tom sito's animation almanac for April 8, 2025

Birthdays: Gautama Buddha –as commemorated by Japanese custom-Kambutsue, Ponce De Leon, King Albert of the Belgians, Mary Pickford, Yip Harburg, Betty Ford, Sonja Henje, Catfish Hunter, Jacques Brel, Darlene Gillespie, Julian Lennon, Carmen McCrae, Shecky Green, Douglas Trumbull, Frederic Back, Robin Wright is 60, Patricia Arquette

 

 

1876- Amilicare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda debuted. The ballet portion is famous as the Dance of the Hours.

 

1879- Milk first sold in glass bottles.

 

1911-Vitagraph released Winsor McCay's short cartoon "Little Nemo" theatrically.

 

1933-The WPA- Works Progress Administration, later renamed the Works Projects Administration founded. It was the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s massive jobs program to heal the Depression by putting unemployed people back to work. They built bridges, dams, roads, federal buildings. The WPA arts projects employed artists like Grant Wood, Berenice Abbott, Tyrus Wong, and Thomas Hart Benton and put on plays with Orson Welles and John Houseman. Lee Krasner said it was a life-saver. They created a WPA Symphony that found dozens of unemployed musicians, including three who once played for Peter Tchaikovsky.

 

1933- Disney short Father Noah’s Ark opened. Directed by Wilfred Jackson.

 

1949- A three year old girl named Kathy Fiscus fell into a well in the LA suburb of San Marino California. After a concerted effort by authorities to rescue her, she was found dead. What makes this sad incident memorable, was it was the first time a news story was followed by KTLA television cameras and reported live as it happened. 

 

1963- The Best Short Oscar went to John Hubley's The Hole. Voices by Dizzy Gillespie and George Matthews.

  

1968- The Battle of Que Sanh ended when the First Cavalry Division broke through to the surrounded Marine base. One survivor of the battle, Gary Wolf, a decade later wrote the comic novel Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

 

1973- Pablo Picasso died at age 91. His last words at a dinner with friends was a toast 'Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore'. On his night table was a book of cartoons drawn by former Disney animator Vip Partch. 

 

1974- Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs set in 1935. Hammerin' Hank hit #715 off Dodger pitcher Al Dowling.  Aaron had tied the Babe’s record at the end of the previous season and had to endure an entire winter of stress and racial threats before he could come up to bat again and break the record on opening day of the new season. His locker had sacks of vicious hate mail alongside it. Henry Aaron retired with a new record of 755. Pitcher Al Dowling joked: "I never say 7:15 anymore. I only say, 'It's a quarter after seven'." 

 

1975- Frank Robinson becomes the first black manager in major league history as his Cleveland Indians defeat the Yankees 5-3. The Tribe's new player-manager hits a home run in his first at-bat as the designated hitter.

 

1986- Actor Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of the town of Carmel, California.

 

1994- Chan Ho Park becomes the first Korean to play in the US major leagues as he makes his Dodger pitching debut.  

 

1994- Grunge rocker Kurt Kobain’s body was discovered by a security system electrician three days after he blew his own head off with a shotgun. 

 

2000- The  “More Cowbell” skit first aired on Saturday Night Live. Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken starred.

tom sito's animation almanac for April 7, 2025

Birthdays St. Francis Xavier, William Wordsworth, Mongo Santamaria, Walter Winchell, David Frost, Percy Faith, Daniel Ellsberg, Jerry Brown, Alan Pakula, Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Irene Castle, Wayne Rogers, Stan Winston, James Garner, Olkirk Christenson- the inventor of Lego toys, Francis Ford Coppola is 86, Russell Crowe is 61, Jacky Chan (born Chan Kong Shang) is 71

 

 

1891- Showman P.T. Barnum died of old age. The man who invented kiddie matinees, the Greatest Show on Earth, and coined the word “Jumbo” and “ There’s a sucker born every minute.” His last words were "How were the box office receipts today?"

 

1927- Abel Gance’s classic film Napoleon premiered at the Paris Opera. Gances active camera and editing were years ahead of their time, climaxed by a triptych of large images on three movie screens linked by synchronized projectors. One American man in the audience, Walter Wallin, was inspired to develop the Panavision wide screen lens, used in many movies.

 

 

1939-"The Ugly Duckling" the last Disney Silly Symphony short cartoon.

 

1939- At the Philadelphia Academy of Music, recording sessions began for the music of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. They would continue for 42 more days. Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Philharmonic.

