Tom Sito's animation almanac for July 5, 2025

Birthdays: P.T. Barnum, Beatrix Potter, Mrs. Sarah Siddons, Jean Cocteau, Admiral David Farragut, Len Lye, George Pompidou, Shirley Knight, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Milburn Stone (Doc on Gunsmoke), Warren Oates, Bill Watterson, Henry Cabot Lodge IV, Animator Dave Hilberman, Eva Green is 46, Huey Lewis is 75, Edie Falco is 62

1910- Writer O. Henry died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis at 47. His last words were "Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark." He became a writer while serving a jail term for embezzlement.

1930- The Fox Midland Theater held the first meeting of a Mickey Mouse Club. 

1935- The Wagner Act passed congress, decreeing all American workers have the right to collective bargaining and to form unions.

1943- Betty Grable married bandleader Harry James.

1952- London Transport scrapped the last of their electric streetcars in favor of diesel polluting double-decker buses.

1954- Elvis Presley recorded "That’s All Right" at Sun Records in Memphis. Some call it the first true Rock & Roll song, but that is disputed by Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Ike Turners Delta 88 and many other R&B hits. “That’s All Right” was written by black bluesman Arthur Big-Boy Crudup, who never profited from the song’s success and died living in a shack.

1954- Tomoyuki Tanaka announced the beginning of production on the movie Godzilla.

1975- Tennis player Arthur Ashe became the first African-American to win Wimbledon.

1989- The first episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld.

1994- In Bellevue Washington, a man named Jeff Bezos started a company selling used books through the mail. Named Cadabra shortly after he changed it to Amazon. 

2002- International Professional Women’s Tennis had become dominated by two amazing American sisters, Venus and Serena Williams. This day Serena defeated Venus to win Wimbledon. Of 17 Wimbledon Women’s singles since, the Williams sisters won 14 of them. 

Tom Sito's animation almanac for July 4, 2025

Birthdays: Jean Pierre Blanchard the balloonist-1753, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Calvin Coolidge, Rube Goldberg, Louis Armstrong*, Edward Walker the inventor of the Lava Lamp, Mayer Lansky, Tokyo Rose, Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Bill Waterson, Neil Simon, Mitch Miller, Gina Lollobrigida, George Steinbrenner, Ann Landers, Ron Kovic, Geraldo Rivera, Victoria Abril is 66, Pam Shriver, Rene Laloux, Gloria Stuart, Malia Obama, Eva Marie Saint is 101

1855- Henry Davis Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. He was the first U.S. writer to describe nature as a thing of beauty instead of a mortal enemy to be conquered. This date is considered the birth of the American Conservation Movement.

1855- Walt Whitman published his quarto of poems The Leaves of Grass. Many people were shocked at its frank description of sexual desire. Whitman’s mother said:” Walt is a good boy, but strange.”

1862- Oxford mathematics professor Charles Dodgson rowed ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sister up the Thames in a small punt. The little girls called him Dodo. They begged him for a story, so Dodgson made up fantastic tales of March Hares, Mad Hatters and the Queen of Hearts.

Dodgson later wrote them down and published them in 1865 as Alice in Wonderland. He used the pen name Lewis Carroll, which was a joke on the fact that Renaissance scholars adopted big stuffy Latin names like Ludovicus Carolus Magnus.

1883- Buffalo Bill staged his first Wild West Show in North Platte Nebraska. Bill and his partners took the show all over the US and played for the crowned heads of Europe until 1916.

1905- Los Angeles developer Abbott Kinney had broken with his partners over the Santa Monica Pleasure Pier. He moved down the coast to some marshy wetlands and built a new community with canals, lagoons and gondolas. The town of Venice California was dedicated this day. In 1925, the City of LA got rid of most of the canals and gondolas. Venice went on to be a seaside mecca for Beatniks, Hippies and weightlifters like young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

1911- The first rollercoaster on the Pacific Coast opened on Santa Monica Pier.

1914- First day of filming on D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”

1915- Heavyweight Champion Jess Willard who had taken the championship from Jack Johnson was himself beaten by a new kid named Jack Dempsey, the Manassas Mauler. Dempsey chewed pine tar to make his jaw hard and washed his face in ocean brine to toughen his skin against cuts. Dempsey hit Willard so hard, he broke his jaw and knocked out six teeth by the fourth round. Jack Dempsey defended his title several more times and became a popular media figure by appearing with many Hollywood Movie stars.  After he retired, he opened a bar-restaurant in NY Times Square called Dempseys, the first sports-bar.

1917- The US First Division paraded through Paris in advance of the main American armies still to come. General Blackjack Pershing laid a wreath on the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette and proclaimed:” Lafayette- nous voisci! Lafayette, we are here!” Jake Strauss the owner of Macy’s Department Store changed it to “Gallerie Lafayette, we are here!”

