Tod Browning movie that Bela Lugosi played Count Dracula on film. 

 

1954- The film On The Waterfront opened. Producer Sam Spiegel originally wanted Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly as the leads. But Kelly took Hitchcock’s Rear Window instead, and Marlon Brando and Eva Marie-Saint became available, much to the annoyance of Sinatra.

 

1958- HAPPY LEGO! Danish toymaker Gotfried Kirk Christiansen patented the interlocking plastic bricks. His company had been working on the idea in wood since the 1930s. The LEGO empire began. Lego is from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well."

 

 

1971- Photographer Diane Arbus probed increasingly darker subject matter, circus freaks, severe birth defects. This day she committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, then slitting her wrists.

 

1978- National Lampoons Animal House directed by John Landis opened. 

 



1987- Disney's Oilspot and Lipstick premiered at Siggraph Anaheim. Directed by Michael Cedeno. It was an early experimental all CGI film.


 

2061- The next predicted appearance of Halley’s Comet.

Saturday, July 27, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 27, 2024


Birthdays: Confucius, Alexander Dumas fils, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Maureen McGovern, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Ilya Salkind, David Swift –director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap, Maya Rudolph is 52, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is 47, Norman Lear 


1586- Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first tobacco pipe home to England from America.


1921- Two Toronto scientists, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate the hormone Insulin to treat diabetes.


1921- SHAKESPEARE & CO. opened in Paris. The English language bookshop on the Seine owned by Sylvia Beach was the most famous hangout for the U.S. expatriate intellectuals. Shakespeare & Co. championed writers like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Carlos Santayanna, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sherwood Anderson and more. 


1940- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUGS BUNNY. Tex Avery’s short-"A Wild Hare”-There were several earlier prototypes of the famous rabbit, white with a different voice, but this is the short that is generally accepted as his birthday. 

In the late 30s, a fashion among some animators in LA was to spend the weekend up in the High Sierras hunting. Most of them were terrible at it, and when they came back with nothing, got a lot of razzing from their buddies. At Looney Tunes, a few guys did gag drawings of designer Ben Hardaway fruitlessly hunting a rabbit. His nickname was Bugs, because he originated from Chicago, like gangster Bugs Moran. Being Bugs or Bugsy was also slang then for crazy. The gag drawings were of Hardaway and " Bug's Bunny". Bob Givens created the first official model sheet of the character. 

In this short Bugs says “Whats Up Doc?” for the first time, co-opting a line uttered by Clark Gable while chewing a carrot in the 1934 Frank Capra hit “It Happened One Night”. 
Interestingly, voice actor Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots, and kept a bucket nearby to spit them out after chewing. He experimented with chewing other vegetables, but he claimed nothing sounded as good as raw carrots.


1946- Writer Gertrude Stein died at age 72. Her last words to Alice B. Toklas were:" What is the Answer?" When Alice said nothing, Gertrude said:" Well then, what is the Question?"


1953- The Tonight Show debuted on NBC. Its first host was Steve Allen.


1965- The U.S. Government forces cigarette companies to print warning labels on the their packages about the hazards of smoking. 


1977- John Lennon got his green card. Richard Nixon considered him a dangerous radical. Several times he was under 60-day notice to leave the country.



1977- Allegro Non Troppo opened in American theaters. Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto’s homage to Walt Disney’s Fantasia.


1986- Gregg Lemond became the first American to win the Tour de France bicycle race. 


2007- The Simpson’s Movie debuted.


Friday, July 26, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 26, 2024



 Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitzky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen,

 Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Ken Muse, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Ken Muse, Sandra Bullock is 60, Kevin Spacey, Kate Beckinsdale, Helen Mirren is 79, Jason Statham, Mick Jagger is 81

 

 

1656– Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.

 

 

1861- Mark Twain left St. Jo Missouri to go west and sit out the Civil War. He went with his brother Oren Clemens who had been appointed to administer the Nevada Territory.

 

 

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks. Besides leaded gasoline, many suburban homes had little backyard ovens to burn their garbage.