 

1949- The Musical "South Pacific" debuted. Some Enchanted Evening…

 

1950- SILLY PUTTY- In 1943 chemist James Wright was looking for a substitute synthetic rubber to help the allied war effort. He failed in that, but what he made was a sticky silicon goo that was malleable and did not stain. In 1950 he showed it to a friend named Peter Hodgson who was a toy manufacturer. Hodgson thought this was a great idea for a kids toy and packaged it in a plastic Easter egg to take advantage of the upcoming Easter holiday. This day Silly Putty was announced at the NY Toy Fair and became a sensation. Astronauts even took it to space to stick small objects down so they wouldn’t float around in zero gravity.

 

1970- The film Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and John Voight won the Best Picture Oscar. The only x-rated (NC-17) film ever to do so. Walt Disney’s It’s Tough to be a Bird” won best animated short.

 

1990- The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center opened a show of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC cancelled. Mapplethorpe’s explicit depictions of gay and s/m lifestyles shocked neoconservative critics of the national endowments for the arts. A media debate on whether government should subsidize or censor art raged, and Dennis Barry the museum director was tried for obscenity. His acquittal was seen as a victory for free expression, but the argument cast a pall on future funding of controversial art.

 

30^th Anniv 1995- A Goofy Movie opened theaters. Directed by Kevin Lima. A lot of the animation was done at Disney’s Paris animation studio.

 

30^th Anniv 1995- Frank & Ollie premiered, a documentary written and directed by Frank Thomas’ son, Ted Thomas.

 

1998- Pop star George Michael was busted after exposing himself to an undercover policeman in a public park men’s room in Beverly Hills.

 

1998- Lead singer for the punk band The Plasmatics, Wendy O. Williams, committed suicide with a shotgun. The outrageously mohawked punk rocker was known for stunts on stage like destroying her amplifiers with a chainsaw, skydiving in the nude, autoeroticism with a sledgehammer, and crashing a burning school bus into a wall of television sets.

 

2155- According to the show Babylon 5 today marked the first contact between humans and the Centauri Alliance.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 6, 2025

Birthdays: Raphael of Urbino, Sacajawea, Ram Dass, Butch Cassidy, Gustav Moreau, Lowell Thomas, Merle Haggard, Billy Dee Williams, George Reeves, Michelle Phillips, Andre Previn, Barry Levinson, Roy Thinnes, John Ratzenberger, Gheorghe Zamfir, Paul Rudd is 56, Zach Braff is 50.

  

 

1520- Renaissance artist RAPHAEL of Urbino, died on his 37th birthday. Vasari wrote of the great artist: " He pursued pleasures and love affairs without moderation. On one occasion he went to excess, and returned home with a violent fever, whereof he died soon after." 

 

1853- The town of Portland Oregon founded.

 

1896- The first OLYMPIC GAMES of the modern era opened in Athens Greece. The last was closed by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius in 391A.D along with all the other pagan festivals. The Olympics were revived as the idea of Baron Pierre Coubertin, who became the first president of the IOC. These games also saw the first modern Marathon race. Appropriately it was won by a Greek- Spyridion Louis. 

 

1906 – Working for Edison cartoonist James Stuart Blackton released his film The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.Today it is considered the first animated film. Blackton made a fortune, lost it, and was hit by a bus on Pico Blvd. in 1940. But his animated antics paved the way for Mickey, Bugs, Bart, and Ariel. 

 

 

1931- The Little Orphan Annie radio show premiered. “Who's the little chatterbox?
The one with pretty auburn locks. Who can it be, It's Little Orphan Annie…”

 

1933- the Screen Writer's Guild, later the WGA, formed. 

 

1936- Episode One of the Flash Gordon series of movie serials premiered. This introduced Flash, Dale, and Emperor Ming the Merciless of the Planet Mongo.  It made a moviestar out of Olympic gold medalist Larry “Buster” Crabbe.

1946- WB short “Daffy Doodles” Bob McKimson’s first directorial effort. Daffy as a graffiti artist bedevils Officer Porky.

 

1951- Happy Birthday AstroBoy! According to the 1951 manga comic book by Osamu Tezuka, today Professor Elephant completed the little boy with the suction cup feet and pointed hairdo. Originally called Tetsuwan Atomo, he was named Astro Boy when Mushi Prod released the animated version in the US in 1961. 

 

1956- Elvis Presley signed his first movie deal with Paramount Pictures.

 

1956- The iconic round Capitol Records Building in Hollywood opened for business. Its recording studios were used by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Les Paul to create their classic albums.

 

1970- Sean Flynn was the only child of Errol Flynn and Lili Damita. He became a freelance war photographer who specialized in going to the most dangerous war zones. This day he was arrested by the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the Cambodian jungle. He was never seen again. His mother had him declared legally dead in 1984. Sean Flynn was 28.

