Tom Sito's animation almanac for Oct. 5, 2024

Birthdays: Wendel Wilkie, President Chester Allen Arthur, Ray Kroc the mastermind of MacDonalds restaurants, Louis Lumiere, Vaslav Havel, Larry Fine of the Three Stooges, Bob Geldorf, Mario Lemieux, Josh Logan, Bill Dana "my name Jose Jimenez", Bill Keane, Clive Barker, Glynnis Johns, Donald Pleasance, Maya Lin, Bernie Mac, Karen Allen is 73, Kate Winslet is 49, Guy Pearce is 57, Jesse Eisenberg is 41

 

According to his creator Mike Mignola, today is the birthday of Hellboy, born in Hell -1617.

 

 

1762- Christoph Gluck premiered his opera Orpheo et Eurydice in Vienna.

 

1904- According to comedian and playwright Steve Martin, this is the day Pablo Picasso met Albert Einstein at the Cafe Lapin Agile. There was a cafe in Paris called Lapin Agile that Picasso did like to frequent, but he never actually met Einstein.

 

1905- Happy Birthday T-Rex! Prof. Henry Osborne published a paper on the new bones found in Montana of a sleek hunter-killer dinosaur. He originally called it Dynamosaurus Imperiosis, but changed it to Tyrannosaurus Rex.

 

 

1927- Sam Warner, the Warner Brother most responsible for committing the studio to gambling on a talking picture process, died just as the 'Jazz Singer 'opened and made Warner-Vitaphone a major Hollywood power. He literally worked himself into an early grave. Brother Jack Warner had earlier said "Who the heck wants to hear actors talk?"

 

1927- A play version of the novel Dracula opened on Broadway. It starred a Hungarian immigrant named Bela Lugosi. It became a huge hit and made him a star. When the Hollywood movie version was made, Lugosi and Everett Sloan (Van Helsing) were the only two from the original play. 

 

 

1932- Talking pictures now in vogue, MGM Studios fired famed comic Buster Keaton. Keaton later said giving up his independent studio to work for MGM was the biggest mistake of his life.

 

1933- Warner Bros musical Footlight Parade with James Cagney premiered.

1933- A WB studio memo from Jack Warner to producer Hal Wallis advised their star Joan Blondell to please wear a brassiere. “if those bulbs keep sticking out our pictures will be shut down around the country!”

 

1945- The BATTLE OF BURBANK- Three thousand striking union filmworkers (and a few animators) battled the Burbank police in front of Gate 2 of the Warner Bros. Studio lot. chains, bricks, tear gas, firehoses, burning cars. Jack Warner placed sharpshooters behind those large movie billboards on Barham and Pass. One of the strike leaders arrested was a background painter for Tex Avery cartoons. Herb Sorrel, the union leader, was pulled into a car and beaten up by gangsters, then arrested by police for incitement to riot. 

   

 

1949-Walt Disney’s Ichabod and Mr. Toad released.

 

1961- The film Breakfast at Tiffany’s opened, with Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, the song Moon River.

 

1964- There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here!” The Underdog Show premiered.

 

1969- Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted on British television BBC-1.

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2003- Timothy Treadwell was an author and advocate for the wild grizzly bears of North America. This day near Khalifa Bay Alaska, a huge bear attacked Treadwell and his girlfriend Anne Huguenard and tore them to pieces. When authorities brought down the bear in question, after being shot 21 times, human remains were found in his stomach. When Treadwell appeared on the David Letterman TV Show the previous year, Letterman joked:" Is it going to happen that one day we read a news article about you being eaten by one of these bears?" Werner Herzog did a film about his life. Grizzly Man.

 

2011- Steve Jobs died at age 56 of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET) that spread to his liver. As he faded away, he looked straight ahead as if he was seeing something and murmured "oh wow....oh....wow...."

 

2017- The Me-Too/Times Up Movement. Harvey Weinstein of Miramax and later the Weinstein Company was one of the most powerful movie producers in Hollywood. This day the NY Times broke the story of his history of sexually abusive conduct towards women. He was first fired from his company, then ejected from the Motion Picture Academy.  Soon more women and men began to come forward with their stories of sexual abuse. All across Hollywood, celebrities’ dark secrets were exposed, and careers collapsed. Louis CK, Garrison Keillor, Les Moonves, Maestro James Levine, opera star Placido Domingo, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and more.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for Oct. 4, 2024

Birthdays: French King Louis X The Stubborn 1314, Richard Cromwell “Tumbledown Dick, “ Rutherford Hayes, Frederick Remington, Jean Millet, Buster Keaton, Englebert Dolfuss, Charlton Heston, Armand Assante, Damon Runyon, Alvin Tofler author of Future Shock, Anne Rice, Alicia Silverstone is 48, Christoph Waltz is 68, Liev Schreiber is 57, Melissa Benoist is 36, Susan Sarandon is 78.