 

 

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. Chaplin never was a communist or any other radical movement. He was just outspoken in his views, and in Commie-Paranoid America that was enough. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achievements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.


 1951- Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had its world premiere in London’s Leicester Square Theatre. It opened in the U.S. two days later.


 

1959- KPFK, Los Angeles progressive radio of The Pacifica Network, starts up.

 

1970- Oh, Calcutta! Play opened in London. Oh, Calcutta had nothing at all to do with a city in  India, the show was a series of unrelated, but sex-dominated sketches featuring a totally nude cast, both male and female. Sketches were written by John Lennon, Sam Shephard and Jules Feiffer. The title came from a 1946 Dadaist painting by Clovis Trouille. It was a pun on the French “O quel cul t’as” meaning “what a nice ass you have”. 


 

1984- Edward Gein died peacefully in a prison for the criminally insane. Gein was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to life for mass murder. Police found his farm in Wisconsin decorated with human body parts, heads in the freezer and in the stove, and the dried cadaver of his mother Augustina sitting in a chair.  His story inspired "Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs".

 

1990- Pres. George H.W. Bush signed the Citizens with Disabilities Act into law.

 

1991 – Children’s comic Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman was arrested in Florida for masturbating in an adult movie theater. The film was Naughty Nurse Nancy.

 

1995- After a year of investigation, the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Roswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. …Hmmm.

 

 

Thursday, July 25, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac or July 25, 2024

Birthdays: Bishop Theitmar of Merseberg- 975AD, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Stuart K. Hine 1899 missionary who wrote the hymn "How Great Thou Art", Woody Strode, Walter Payton, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illena Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-conceived by invitro-fertilization is 46


1788- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony #40 in G minor.


1846 -The Spanish-Californios residents of pueblo Los Angeles chase the U.S. occupying force out of town a second time.


1871- The electric carousel was patented by Wilhelm Schneider, Davenport, Iowa 


1897- Young writer Jack London went to the Klondike to look for gold. He didn’t find much gold but did get material for a lot of good stories.


1909-Frenchman Louis Bleriot flew the English Channel. 


1918- In Russia, the anti-Communist White Guards entered Ykaterinburg one week too late to prevent the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family. They discovered the bullet ridden blood soaked room and after capturing one of the Bolshevik agents involved in the murder spread the news of the crime to the world. Soviet apologists for years maintained that the murder of the Imperial Family was done upon the initiative of the local Soviet council under Commissar Yakovlev. But documents discovered in 1989 revealed the murders were a direct order from Lenin himself.


1936- Orchard Beach opened in the North Bronx.


1935- Mickey Mouse short Alpine Climbers released.


1940- In Nazi occupied Paris, a Gestapo agent walked into the French offices of MGM studios and confiscated the six prints of "Gone With The Wind" sent from America. They were taken to Berlin for a screening for top Nazi officials. Gone with the Wind was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite movies. For the entire period of the Occupation, Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, hid a surviving print of Gone With The Wind under his bed. The day Paris was liberated, the Cinémathèque was reopened with the first public screening.


1946- MARTIN & LEWIS- Singer Dean Martin had met young comedian Jerry Lewis the year before at a club in New York City. This day in Atlantic City’s 500 Club they debuted as a team when Lewis suggested to the club owner that Martin would be a good replacement for a singer who called in sick. They became a major sensation, with movies, records and TV shows. They hired young writer Norman Lear and Ed Simmons to write for them.


1951- CBS conducted the first television broadcast in color. NBC made color TV popular in the mid 1960's.



1953- Chuck Jones’ "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".


1956- Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed for the last time as a duo at NY’s Copacabana. Exactly ten years from their first appearance.


1958- Jack Warner cheated his two surviving brothers Harry and Al out of their share of Warner Bros Studios. The three had agreed to all retire together and sell to an investor group led by a man named Sememenko. But by a pre-arranged deal with Sememenko, Jack then bought him out and named himself President of Warner Bros. When brother Harry read the news in Variety the next day, it gave him a heart attack. He lingered for a week then died this day. The family never spoke to their brother Jack again. Harry Warner’s wife Rhea said “He didn’t die. Jack killed him.”