 

1974- ABBA, a new disco phenomenon from Sweden is introduced to the world when they win a Eurovision song contest. Mama Mia!

 

1991- The first episode of Darkwing Duck premiered.

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 5, 2025

Birthdays: Plato, Swinburne, Booker T. Washington, Josef Lister, Bette Davis, Nadar, Jean Fragonard, animator Hicks Lokey, Nguyen Van Thieu, historian Robert Bloch, Gale Storm, Washington Atlee-Burpee the mail order seed king, Spencer Tracy, Frank Gorshin, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Nigel Hawthorne, Peter Greenway, Gregory Peck,  Colin Powell, Mary Costa, the voice of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Roger Corman, Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA is 75, Pharrell Williams is 52.

 

1874- Johann Strauss Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus (the Bat) premiered in Vienna. 

 

1913- Ebbets Field opened in Flatbush. The Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Highlanders (Yankees) 3-2.

 

1915- Jess Willard knocked down Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion in a title fight in Havana Cuba. The older Johnson retired after the fight. Jess Willard wouldn’t hold the title long though, on July 4^th Willard lost to new kid Jack Dempsey.

 

1923- Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band took a train from Chicago to Richmond Indiana to record Chimes Blues. Satchmo’s first record.

 

1930 -James Dewar invented the Twinkie. He said he got the name when he drove by a billboard advertising "Twinkle-Toe Shoes" and modified it to Twinkie. Dewar ate two every day of his life, and called them, “The best darn-tootin idea I ever had!” 

 

1931- Fox Film Company dropped their option on young star John Wayne as a dud not going anywhere. Wayne eked out an existence doing cheap westerns for Republic and Monogram until John Ford of RKO made him a star in 1939’s Stagecoach.

 

 

1940- Disney short Donald’s Dog Laundry.

 

1945- The first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon.

 

1956- At Disneyland, The Bathroom of the Future opened at Tomorrowland.

 

1963- The Lava Lamp invented by Dr. Edward Craven Walker.

 

1965- Julie Andrews had created the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway. But when filming the movie version old studio head Jack Warner decided she was not a big enough star, so he used Audrey Hepburn with a dubbed singing voice. But Andrews had her revenge. At the Academy Awards this night My Fair Lady won Best Picture, but Julie Andrews won the best actress Oscar for Mary Poppins. She famously said, "I would like to thank Jack Warner for making this award possible!"

 

1975- The Best Animated Short Oscar went to Closed Mondays, claymation from Portland based Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton. In 2005 the Will Vinton Studio was renamed Laika.

 

1976- Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes died at age 76. Hughes had inherited his fathers oil rig tool company at 17, and built the mighty Hughes aircraft empire, and ran RKO pictures. He was a well-known Hollywood playboy and romanced beautiful stars like Jane Russell. But after surviving several test plane crashes, he became addicted to pain killers and became increasing paranoid and withdrawn from the world. He died a strange shut in, long haired and living on a diet of drugs, and saving his urine in mason jars.

 

1985- Singer David Lee Roth quit the rock band Van Halen to pursue a solo career.

 

1987- The young Fox TV network premiered The Tracey Ullman Show. She was an English sketch comedy actor who did clever impressions. But a highlight of the show was the unique animated interstitials before commercials. One in particular was a take on a family done by Matt Groening entitled The Simpsons. The Tracey Ullman Show eventually ended, but The Simpsons spun off into a regular TV show in 1989. It became one of the most famous, longest running TV series in history. Tracy Ullman later complained, “I played midwife to the Simpsons.”

 

1994- Grunge rock star Kurt Kobain shot himself. His body wasn’t discovered until two days later.

 

2063- FIRST CONTACT- According to Star Trek, this is the day Professor Zephram Cochran adapted an old-World War III missile and invented the Warp Drive, enabling the Earth to begin deep space exploration, and during whose maiden flight he made the first contact with an alien race- from the planet Vulcan.  

tom sito's animation almanac for April 4, 2025

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Eadweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence-Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters-born McKinley Morganfield, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Bea Benaderet, Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr is 60, Barry Pepper, Craig T. Nelson is 81, Hugo Weaving is 65

 

Ira Spence

 

1924- On a dry lakebed in California, Tom Milton ran a Miller race car at 151 mph.

 

1952- CARTOON COMMIES- Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the owners of a New York commercial animation studio, Tempo Productions of Communist sympathies. One of the owners was Disney Layout man Dave Hilberman, who was a union organizer and was the only artist personally named by Walt Disney to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The F.B.I. began investigating Tempo and their Madison Avenue clients quickly pulled their business. Tempo closed, laying off 50 artists. Mr. Clean, Markie Maypo and the Hamm’s Beer Bear were once again safe from Red subversion. 