1917- The July Coup. Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to overthrow the Russian Government early but were put down. They fled into exile, Lenin lived in London, Trotsky lived in the Bronx. They tried again in October.

1926- Hungarian film director Mano Mikhali Kertesz arrived in Hollywood. He changed his name to the more manageable Michael Curtiz and directed classic films like Captain Blood, Robin Hood and Casablanca.

1927-Walt Disney’s Trolley Troubles with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit premiered.

1933- In San Francisco Bay, the work began on the Oakland Bay Bridge..

1956- MIT’s TX-1 Whirlwind computer added an adapted typewriter keyboard to enter data.

1966- President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act.

1968- “The Green Berets” premiered. John Wayne financed and produced this attempt to counter the antiwar sentiment sweeping America by creating a pro-war WWII style movie about the Vietnam conflict.

1969-“Give Peace a Chance.” released by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.

1976- What’s Love Got to Do With It?  Singer Tina Turner left Ike Turner.

1976- The Ramones first arrived in England for a tour. They greatly inspired future bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols. When playing at the Palladium the Sex Pistols said they couldn’t get tickets to get in, so the Ramones pulled them in through the men’s room window. Hey, Ho, Lets Go!

1981- UPA producer Steve Bosustow passed away.

1982- Jimmy Connors defeated John McEnroe for his final Wimbledon Championship.

1982- Ozzie Ozbourne married Sharon Ozbourne.

1984- First Lady Nancy Reagan began the campaign to combat drugs among kids by saying “Just Say No”. Two of her Secret Service bodyguards were later caught doing cocaine.

1990- 2 Live Crew released the song Banned in the USA.

1997-NASA landed Pathfinder on Mars and deployed Sojourner, the first ever autonomous robotic rover.  Expected to function for only two months, the rover collected data on the Red Planet for the next ten years.

2012- The Higgs-Boson is a subatomic particle. It existed only in theory until in  this day, the CERN Large Hadron Collider announced they had observed one.

2022- Kazuki Takahashi, the millionaire creator of the manga craze Yu-Gi-Oh, drowned off the coast of Okinawa while trying to rescue a young American girl swimmer caught in a rip current. He heroically saved the girl, when a freak wave took him. He was 60.

tom sito's animation almanac for july 3, 2025

Birthdays: King Louis XI of France "the Spider King"1423, Franz Kafka, Mr. Preserved Fish -New York Congressman 1819, Joel Chandler Harris “Uncle Remus”, Dave Barry, Leos Janacek, John Singleton Copley, Ken Russell, Tom Stoppard, George Sanders, Peter Fountain, Yeardley Smith, Tom Cruise is 63, Kevin Hart is 45

1931- The Cab Calloway Orchestra recorded 'The St. James Infirmary Blues."

1937- In California the Del Mar Racetrack opened.  Owner Bing Crosby personally welcomed the first customers to his track. Called “Where the Surf Meets the Turf.”

1943- Chuck Jones short Wackiki Rabbit debuted. Background design by Bernice Prolyfka were based on Hawaiian shirt patterns. The two castaways were caricatures of story people Ted Pierce and Mike Maltese, who provided their voices.

1969- Brian Jones, having been kicked out of the Rolling Stones just days before -- drowned in his swimming pool.  His home was once the estate of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne. 

1969- On the same day, John and Yoko Lennon were almost killed in a car crash, along with John's son Julian and Yoko's daughter Kyoko.

1971- The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison, was found dead of a heart attack in his bathtub in Paris. He was 28. 

1971- In Sweden, the first laser eye surgery was performed.

1985- Robert Zemeckis’ film Back to the Future opened. 

1991- James Cameron’s Terminator 2 Judgement Day, premiered.

1996- Independence Day, by Roland Emmerich opened.

2002- Powerpuff Girls the Movie, premiered.

tom sito's animation almanac for july 2, 2025

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Valentinian III (419AD), Bishop Thomas Cranmer (1429) , Christoph Witobald Gluck, Herman Hesse, Medgar Evers, Patrice Lamumba, Thurgood Marshall, Andrez Kertesz, Richard Petty, Abe Levitow, Ken Curtis, Ahmad Jamal, Cheryl Ladd, Jose Canseco, Jerry Hall, Imelda Marcos, Ron Silver, Lindsay Lohan, Brock Peters, Margot Robbie is 35, Larry David is 78

1650- The first daily newspaper is published in the city of Leipzig. 

1723- Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale Magnificat first performed in Leipzig.

1921- To prove what a neat new invention radio was, RCA chief David Sarnoff broadcast for free a live feed of the Jack Dempsey vs. George Carpentier championship prizefight. He had loud speakers set up in Times Square that attracted ten thousand listeners. As it happened, the live reports were a sham. An eyewitness to the fight relayed details via tickertape to a Manhattan studio. Then an announcer read them aloud over the radio as though he were there. No matter, the effect was electric. Suddenly everyone wanted a radio in their home. 