1965- Folk Music star Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Folk Festival for using an electric guitar. Alan Lomax, the great Smithsonian Folk Music historian got into a fistfight over it, and Pete Seeger threatened to pull the electric plugs.


1975 - "A Chorus Line," longest-running Broadway show (6,137), premiered.


1984- Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became 1st woman to walk in space.


1984- The groundbreaking CGI film The Adventures of Andre and Wally-B premiered at the Siggraph convention in Minneapolis. Directed by Alvy Ray Smith and the computer designers who would eventually form Pixar. They were aided by new hire John Lasseter, who brought his traditional Disney animation skills to forming credible character animation on computer.


1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS. He had collapsed in France and he made the announcement while being treated at a French clinic. He was the first major public figure to acknowledge he had the mysterious new disease. People then were so afraid of AIDS and how it was transferred, everyone’s initial response was to shun the sufferer. The French-American hospital insisted Hudson leave, so he called his friends Pres. Ronald and Nancy Reagan for an airlift to a U.S. military hospital. They ignored him. Rock Hudson had to pay out of his own pocket to hire a 747 airliner to fly him directly home to LA. 


1989- Steve Rubell, the owner of Studio 54 died of HIVAIDS. He was 45.


1990 - Roseanne Barr sang the National Anthem at a San Diego Padre game. As a joke she impersonated ball players by spitting, grabbing her crotch and screeching during her rendition. It didn’t go over well with the more patriotically minded in that very conservative town.


2000- An Air France Concord supersonic jetliner exploded on takeoff, killing everyone on board. The investigation proved a piece of metal debris that fell off the previous Continental jetliner exploded one of the Concords tires and the resultant wreckage was sucked into the plane’s engine. Both Britain and France suspended SST flights for over a year and in 2003 discontinued them forever as being too expensive.


Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 24, 2024


Birthdays: Simon Bolivar, Amelia Earhart, Alexander Dumas fils, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Graves, Pat Oliphant, Bela Abzug, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ruth Buzzi, Lynda Carter is 73, Chief Dan George, Robert Hays, Gus Van Sant, Anna Paquin, Patty Jenkins, Elizabeth Moss, J-Lo Jennifer Lopez is 54

 


 

1901- William Porter, also known as O. Henry, was released from jail after doing time for embezzlement. While in jail, he discovered he had a talent for writing.

 

1934- Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film Cleopatra premiered. 

 

1938 - Instant coffee invented.

 


1948- Warner's "Haredevil Hare" featuring the first Marvin the Martian.  Now where did I put my Pew Illudium Q 36 Explosive Space Modulator? 

 

1965- Bob Dylan released the song “Like a Rolling Stone”.

 

1969- After successfully landing on the moon and returning to Earth, Apollo 11 safely splashed down in the ocean.

 

1980- In London’s Dorchester Hotel, comedian and actor Peter Sellers died of a heart attack. He was 54. 

 

 

1985- Walt Disney's "The Black Cauldron" premiered. Billed as Walt Disney’s greatest animation feature in decades, its first week it came in third to PeeWee’s Big Adventure, and The Care Bears Movie. It’s failure almost ended Disney animation.

 

1998- Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opened.

 

2005- American Lance Armstrong won the Tour du France bicycle race for an unprecedented 7th time, even after surviving testicular cancer that had spread to his spine and brain. Steroids or not, it was still one hell of an achievement. After he confessed to juicing (using performance enhancing drugs like steroids), all his medals were taken away.

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Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 23, 2024


Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler, Jackson Beck the voice of Bluto, Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse, Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Slash, Marlon Wayans, Woody Harrelson is 64, Edie McClurg, Daniel Radcliffe is 36

 

Today is the Ancient Roman Festival of Neptune, God of the Sea.

 

 


1886- This was the day Bowery saloonkeeper Steve Brodie claimed he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and lived to talk about it. 

 

1888 - John Boyd Dunlop patents the pneumatic rubber tire.

 

 

1904 – The Ice Cream Cone created by Charles E. Menches during the LA Purchase Expo. Also introduced there was Dr. Pepper.