 

1954- Arturo Toscanini, who had been making music since the 1880’s, conducted his final concert. Toscanini’s studio space at NBC is today the set of the Saturday Night Live TV show.

 

1967- Van Nuys premiere head shop Captain Ed’s Heads & Highs first opened for business.

 

 

1967- Snoopy’s little bird friend Woodstock debuted in the Peanuts comic strip.

 

 

1973- The World Trade Center Twin Towers first opened to the public.

 

1984- In George Orwell’s novel 1984, this is the day Winston Smith started a secret diary and first wrote the dangerous thought-crime “Down With Big Brother”.

 

1987- Ronald Reagan’s hand-picked FCC voted to repeal The Fairness Doctrine, which mandated news services report only unbiased news, reflecting all opinions. It also said you clearly had to separate hard news from opinion. This set the stage for the highly partisan Right-Left reporting of today.

1994- Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark started Netscape. Clark also founded Silicon Graphics, Inc.

 

2007- Bob Clark, the director of the holiday classic film A Christmas Story, was killed in a head on car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He was 67. 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 3, 2025

Birthdays: Marlon Brando would be 100, King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington Irving, William Marcy "Boss"Tweed, Sally Rand the Fan Dancer, Bud Fisher “Mutt & Jeff”, Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Amanda Byrnes, David Hyde Pierce is 67, Alec Baldwin is 67, Eddie Murphy is 64, Jane Goodall is 91.

 . 

 

 1860-The Pony Express system started. Relay riders from Saint Louis across the prairies and deserts all the way to Sacramento, California. Ten days to get a letter from St. Jo to Denver. For all its romance, The Pony Express failed after just 2 years. Stagecoaches and telegraph wires soon covered the same message business much more easily.

 

 

1869- First performance of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor. 

 

 

1897-composer Johannes Brahms died.

 

1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald married.

 

1941- With the possibility of a labor strike at his studio, and war looming, Walt Disney held the first meeting with U.S. government officials to try and obtain work for training films. 

 

1943- Conrad Veidt, famed German actor who played the evil Major Strasser in Casablanca, collapsed and died on the Riviera Golf Course in Los Angeles. He was 50 and suffered from a heart condition, not helped by his chain smoking. Veidt was anti-Nazi and had a Jewish wife. He put in his contract that in movie roles he wanted to play suave evil nazi bad guys. His death occurred just as his movie Casablanca was receiving rave reviews. 

 

 

1968- Stanley Kubrick's epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered. The N.Y. Times review said it was: " Somewhere between hypnotic and boring". Pauline Kael called it "monumentally unimaginative!" After an academy screening in Hollywood, movie star Rock Hudson walked out saying” Will someone please tell me what the hell that was about?” 

 Writer Arthur C. Clarke always said HAL the computer was not a coded reference to IBM. At the Oscars, Clarke and Kubrick lost the best screenplay award to Mel Brooks for The Producers. 2001 won only one Oscar, for visual effects. It was the only Oscar a Stanley Kubrick film ever won.

 

1973- Standing on the corner of 6^th Ave in Manhattan, Motorola scientist Marty Cooper made the first cell phone call. He called his competitor Joel Engel at Bell Labs to tell him he had lost the race to invent the cell phone. He said of that first phone, “It was the size of a leg of lamb.”

 

1994- Disney chief executive Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter crash on a skiing trip. It’s been speculated that blowing snow off some high peaks caused an ice ball to be sucked into the copter’s air intake manifold. Clint Eastwood was supposed to be on that trip but couldn't make it. Billie Joel and Christie Brinkley had a similar scare with their helicopter on the same day. The death of the Disney CEO set in motion the events that would lead to Jeffrey Katzenberg leaving Disney and forming Dreamworks, as well as Michael Ovitz’s brief tenure as a mouseketeer and Michael Eisner’s eventual fall in 2006. In 1999 the Hollywood Reporter estimated that little iceball cost the Walt Disney Company over one billion dollars.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for April 2, 2025

Birthdays: Frankish Emperor Charlemagne, Giacomo Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, Marvin Gaye, Emile Zola, Max Ernst, Buddy Ebsen, Sir Alec Guinness would have been 111, Frederick Bartholdi, Emmy Lou Harris, Isaiah Washington, Karl Castle, Linda Hunt is 80.

 

 

1722- A Boston newspaper The New England Courant printed an article of homespun wisdom from a self-described old widow named Silence Dogood. It was in reality the first published writing by Benjamin Franklin, then 17 years old. The publisher was his older brother. After awhile Franklin argued with his brother the editor, and moved to Philadelphia.