 

1798- Lyrical Ballads, a small book of poems published jointly by English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The book opened with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and finished with Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey.” The book didn’t sell that well. Wordsworth blamed Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner poem for being too long. Some of the best sales of the book were by sea captains who thought The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a collection of sea shanties. 

 

 

1869- Henry J. Heinz began his condiment company, bottling horseradish in a little shop in Pittsburgh. He was later called the Catsup King, -or Ketchup, if you prefer.  Ketchup comes from a Chinese fermented fish sauce called Koe-chiap he adapted. 

 

1909- St. Louis Missouri was site of the first –and only- airship race in the US. Four dirigibles, the total number in America, ran a course for a purse of $1,000 dollars.

 

1931- Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy" comic strip debuts.

 

1943- Actor Clark Gable was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for flying combat missions over Germany. It was said Gable took these deliberately dangerous missions instead of doing USO shows out of a death-wish he had in grief for his wife Carole Lombard, who was killed in a plane crash the year before. She had been urging Gable to volunteer shortly before her death.  Adolf Hitler offered a cash reward of $5,000 to anyone who could bring Gable in alive. Adolf was a movie-fan and loved Gone With the Wind. 

 

1950- The first Peanuts comic strip introducing Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy. At first Schulz was going to call him “Sniffy”, but then learned that name was already in another comic strip.

 

1955- The Brooklyn Dodgers a.k.a. "Da Bums" won the World Series for the first time, and the only time they won it while inhabiting the precincts of Flatbush. The name Dodgers came from the fact that several main trolley car lines intersected in front of Ebbets Field on Atlantic Avenue. To get into the ballpark you had to cross this area dodging the traffic. So they were known as the Brooklyn Trolley-Dodgers, then Dodgers.

 

1957- SPUTNIK- Russia first shot an object into space orbit and inaugurates the Space Age. A basketball sized satellite called" Sputnik-1". Sputnik means Fellow Traveler and the word spawned pop words like Beatnik, Nudnik and Peacenik. Americans used to thinking of themselves as the leaders in all technology reacted with shock. Why weren’t we first?  We were losing the space race! Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson complained “I don’t want to sleep under a Commie Moon!”

 The gov't reaction caused the creation of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funneled Defense Dept money into research through leading universities. Besides space, DARPA oversaw the development of computer graphics and the Internet.

 

 

1957-"Leave it to Beaver' debuts on CBS.

 

1961- The Alvin Show premiered.

 

 

1969- Diane Linkletter, the daughter of television personality Art Linkletter got high on LSD and leapt out of a window to her death. Her boyfriend snatched at the belt loops of her dress in an attempt to save her, but they tore away. Art Linkletter became a livelong crusader against drug abuse. 

 

1970- Janis Joplin was found dead of a drug overdose at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood. Room 105. She was 27. Her song “Me and Bobby McGee” was as yet unreleased but soon topped the pop charts. Joplin left a considerable sum in her will for a party for her friends. The invitation read “ The Drinks are on Pearl”, her nickname.

 

1998- Rolie Polie Olie premiered on The Disney Channel. The French-Canadian Nelvana production, designed by William Joyce, is today considered one of the earliest animated TV series done entirely on computer.  

 

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Oct. 3, 2024

Birthdays: Gore Vidal, Mikail Lermontov, Chubby Checker, James Herriot, Eleanor Duse, Emily Post, Leo McCarey the director of the Marx Brothers classic film Duck Soup, and many Laurel & Hardy shorts, Steven Reich, Tommy Lee, Neve Campbell, Clive Owen is 60, 

Cartoonist teacher Harvey Kurtzman would be 100!

 

1855- American James McNeill Whistler arrived in Paris to study painting. He had gotten into West Point for a military career, but dropped out after a year. Later, he joking told friends "If I hadn't identified phosphorous as a gas, I'd be a major general by now!'

 

1903- Dr Horatio Nelson Jackson, the first man to drive an automobile across the American continent, was given a ticket in his home town for driving faster than 6 miles an hour. 

 

1910- English comedians Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel first arrive in the U.S. with a touring British vaudeville company, the Fred Karno Troupe. Fred’s advice to his comics, “when in doubt, fall on your arse!”