 

1927 – Reacting to a public finally tired of the Tin Lizzy Model T and increased competition, the Ford Motor Co sold the first Model A car.

 

1932-The Birthday of Fritos. Texas ice cream maker Elmer Doolin bought a recipe for corn chips from a Mexican fry cook for $100 dollars and started the Frito-Lay Company.


 

1937 – Scientists at Yale University announced the isolation of the pituitary hormone.

 

1951-Thelonius Monk recorded the seminal jazz album Straight, No Chaser.

 

 

1966- The comedy song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha, Ha!" released. The singer was Napoleon XIV.

 

1968- Fred Blasie won an unprecedented fifth World Wrestling Championship belt. Blasie later gained more fame for recording the comedy song "Pencil Necked Geeks" and beating up comedian Andy Kaufman in the ring for calling wrestling a hoax.

 

1982- Actor Vic Morrow and two children are killed by a stunt helicopter while filming "Twilight Zone, the movie". The last scripted line before his death was "I’ll Keep you safe kids, I swear to God!" The children were being worked into the early morning hours without a caretaker supervisor in defiance of the Coogan Laws. Director John Landis was investigated but exonerated. 

 

1984- Vanessa Williams the first black Miss America, resigned after a photo spread of her in a nude lesbian scenario in Penthouse magazine. She denied any impropriety until the photos were published widely. 

 

1986 - Britain's Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson called Fergie. They divorced later and she moved to the US and became the spokesperson for Weight Watchers.

 

 

1999- The Inspector Gadget Movie starring Matthew Broderick opened.

 

2004- Two armed men entered the Munch Museum in Norway and stole Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream at gunpoint. It was recovered with some water damage three years later.


 

Monday, July 22, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 22, 2024

Birthdays: Emma Lazarus, Eduard Hopper, Gregor Mendel, Alexander Calder, James Whale, Oscar De La Renta, Rose Kennedy, Vaughn Bode, Ruthie Thompson, Stephen Vincent Benet, Jason Robards, Bob Dole, David Spade is 61, Terence Stamp is 87, Danny Glover is 79, Alex Trebek, Bobby Sherman, Don Henley, Alan Mencken is 75, Irene Bedard, William Dafoe is 69, John Leguizamo, Selena Gomez, Albert Brooks is 77- born Albert Einstein, a nice name, but already taken.


1598- This day William Shakespeare listed on the Stationers Register, a sort of copyright service, his new play called The Merchant of Venice.


1921- Artist Man Ray arrived in Paris determined to go Dada!


1933- Wiley Post landed at Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn to complete the first solo flight around the world. He did it in 7 days and 18 hours. The following year Post would die in the same plane crash as writer Will Rogers. 


1958- Plan 9 From Outer Space directed by Ed Wood, opened. It has the reputation as the worst movie ever made. Wood coaxed elderly movie star Bela Lugosi to star in it, but halfway though the film he died. Wood shot the remainder of Lugosi’s scenes with his chiropracter wrapped in a cape covering his face. 


1965- Cary Grant married Dyan Cannon.


1967- Jimi Hendrix quit as the opening act for the Monkees.


1977- Walt Disney’s film "The Rescuers" featuring the last work of Disney master animator Milt Kahl.



1989- Nintendo released in America the Gameboy. Designer Gunpei Yokoi designed it and the unique cross shaped directional fingerpad to replace a joystick control. Nintendo loaded Tetris on to it and it became a worldwide phenomenon. Gunpei Yokoi was killed in a car accident outside Kyoto in 1997.


1996- The Daily Show premiered on Comedy Central. John Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn in 1999 and made it famous. 




Sunday, July 21, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 21, 2024


 Birthdays: Ernest Hemingway, Issac Stern, Marshal McCluhan, Don Knotts, Janet Reno, Gary Trudeau the creator of Doonesbury, Eugen Shuftan inventor of the "Shuftan Effect", a cheap way of combining actors with miniatures by shooting through mirrors. Edward Herman, Robin Williams, Josh Harnett, Norman Jewison


1939- Disney short “The Pointer” directed by Clyde Geronimi. The modern redesigned Mickey gets whites in his eyes. 