 

1800- Beethoven's First Symphony premiered. Vienna's leading music critic called it - 'a vulgar, impertinent explosion, more to be expected from a military band than an orchestra!’

 

 

1836- Charles Dickens married Elizabeth Howarth.

 

1877- First man shot out of a cannon.

 

1877- The first White House egg-rolling contest.

 

1902- The first movie theater opened in Los Angeles.

 

1934- Ward Kimball’s first day at Walt Disney as an inbetweener.

 

1943- Disney short 'Private Pluto' the first Chip & Dale cartoon.

 

1943- Warner short “Super Rabbit”. Directed by Chuck Jones.

 

1943- This day Harvard Dean Henry Chauncey supervised the distribution of 316,000 High School seniors of the Army-Navy College Qualifying Test, later re-titled the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or SAT. The SAT became a standardized test that manages every year to raise the stress level of seniors regardless of race, class or religion. Go On To Next Page.

 

1951- Author Jack Kerouac began writing his masterpiece On the Road, on one long roll of teletype paper. He tried to write in a marathon, reinforced by cigarettes, coffee and Benzedrine. The book was one long paragraph, with no page or chapter breaks.“ The only people for me are the mad ones…”

 

1974-While actor David Niven was speaking at the Academy Awards telecast a nude streaker named Bob Opel ran past him on nationwide television. Mr. Niven, completely unflustered, dryly commented: "The only laugh that man will ever get is by stripping off his clothes and showing off his shortcomings. " 

1974- Later at that same Oscar telecast, Francis Ford Coppola presented the last award of the evening, the Best Picture. Francis held up the show to launch into a speech about the coming revolution in computer technology in movies. “A revolution that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a small-town try-out!” The audience was confused and annoyed at being delayed any longer to get to their parties. No one knew what he was talking about.

 

1978- The TV show "Dallas" debuts.

 

 

1993- Bullocks Wilshire department store with the famous Tea Room closed.

 

2004- Walt Disney Studio released Home on the Range.

 

 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 1, 2025

Welcome to April, named for Aprilis, an Etruscan Goddess of Agriculture and planting, or it may even be a corruption of the name of the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love. OtThe month was considered by Romans sacred to Venus- Venuralia.

  

 

Birthdays: Big Jim Fisk , Edmund Rostand, Lon Chaney, Sir William Harvey, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ali McGraw, Toshiro Mifune, Debbie Reynolds, Phil Neikro, Wallace Beery, Jane Powell, Bo Schembechler, Annette O’Toole, Barry Sonnenfeld, Rachel Maddow is 47, animator Andreas Deja is 65.

 

 

1867- Opening of the Paris World Exhibition. This world’s fair was seen as the zenith of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Visitors marveled to exhibits as Dr Lister’s new disinfectant, a new metal called Aluminum, a new butter substitute called margarine, and in the American exhibit, a novel bit of furniture called a Rocking Chair. The Art galleries of the exhibition were filled with Ingres, Courbets and Delacroix. But nothing from Cezanne, Manet, Pizarro or any of the other weirdoes who would one day be called Impressionists.

 

1918- The British Royal Flying Corps (RAF) formed. 

 

1923- Developers S.H. Woodruff and Canadian William Whitley start advertising lots for sale in Hollywoodland, beneath their giant new Hollywoodland sign. The sign originally was covered with lightbulbs. It collapsed and was repaired in 1939, the 'land' part never restored. The Hollywood Sign was made over again in 1978.

 

1944- Tex Avery's "Screwball Squirrel" Only a few shorts were made. As animator Bob Givens reminisced:" Eventually, everyone found that squirrel just too annoying!" 

 

1945- OKINAWA- The Marines land and the battle began. Because it was not a conquered territory, but part of the home Japanese islands, Washington weighed it’s decision to use the atomic bomb by its observation of how tough Okinawa was, indicating how tough it would be to land on mainland Japan, only 360 miles away.  

The fighting was brutal, hand to hand with bayonets and flame-throwers. Of the 125,000 man Japanese garrison only 7,500 didn’t fight to the death, and many civilians threw themselves off cliffs in mass suicide. A children's class trip visiting from Tokyo who were caught in the battle, were shown by soldiers how to cluster themselves around a single hand grenade, so as to save on the number needed. Today there is a shrine to their memory. The Cave of the Maidens is dedicated to a group of schoolgirls who hid in a cave and when the Americans heard Japanese voices inside and none would answer their calls to come out and surrender, filled the cave with flamethrower fire. 