 

 

1934- Walt Disney held a story meeting on their planned Snow White movie. They discussed the bed-building sequence, and one where Snow White teaches the Dwarfs how to pray. (both never made)

 

 

1941- Warner Bros. THE MALTESE FALCON "premiered. Screenwriter John Huston asked if he could direct an adaptation of this old Dashell Hammett story, which had been already made into movies twice. This version became the most famous. The name was kept despite producer Hal Wallis wanting to change it to THE GENT FROM FRISCO. 

 

 

1951- The Shot Heard Round the World- Bobby Thompson's bottom of the ninth, last out, home run which enabled the N.Y. Giants to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League Pennant.

 

1953- Chuck Jone’s “Duck, Rabbit, Duck” The third of his hunting trilogy.

 

1955- 'Good Morning, Captain.' The Captain Kangaroo kid show debuted on television. 

 

1955- The Mickey Mouse Club TV show premiered. “Who’s the leader of the Band that’s Made for you and me…?”

 

1957-Walter Lantz's The Woody Woodpecker TV Show debuted.

 

1957- Jayne Mansfield met Greta Garbo and asked for her autograph.

 

1961- The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered. It made stars of Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore and was written by ex-Sid Caesar writer Carl Reiner and Rocky & Bullwinkle writer Alan Burns. Carl Reiner originally wanted to be the star, but after one show, producer Sheldon Leonard told him, “We’re going to find a better actor to play you.” So in came Dick Van Dyke. The show was a favorite of Orson Welles and Stan Laurel.

 

1967- Folksinger and union activist Woodie Guthrie died of Huntington’s Chorea. He was 55. His family scattered his ashes in New York Harbor, then went to Nathans on the Coney Island Boardwalk for hot dogs, Woody’s favorite.

 

1967- Voice actor and vaudevillian Pinto Colvig died of lung cancer. He was 75. He was the original voice of Disney’s Goofy, Pluto the dog, Grumpy and Sleepy on Snow White, Gabby in Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels and the first Bozo the clown.

 

1980- David Lynch’s “ The Elephant Man” with John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft opened.

 

 

1992- Bald Irish pop star Sinead O’Connor caused a fuss by tearing up a picture of the Pope on the show Saturday Night Live. She was later booed off stage during a concert at Madison Square Garden.

 

 

2003- The Siegfried and Roy magic show in Las Vegas ran to sell out crowds for years. Today the act finally came to an end after a large Bengal Tiger attacked Roy Horn and tore his throat open in front of an audience. Most thought it was part of the act. Roy survived, but they wisely decided to retire.
Roy Horn died in 2020 of covid at age 75. Siegfried (Fishbacher) died the following January.

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Oct. 2, 2024

Birthdays: King Richard III, Nat Turner, Mahatma Ghandi, Claus Von Hindenburg, Ferdinand Foch, Spanky MacFarland, Groucho Marx, Bud Abbott, Moses Gunn, Graham Greene, LeRoy Shield (composer of the music in the Hal Roach comedies), Donna Karan, Gordon Sumner known as Sting is 73, Lorraine Bracco is 60, Tiffany, Kelly Ripa

 

1920 - The only triple-header in baseball history was played on this day, as the

Cincinnati Reds took two out of three games from the Pittsburgh Pirates.

 

1925-The first bright red Leyland doubledecker omnibuses appear on London streets.

 

1928 - This was a busy day at Victor Records Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. DeFord

Bailey cut eight masters. Three songs were issued, marking the first studio recording

sessions in the place now known as Music City, USA.

 

1933- Library of Congress musicologist Alan Lomax met with an Arkansas chain gang

convict named Hudlan Ledbetter, who everyone called Ledbelly.  He recorded a cotton picking work song of his called "the Rock Island Line' and “The Midnight Special”. 

  

1937 - Ronald Reagan, just 26 years old, made his acting debut this day

with Warner Brothers release of "Love is in the Air".

 

1950- Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip debuts. Good ol' Charlie Brown was the name of an office worker Schulz knew that all the guys liked to play jokes on.  Schulz's idea 'Little Folks' was initially rejected by all the major comic syndicates. When it was finally accepted, a syndicate editor suggested he change the name to Peanuts, after the children’s Peanut Gallery in the popular Howdy Doody TV Show. Three months before the strip was accepted his girlfriend broke off their engagement. She was convinced he would never amount to anything. 

At the time of his death Charles Schulz had mountains on the moon named for his characters, and he was arguably among the richest visual artists on earth.

 

1954- Elvis Presley was fired from Nashville's Grand Ol' Opry Show after 

one performance. He was told: "Son, you ain't a' going no where. Go

back to driving a truck!" The next year he was a major star.

 

1955 - "Good Eeeeeeevening." The master of mystery movies, Alfred

Hitchcock, presented his brand of suspense to millions of viewers on CBS

on this night.