1954- The Fellowship of the Ring, first book of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, first published. Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis said the book “came forth like thunder on a summers day.”

1959- Judge Frederick van Pelt-Bryan ruled that D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not pornography and therefore could be sent through the U.S. postal system.


1969- The Lunar module had landed on the 20th. Eight hours later Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the surface of the Moon, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind.”  Buzz Aldrin admitted years later that Neil was the first to walk on the moon, but he was the first to pee on the moon. Houston control said, “I can see you’re smiling there, Buzz…”


1971, The New York Times ran an article about Taki 183 on the front page of its inside section, titled "Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals. Taki was the first graffiti tag artist. Taki was a nickname of a man named Demetrius from 183 St.  In the late 1960s-1970s his tag seemed to be everywhere. Although graffiti has been around since the Egyptians and Romans, this helped spark the modern fascination.


1980- SAG went on strike for actor's residuals from videocassette and cable TV sales.

The actors hit the bricks again in 1988, 2000, 2008 and in 2023.


Saturday, July 20, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 20, 2024


Birthdays: Petrarch, Sir Edmund Hilary, Lord Elgin, Quaker Anne Hutchinson, Natalie Wood, Theda Bara, Diana Rigg, Dick Lucas, Carlos Santana, Lord Reith- the first Director General of the BBC. Gus Arriola, Carlos Alarzaqui, Giselle Bunchen is 44, Sandra Oh is 53, Harrison Ellenshaw is 79 

 

 

1804- Sir Richard Owen born. He was the British scientist who coined the term Dinosaur for all the big fossils being dug up. Yet he came to oppose Darwin’s theories of evolution. He believed dinosaurs were the creatures from Noah’s Flood who for some reason missed the boat.

 

1858 – Admission first charged to see a baseball game, 50 cents. NY beat Brooklyn 22-18.

 

1868 - 1st use of tax stamps on cigarettes.

 

1869- Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and in the Holy Land first published. If you ever wondered what was the most popular book in America during the 19th Century, it was not Moby Dick, War & Peace, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. The all time best selling book in America during the Victorian Era was a sappy travel diary" Tent Life in the Holy Land "by a forgotten author William Prime. Twain had taken The Grand Tour abroad that was fashionable with the American wealthy classes and thought he’d have some fun recounting his own trip” To cross the Sea of Galilee by boat, a big local demanded eight dollars for use of his miserable conveyance. No wonder Christ preferred to walk.”

 

 


1946-Bob Clampett's cartoon"the Great Piggy Bank Robbery" with Daffy Duck as Duck Tracy. "I'm gonna rrrrrrrrrrrubbb ya out, see!"

 

 

1964 –The first surfing record to go #1-Jan & Dean's "Surf City"

 

1968 - Iron Butterfly's "In a-Gadda-da-Vida", reached #4 in the pop charts. Then it was called Psychedelic Rock, today it is considered the first Metal hit. The song was written as “In the Garden of Eden” but singer Doug Ingle was so drunk and stoned, In a Gadda Da Vida was all he could mumble out. 

 

1969- Tranquility Base- The Eagle has Landed. Apollo11’s Lunar Module the LEM first landed humans on the Moon. Eight hours later Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the surface of the Moon, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind.”  

 

1973- Bruce Lee died of cerebral edema one month before his last film Enter the Dragon premiered. The handsome Hong Kong movie star single-handedly made Chinese martial arts a worldwide craze, and the Kung Fu genre film a standard genre in world movie theaters. He was buried in his Enter The Dragon costume. Bruce Lee was 33.

 

 

1976-Warner\Lambert, makers of Trident sugarless gum, comes out with their famous slogan "Sugarless gum is recommended by four out of five dentists who chew gum". When people asked what gum the fifth dentist recommended, they were brushed. 

 

1976- The Viking I probe successfully landed on Mars.

 

1984 - Jim Fixx, creator of the Jogging craze through his hit book Running, died at 52 of a heart attack. Apologists for a health advocate dying so young, say Fixx would have died even younger without his physical routine. The creator of PowerBars also died in his fifties. 