Almost every American soldier who was captured was executed.  The U.S. Navy suffered the worst number of ships sunk and men killed since Pearl Harbor. There were 1,900 Kamikaze plane attacks. U.S. casualties were so high the government re-imposed a press blackout.

This battle has the rare distinction like the Plains of Abraham in 1759 where both opposing generals died. US General Simon Bolivar Buckner, whose father had fought Ulysses Grant in the Civil War, was killed by an artillery round three days before the battles end. Japanese General Usijima committed hari-kiri almost at the same time.

 

1949- Zsa Zsa Gabor married George Sanders. (Shere Khan )

 

1961- Rev Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker get married.

 

1970- A symbol of the 70’s, AMC’s compact car the Gremlin introduced.

 

1972- In a gesture of turnabout-is-fair-play for women, Playgirl Magazine ran its first male nude centerfold- Burt Reynolds.

 

1976- Two college dropouts, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started a company named Apple Computers. A third partner, small businessman Ron Wayne, sold his shares to Jobs & Woz for $800 before they filed papers of incorporation. He didn’t want to get stuck with the bill when they failed. In 2011 Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s richest company.

 

1984- Motown star Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his own father in an argument over plans for the singer's 45th birthday party the next day. 

  

 

1996- Animation World Network, Toontown’s virtual trade magazine, started up. www.AWN.com

 

2004- G-Mail invented.

Tom Sito animation almanac for march 31, 2025

Birthdays:  Rene' Descartes, Franz Josef Haydn, Serge Diaghilev, Harald von Braunhut 1926- the inventor of Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs, Richard Chamberlain, Cesar Chavez, Herb Alpert, Gordie Howe, Liz Claiborne, Gabe Kaplan, Rhea Perlman, Shirley Jones is 90, Richard Kiley, Volker Schlondorf, William Daniels, Lucille Bliss the voice of Crusader Rabbit, Christopher Walken is 81, Colin Farrell is 46, Ewan McGregor is 53, Al Gore is 76, Ed Catmull is 79.

 

1836- Charles Dickens first work published "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club."

 

1840- Congress lowers the minimum workday for federal workers from 11.4 hours a day to 10 hours a day. At this time in mines and factories people worked an average 12-16 hour day. The 8 hour day wasn’t achieved until 1913, not until 1941 in Hollywood.

 

1860- Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper refers to Harriet Lane, President James Buchanan's niece as "FIRST LADY of the Land". Buchanan was a bachelor and was probably gay, So Ms. Lane performed the duties of the White House hostess. Earlier in 1840 President Zachary Taylor eulogized Dolly Madison as First Lady, before that Martha Washington and Abigail Adams were referred to as Lady Washington and Lady Adams. But this is the first official use of the term First Lady for the President’s consort.

 

1889- The Eiffel Tower first opened to the public, to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution. Twice as tall as the Saint Peter's in Rome or the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Wizard of Iron Gustave Eiffel also designed the armature holding up the Statue of Liberty. Eiffel’s original deal with the French government called for the tower to only stay up for twenty years, then pulled down if no further use can found for it. Eiffel agonized about what to do as the deadline approached.  Fortunately by 1909, wireless radio transmissions became important and the Eiffel Tower turned out to be a great broadcast antenna.

 

 

1905- THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought back his famous sleuth in a new series of adventures. Conan Doyle had created Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in 1887 but by 1893 he had tired of the characters, he wanted to write more serious fiction like his novel The White Company. So he killed him off. Holmes fell to his doom fighting Prof. Moriarity at the Reichenbeck Falls. The reaction of the public was astonished outrage. It seemed whenever Conan Doyle went out inevitably someone would stop him and say "You Blackguard! How Could You ?!" He did a speaking tour in America, but all anybody wanted to know was how Holmes and Watson were doing?  Finally, Conan-Doyle bowed to public pressure and resumed the career of the inhabitants of #221B Baker Street. He would later refer to Holmes success as “his monstrosity.”

 

1930- Floyd Gottfredson began drawing Disney’s Mickey Mouse comic strip after Ub Iwerks quit. He continued to do the strip uninterrupted for 45 years, until his retirement in 1975.

 

1930 -Reacting to charges that the movies had become too naughty, Hollywood producers accept the MOTION PICTURE CODE. It was regulated by Will Hays, former Republican Party Chairman. The regulation wouldn't really start to have strength until 1935-36 when pressure groups like the Catholic League of Decency went after Mae West and the Tarzan pictures. 

The Hays Code forbade open sex and obscenity:

  - twin beds only in a bedroom, nightclothes buttoned to the neck. 

  - if a couple were seated together on a bed they must have at least one foot touching the floor,

  -"kisses with a duration of no longer than 3 seconds, parting with lips closed."