 

1957- Raintree County, the first film in Panavision.

 

1957- The Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean, premiered. In the opening, the reason the British soldiers are whistling the Col. Bogey March instead of singing it is because the lyrics are all quite rude. “Hitler, has only got one ball. Goering, has two but very small.”

 

1959- The television show The Twilight Zone debuts. Producer/writer Rod Serling 

had fought network execs for months that a mystery-suspense show could compete with

all the Doctor and Cowboy shows on TV.  He originally wanted Orson Welles to be 

the host of the show, but when Welles asked for too much money, Serling decided to

do it himself. He wrote 90 episodes. 

 

1967- Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African American to be a Supreme

Court Justice. 

 

1967- San Francisco Police raid the Haight-Ashbury home of the rock band the Grateful

Dead, busting everyone for possession of narcotics.

 

1977 - Following a foiled attempt to steal the body of Elvis Presley from

Forest Hill Cemetery, both Presley's and his grandmother's bodies were moved

to Graceland.

 

1978- Future TV star Tim Allen was busted in Kalamazoo Michigan for selling cocaine.

 

1982- Godfrey Reggio’s haunting documentary Koyaanisqatsi premiered at Radio City Music Hall. No dialogue, no narration, no actors. just amazing music by Phillip Glass.

 

1985- Actor Rock Hudson died of AIDS, just 3 ½ months since he announced he had contracted it. He was 59. The first major celebrity to die of the disease.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Oct. 1, 2024

Welcome to October, Month Number 8 to the Romans, Octubrius Mensis. In 138AD the Roman Senate wanted to rename October- Faustina, after the wife of the Emperor Antonius Pius. But she being a rare modest empress, declined the honor.

 

Birthdays: Paul Dukas, Vladimir Horowitz, Walter Matthau, Richard Harris, Phillipe Noiret, James Whitmore, Everett Sloane, Rod Carew, Stanley Holloway, Tom Bosley, Randy Quaid, Cindy Margolis, Richard Corben, Zack Galifanakis is 55, R.O. Blechman is 94, Brie Larson is 35, Julie Andrews is 89, Pres. Jimmy Carter is 100!

 

1810- The first Berkshire Cattle Show.

 

1857- Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary premiered in magazine installments. Flaubert was tried for pornography because of it, but acquitted.

 

1880- John Phillip Sousa was named leader of the Marine Corps Band and began his career as the March King.

 

1923- The first football game in the L.A. Coliseum- USC defeated Pomona.

 

1931- Construction completed on the new Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The original Waldorf Astoria from the XIX Century was demolished to make way for the Empire State Building. The new Waldorf boasted the Waldorf Towers, where kings, presidents and other Hoi-Paloi could enter by a private lobby and stay for weeks at a time. Old president Herbert Hoover was a long time resident. Their restaurant was where The Waldorf Salad was created.

 

1932- Babe Ruth's "Called" Home Run. Ruth was hitting against a Chicago Cubs pitcher when he pointed with his bat towards right field. He then swung his bat and hit a home run over the right wing bleachers.

 

1937- After heavy lobbying by millionaire publisher William Randolph Hearst the first Federal law banning Marijuana goes into effect. The law was sought chiefly by southwestern states, that wanted to have any excuse to deport Mexican immigrants. Plus Hearst had many powerful paper manufacturers behind him who wanted wood pulp to be the chief source of paper products rather than hemp, which grows, well…. like a weed.

 

1945- Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin left the cartoon business to work full time as a screenwriter at Paramount on live action movies. He wrote for the Marx Brothers and later directed the Dean Martin Jerry Lewis comedies. 

 

1952- This Is Your Life TV show hosted by Ralph Edwards premiered.

 

1955- The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason, Jayne Meadows and Art Carney premiered on TV.

 

1957- Los Angeles outlawed garbage incineration to try and cut down smog levels. Even though Los Angeles has reduced it's pollution levels by 30% in ten years it still had the worst air in the United States until surpassed by Houston in 1999.

 

1958- NASA born. The National Aeronautics & Space Agency. The U.S. government takes the space program out of the hands of the military and sets up a civilian space agency to get us into orbit.

 

 

1968- George Romero's film "Night of the Living Dead' premieres. Despite one film critic describing it as,” A bunch of sick crap”, it went on to become a cult hit.

 

1971-Walt Disney World Florida opened to the public.

 

1982- Disney's EPCOT opens.

 

1987- The Whittier Earthquake rocks L.A. 5.9 on the Richter Scale, it killed 8 and caused millions in damage.

 

1992 -The Cartoon Network started.

 

15th Anniv. 2009- The Walt Disney Family Museum opened in San Francisco.