 

 

2001- Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away premiered in Japan. The first Japanese anime to win an Oscar.

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Friday, July 19, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 19, 2024


Birthdays: Edgar Degas, Samuel Colt, Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Bert Kwouk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vicki Carr, Max Fleischer, animator Brenda Banks, Lizzie Borden, Ille Nastase, George McGovern, Brian Harold May of Queen, Atom Egoyan, Anthony Edwards, Campbell Scott, Dal McKennon- the voice of Gumby, Ben Franklin in Ben and Me, and Archie in the Archies, Benedict Cumberbatch is 48


1899- “The Newsies Strike” Hundreds of poor children in NYC who survived by selling penny newspapers, banded together and went on strike against William Randolph Hearst and Josef Pulitzers newspaper empires. Despite lots of drama and threatened violence, Hearst and Pulitzer  eventually both gave in to their demands.


1900- The first line of the Paris Metro underground dedicated. Ligne 1 Porte Vincennes.


1913 - Billboard Magazine publishes earliest known "Last Week's 10 Best Sellers among

Popular Songs" Malinda's Wedding Day is #1


1932- writer Daphne du Maurier married General Frederick Browning.


1934- The Walt Disney studio signed a deal with the Lionel toy train company to produce a Mickey and Minnie wind up handcar. The sales were so good it actually saved the Lionel company from going bankrupt. 


1939 – Dr. Roy P Scholz is the first surgeon to use fiberglass sutures, replacing cat’s intestines and wool thread.


1941 - British PM Winston Churchill launched his "V for Victory" campaign.  V in French for Victoire, in Dutch Vrijheid (Liberty). By coincidence the letter "V" in morse code corresponded with the opening notes of Beethoven ‘s 5th symphony "Dit-Dit-Dit Daaah." making it the musical theme of the BBC overseas radio service war news. 


1942- Actor Stirling Holloway, who did Disney character voices like Winnie the Pooh, enlisted in the army. He was 37. They didn’t send him to fight, but used him in Special Services raising money and public relations.


1952- Several UFOs appeared on the radar of Washington DC’s National Airport (Today its Reagan Airport). So many alarming reports and phone calls came in, that the Air Force was obliged to hold a news conference to calm public fears. They explained the lights were temperature inversions. Uh, huh…


1957- The film “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” starring Michael Landon premiered. 


1966- Frank Sinatra (50) married Mia Farrow (21). Frankie’s ex Ava Gardner commented:” Hah! I always knew Frank would one day wind up in bed with a little boy.” Two years later when Mia Farrow was offered the lead role in Roman Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby” Frank gave her an ultimatum "Baby, it's either me or your career”. She took the part and he served her with a divorce papers on the set. Mia got an Oscar nomination and Frank recorded “Strangers in the Night”. 



Thursday, July 18, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 18, 2024


Birthdays: William Makepeace Thackeray, Chill Wills, Nelson Mandela, James Brolin, Elizabeth McGovern, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Hume Cronyn, Red Skelton, Hunter H. Thompson, Clifford Odets, Paul Verhoeven, John Glenn, Syd Mead, Vin Diesel is 57, George Griffin is 81.

  

 

1877- Thomas Edison first recorded sound on tin foil cylinder `Mary Had a Little Lamb'

 

1936-“I Love to Singa” Looney Tune by Tex Avery. A sendup of Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer.

 

1939- MGM tried a sneak preview of the film The Wizard of Oz. Afterward they debated cutting the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow as slowing down the story. Finally, they decided to leave it in. The film debuted in August to wild success and acclaim.

 

1939- RKO pictures signed Orson Welles to direct movies in Hollywood. That Hollywood signed a 24 year old radio star who never made a single film, and gave him complete freedom and final cut was an amazing deal.

 

 

1950- Walt Disney’s live action film Treaure Island Premiered, with Robert Newton as Long John Silver, Capt. Jack Sparrow’s role model. Arrrr-Jim, me boy!

 


1964- Bob McKimson’s "A False Hare", the last Bugs Bunny theatrical short for Warner Bros for twenty years, until 1985.