-  One other little known clause was the forbidding of members of different races from kissing on camera. So Anna Mae Wong, the greatest Chinese-American actress of her time, could not play a Chinese heroine if her co-star was a Caucasian made up to look Asian.

   Lots of jokes were spawned like: "Give him the bird!" "If the Hays Commission would let me, I'd give him the bird!"

 

1931- ITT transmits the first message by microwave, from Dover to Calais.

 

1932- Ford introduces the V-8 Engine.

 

1933- Max Fleischer's short cartoon "Snow White" (starring Betty Boop) premiered. Cab Calloway singing the "St. James Infirmary Blues" is a highlight.

 

1943- Rodger & Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" debuts.  Despite the opinion of producer Mike Todd -"No legs, No Laughs, No Chance", the musical becomes one of the great hits of American musical theater.

 

1950- Thor Heyderthal's book of his exploits Kon Tiki published. This was an account of his 4,200 mile voyage which proved ancient mariners could have traveled from Peru to Polynesia on boats made from tied reeds.

 

1959- The Dalai Lama fled the Communist Chinese invasion of Tibet and began his long exile.

 

1962- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened on Wilshire Blvd. No, it didn’t display customized surfboards, or the ideal tuna melt with sprouts, but an exhibit of paintings by Bonnard. 

 

1967- In a small London nightclub, rising young rock & roller Jimmy Hendrix burned his guitar for the first time. Rock luminaries like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and Pete Townsend sat in the audience stunned at the technical brilliance of this unknown former paratrooper who played left-handed. The pieces of his guitar were purchased by Microsoft chairman Paul Allen and today are in his Seattle Rock Museum.

 

1973- Comic strip hero Smilin' Jack gets married; the strip concludes next day.

 

1991- Former child star Danny Bonaduce arrested for a fist fight with a trans prostitute.

 

1995- In Corpus Christy Texas legendary Tejana singer Selena Perez was shot and killed by an obsessed fan. The woman Yolanda Saldivar was president of the Selena Fan Club. “The gun just went off, I didn’t mean to shoot anybody.” Just last week her request for parole was denied again.

 

1999- The movie The Matrix opened in theaters. Whoah!

 

tom sito's animation almanac for march 30, 2025

Birthdays:  Maimonides- Moses Ben Maimon, Anna Sewell (the author of Black Beauty), Vincent Van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Peter Marshall, Ray Magliozzi (CarTalk), Warren Beatty is 88, Eric Clapton, Arthur Lee Harrington the designer of the first Jeep, Tracey Chapman, Robby Coltrane, Paul Reiser, Celine Dion, Nora Jones is 46, Disney animator Marc Davis, Maurice LaMarsh is 67, John Astin is 95

 .

 

1858- The pencil eraser patented. The Eraser, or Rubber outside the U.S., was developed in 1770, but Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia first attach it on the top of a pencil.

 

1918- Thomas Edison sold his studio and got out of the movie business. He fired W.K.L. Dickson, inventor of the movie studio set, Edwin Porter the inventor of the narrative film, Willis O’Brian, and J. Stuart Blackton, the inventor of cartoon animation, for annoying him too much about filmmaking. Edison was more interested then in finding a way to extract iron ore from rocks using magnets. 

 

1939- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BATMAN Detective Comics # 27, Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, first appeared in a comic. It was called the May issue but it actually came out this day.

 

1968- In New York City’s Bowery district two children find the dead body of a homeless drug addict. It took weeks to identify the remains as Bobby Driscoll, 31, Walt Disney child star, and the voice of Peter Pan. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in Potter’s field.

 

1980- Easter Fever by Nelvana premiered.

 

1988- Beetlejuice, directed by Tim Burton. Starring Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton.

 

2000- Dreamworks animated feature The Road to El Dorado premiered.

 

2007- Disney’s Meet the Robinsons.

 

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for march 29, 2025

Birthdays: President John Tyler, Sir William Walton, Pearl Bailey, former English P.M. John Major, Bud Cort is 77, LaToya Jackson, Eugene McCarthy, Jennifer Capriati, M.C. Hammer, Walt "Clyde" Frazier, Cy Young, Christopher Lambert is 70, Jimmy Dodd, Disney animator Jack Kinney, Brendan Gleeson is 70, Lucy Lawless, Elle MacPherson, Eric Idle is 82

 

1859- In St. Louis, unemployed drunk Ulysses S. Grant voluntarily freed his one slave, given him by his slave-owning father-in-law. He could have gotten up to a thousand dollars to sell him. But he hated the concept of owning another human. He would go on to win the Civil War and become president.

 

1886- COCA-COLA invented. Atlanta Pharmacist and liver pill salesman John Pemberton developed the carbonated drink, originally with cocaine in it. His bookkeeper Francis Robinson penned the famous script logo, still in use today. Advertising for the drink claimed it cured everything from hysteria to cholic and the common cold.

The formula is still a secret. During World War II the Nazis openly worried how a break with the United States would affect their supply of Coca Cola, so Reichminister Goebbels arrested Coke execs in Germany and forced them to develop a substitute. This became Fanta Cola. 

 

1891- Impressionist painter George Seurat died at age 31. Before he died, he told his parents that he had fathered two children with his model Maureen Knobloch. Surprise!

 

1936- Republic Pictures formed.

 

1939- Moviestars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard married. They had a happy marriage until Lombard was killed in a plane crash in 1942. It’s been said the first California King Size mattress, slightly larger than normal king size, was ordered custom made for Gable and Lombard for their rather exuberant rendevous at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. 

 

1951- 'The King and I' debuted on Broadway with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, who shaved his head for the first time for the role.

 

1974- Mariner 10 was the first satellite to reach the planet Mercury.

 

1974- Chinese farmer Zhao Kangmin digging a well discovered the huge, lifesize terracotta army buried with Chinas’ first emperor at XIAN.

 

1979- The House Committee Investigation into Assassinations, published their conclusions. They concluded that "President John F. Kennedy was in all probability killed by a conspiracy " but just who and why and what to do about it, they didn’t know. 

 

1989- As part of one of the silliest Oscar telecasts in history, actor Rob Lowe had to dance and sing 'Proud Mary" with a Las Vegas showgirl named Eileen Bowman dressed as Disney’s Snow White.  Rob Lowe had just been embarrassed by the publication of a videotape shot in a hotel room of him having sex with two teenage girls. The Walt Disney Company immediately threatened a lawsuit. The Academy apologized and replaced producer Alan Carr with Gilbert Cates.

 

1992- Presidential candidate Bill Clinton uttered the legendary American phrase:" I smoked pot- but I didn’t inhale!" 

 

1993- At the 65^th Academy Awards, Disney’s Aladdin won two Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Soundtrack. Best Animated Short was Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase by Joan Gratz.

 

2019- Tim Burton’s remake of the Disney animated classic Dumbo opened in theaters.

 

2020- At President Trump’s insistence, the FDA approved emergency use of an anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine despite little evidence that it was effective in treating coronavirus. Even after the FDA declared hydroxychloroquine totally useless against the disease on Aug. 1 President Trump continued to tout its miraculous qualities. 

 

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for march 28, 2025

Birthdays: Paul Whiteman, Freddy Bartholomew, Dirk Bogarde, Gen. Wade Hampton, pianist Rudolph Serkin, Swifty Lazar, Sterling Haydn, Mouseketeer Jimmie Dodd, Marlin Perkins, Diane Weist, Reba McEntire, cartoonist Edward Sorel, Vince Vaughn is 55, Julia Stiles is 44, Lady Gaga (born Stefani Germanetta) is 39

 

1881- P.T. Barnum formed a partnership with his chief competitor James Bailey to create Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. He proclaimed it the Greatest Show on Earth!

 

1920- Silent film stars Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford married.

 

1928- Via radio broadcast, the public heard the voice of Charlie Chaplin for the first time.

 

1929- Disney short The Opry House was released. The first short where they changed Mickey Mouses’ design to give him white gloves. 

 

1930- The name of the City of Constantinople was officially changed to Istanbul, Turkish for “The City”. Angora was renamed Ankara.

 

1935- Leni Reifenstahl’s hypnotic movie paean to Nazism- Triumph of the Will, premiered at the Berlin Ufa Palace Theatre.

 

 

1941- English writer Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex. She was 59. Her body was never found. 

 

1942- Albert Hurter, Swiss designer for Walt Disney's "Snow White' and 'Pinocchio", and called the first inspirational artist in animation, died of rheumatic heart disease. He was 59.

  

 

1958- The Killer Slide- US 1, The Pacific Coast Highway has always been at the mercy of wind and weather erosion effecting the unstable cliffs it was carved from. This day while repairing a previous land slide, construction workers were caught in an even bigger hillside collapse- several people were killed.

 

1966- The hit British TV series The Avengers first appeared on American TV. With Diana Rigg and Patrick McNee. “ Mrs. Peel, we are needed.”

 

 

1987- The first Disney Store opened, this one in the Glendale Galleria not too far from the Burbank studio.

 

1999- Matt Groening’s cartoon series Futurama debuted.