 

1966- Bobby Fuller who made the hit song "I fought the Law and the Law Won" was found in LA in his mother’s Oldsmobile, beaten and dead from "forcible inhalation of gasoline"- huffing.

 

1968- Engineer Bob Noyce quit Fairchild Semiconductor and founded a new company in Santa Clara California named Intel. His partners were Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, he of Moore’s Law. It sold a new thing called microprocessors. In 1980 Intel would invent the silicon chip.

 

 

1975- Famed underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode’ experimented with breath control while doing hallucinogenic drugs. This day the creator of Cheech Wizard died of auto-asphyxiation while high. 

 

 

1986- Aliens, the sequel directed by James Cameron, premiered. Game over, man!

 

1998- The movie Pokemon the First was released in Japan, stoking a Pokemon craze.

 

2019- A demented man set the Kyoto Animation Studio ablaze with gasoline and attacked people with a knife. 34 people died in the blaze. Many were young women for whom it was their first job.


Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 17, 2024


Birthdays: James Cagney, John Jacob Astor I, Hyacinth Rigaud, Bernice Abbott, Chill Wills, Brian Trottier, Phoebe Snow, Daryl Lamonica, Prof. Peter Schickele a.k.a. PDQ Bach, Earl Stanley Gardner the creator of Perry Mason, Art Linkletter, Phyllis Diller, Diane Carroll, Donald Sutherland, animator Willie Ito is 91, David Hasslehoff is 73


1717- British King George I held a flotilla of boats from Whitehall Palace to Chelsea and back. To add color to the event, he had his composer George Freidrich Handel compose a suite to be played by a boatload of musicians. Handel’s Water Music. King George enjoyed the music so much he made the exhausted musicians play the entire sweet three times during the outing. 


1841 - British humor magazine Punch first published.


1893- Representatives of fourteen stage unions meet to form IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical & Screen Engineers of the U.S. & Canada.


1928- Mexican President-elect Alvaro Obregon was at a large banquet for former veterans of the Mexican Revolution. Part of the party was having a cartoonist stroll about making caricatures of the guests. Obregon said to cartoonist Leon Toral: "Make sure you make me look good." Toral responded "Oh, I will.." and pulled a gun and shot the President to death. An assassin but still a professional artist, Toral actually completed the drawing before reaching for his pistol. Gotta watch them cartoonists….


1935 - Variety's famous headline "Sticks Nix Hix Pix" meaning audiences in rural areas were not attending movies with a rustic theme.


1937- the Nazis open an art exhibit of banned artworks and artists called Entartete Kunst- Degenerate Art. Works of Dali and Duchamp, Grosz, Lippschitz, Kandinsky and Miro, with appropriate insults underneath. The next day Hitler dedicated the Great German Art Collection, having cleansed the German art world for National Socialist art, mostly bad deco-greco nudes and dumb Nordic medieval fantasy scenes.


1955- DISNEYLAND dedicated- Walt Disney's dream of a perfect family amusement park, called 'The Happiest Place on Earth" was declared open with celebrities like Ronald Reagan, Art Linkletter and the Mouseketeers in attendance. It opened to the public the next day. Walt hoped to get 1,000 visitors that first day.  He got 30,000. Facilities broke down from the huge crowds and the haste with which the park was built.  Concrete pavement which was poured the night before was still soft under people's feet, there were no working water fountains and the car parking was a nightmare. To the Disneyland workers opening day was nicknamed 'Black Sunday". But despite all, Disneyland became a huge success.


1959- Singer Billie Holiday, called Lady Day, died of heart and liver failure, and cirrhosis in Metropolitan hospital in NY. She was 44. Hounded by federal authorities for twenty years, Feds were trying to arrest her for drug possession even as she lay dying. 


1959- Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest premiered.


1967– The Monkees performed at Forest Hills NY, Jimi Hendrix was their opening act.


1968- The Beatles musical cartoon feature The Yellow Submarine premiered in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Look Out! It’s the Blue Meanies!!



1969- The first Vampirella comic, created by Forrest Ackerman and Trina Robbins.


1975-The first Apollo-Soyuz space linkup. A second linkup would not happen until 1995.


2004- Katsuhiro Otomo’s film Steamboy premiered. Japanese interest in the idea of SteamPunk began to spread worldwide.


Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Tom Sito's animation almanac for July 16, 2024


Birthdays: Andrea Del Sarto, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Ginger Rogers, Pinchas Zukerman,

Orville Redenbacher, Roald Amundsen, Sunny Tufts, Barbera Stanwyck, Reuben Blades, Mary Baker-Eddy the founder of Christian Science, Phoebe Cates, Will Farrell is 58

1439 - Kissing is banned in England to stop diseases from spreading. I wonder if they knew about fist-bumping?


1932- Cecil B. DeMille shot the scene in his film Sign of the Cross where Claudette Colbert took a bath in asses milk. Legend has it that DeMille insisted on real milk in the bath and that by the second day the hot studio lights had curdled it to a smelly cheese. But production notes show the scene was all shot in one day. DeMille always got away with sexy semi-nude scenes by putting them in biblical settings. After all, who would criticize a morality tale from the Good Book? 


1935- The first parking meter set up in Oklahoma City.


1936 - 1st x-ray photo of arterial circulation, Rochester, NY


1951- J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" published.


1954- Groundbreaking for the construction of Disneyland.


1956 –The last time Ringling Bros, Barnum & Bailey Circus performed under a canvas circus tent.


1963- Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space aboard Vostok 6. 


1969- Congress passed Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It makes it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their spacecraft.


1969- Apollo 11 blasted off for the Moon.


1994- Comet Schoendacher-Levy 6 impacted with the Planet Jupiter, giving scientists a spectacular ringside seat to the processes of the creation of the Universe.



1988- Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic film Akira premiered in Tokyo. It opened in America a year later. It was the first Japanese Anime film to go beyond the domestic and its niche fan base, to appeal to a global audience. 




Monday, July 15, 2024

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for July 15, 2024


Birthdays: Rembrandt van Rijn, Inigo Jones, Sir Thomas Bullfinch, Mother Cabrini, Rev. Clemont Moore, Julian Bream, Linda Rondstadt is 78, Alex Karras, Jan Michael Vincent, Lola Davidovich, Forrest Whitaker is 63, Brigette Neilsen, Jesse Ventura is 72, Terry O’ Quinn is 72.


1795 - "Le Marseillaise" became officially the French national anthem.


1806- American captain Zebulon Pike set off on his trek of discovery through the new Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado territory. Near Santa Fe New Mexico he was apprehended by Spanish Authorities for trespassing and put on a boat back home. In Colorado, Pike discovered the mountain named for him- Pike’s Peak.


1916- The Boeing Aircraft Corporation (originally Pacific Aero) formed in Seattle by William Boeing. 


1928- The first Enigma Machine for decryption invented. A forerunner of the computer.


1938- Max Fleischer Popeye cartoon "With the Jeep" introduced Eugene the Jeep. The character was created in the Thimble Theater comic strip two years earlier. The funny little character later gave its name to the army’s new General Purpose Vehicle, the G.P. or Jeep.


1941- President Franklin Roosevelt sent federal mediator Stanley White to try and solve the labor strike between Walt Disney and his cartoonists.


1953- The film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes premiered starring Marylyn Monroe and Jane Russell.


1971- Producer Steve Krantz announced the production of the first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat, based on the popular underground comic by Robert Crumb. It would be directed by Ralph Bakshi.


1982-Coca-Cola introduced Diet Coke. Coke officials are proud of the fact that within a year it's sales top that of Tab, but Tab was owned by Coke as well. (duh..?)


1994- James Cameron’s movie True Lies opens. With Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.


1997- Famed clothing designer Gianni Versace was murdered outside his Miami mansion by a deranged serial killer on a spree since leaving Minnesota.  The killer, Andrew Cunanan, was later found in a houseboat with a self-inflicted bullet in his head.



2011- Disney’s last hand-drawn feature film Winnie the Pooh, and short the Ballad of Nessie opened in theaters. Two years later CEO Bob Iger said there were no more 2-D projects in development and laid off most remaining traditional artists.