1927- The film Flesh and the Devil established a new star named Greta Garbo.

1934- Twentieth Century Fox signed a movie contract with child star Shirley Temple.


1945- In the July issue of The Atlantic Magazine, MIT Scientist Vanaevar Bush predicted some day in the future we would all be writing to each other on little electronic boxes on our desks. He didn’t have the name computer yet. He called it a “memex”. We would read stories, watch movies, have access to all the libraries of the world. We would send each other letters and pictures on it. In a Manila hospital, a young serviceman named Douglas Engelbart was recovering from war wounds. He read this article there and was inspired to study this new field. He eventually invented the computer mouse, hot keys, and coined the term "on-line."

1951- New Yorker cartoonist Sam Cobean was killed in a car accident. He was 38.The following year a collection of his work “The Cartoons of Cobean” was published by Saul Steinberg, with a forward by Charles Addams.

1955- The Lawrence Welk T.V. Show debuts. Wannaful, wannaful! 

1973-Art Babbitt began his animation lectures to Richard Williams London Studio. Dick took copious notes, and they became one of the most copied, underground how-to books in film history.

1980- the Abrahams-Zucker Bros comedy Airplane! Premiered. 

1982- Don Bluth’s The Secret of Nimh premiered.

1986- Walt Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective released in theaters. 

1986- John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China debuted.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for July 1, 2025

Birthdays: Louis Bleriot, Tommy Dorsey, George Sand, Charles Laughton, James Cagney, Princess Diana of Wales, Twyla Tharp, Carl Lewis, Jamie Farr, Sidney Pollack, Wally "Famous"Amos, Estee Lauder, Debbie Harry (Blondie), Olivia De Haviland, Toshiyuki Sakata (Oddjob), Genevieve Bujold, Karen Black, David Prowse, Dan Ackroyd is 73. Andre Crouch, Pamela Anderson is 57, Liv Tyler is 48 

Welcome to July, named for Julius Caesar. Originally the Romans called it month number five- "Quintilicus Mensis". They had a ten month calendar that began with Mars (March) and ran out of names after Juno (June). After Caesar’s assassination, the Senate voted to change the name of Month Five to the month of the Divine Julius. So, thank Caesar that you don't have to celebrate The Fourth of Quintilicus.

1926- THE FIRST ANIMATED FEATURE. Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed premiered in Paris.  Ten years before Walt Disney’s Snow White.

1933- Mickey’s Gala Premiere, Mickey short with Joe Grant’s caricatures of famous Hollywood celebrities.

1940- Chuck Jones short Old Glory. Porky gets an American history lesson from no less than Uncle Sam himself.

1941- Animation director Tex Avery stormed out of the Looney Tunes Studio when Jack Warner ordered cuts in his Bugs Bunny cartoon, THE HECKLING HARE. 40 feet was trimmed from the end of the cartoon by Leon Schlesinger who agreed with Mr. Warner it had one too many endings, involving Bugs and the Dog falling through space endlessly. Tex felt the run-on gag was the whole point of the joke. Leon put him on a four-week suspension without pay, but Avery had already lined up a new directing gig at MGM.

1941- THE FIRST TV COMMERCIAL -During the live coverage of a Brooklyn Dodgers-Philadelphia Phillies baseball game the first FCC sanctioned television commercial aired. It was for the Bulova Watch Company.

1944- Leon Schlesinger sold his animation and shorts company outright to Warner Bros Studio and took a less taxing post in merchandising until his death in 1949.

1945- With WWII in Europe over, Bill Mauldin's wartime comic strip "Willie and Joe' ended it's run along with the European front-line edition of Stars and Stripes magazine. Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame said no one could draw mud like Bill Maudlin. Mauldin was once chewed out by General Patton for making his GIs so slovenly and cynical. He felt it was a negative image of the American Fighting Man. Seesh...everybody’s a critic!

1945- NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia read the Sunday comics section aloud over the radio because of a newspaper strike.

1956- The film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers premiered. Effects by Ray Harryhausen.

1958- Does She or Doesn’t She? Clairol hair dye introduced.

1963- U.S. post office introduced zip codes.

1966- The US Medicare Program began. The first Medicare card was given by LBJ to elderly former President Harry Truman. At the time it was felt there was no need to include prescription drugs in the program since their cost was so low. 

1970- Hanna & Barbera’s attempt at a primetime animated series "Where’s Huddles?"

1970- The Xerox Company of Connecticut were convinced to open a new computer science lab on the west coast near Stanford University. It was called Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC. In 9 years, PARC would develop laser-printing, color graphics, GUI’s- Graphics User Interface, windows, cursor point and click, and Ethernet. 

1972- Ms. Magazine started publication.

1979- Sony introduced the Walkman portable cassette player in the U.S.

1981- The Wonderland Murders. Overly endowed porn star Johnny Holmes (aka Johnny Wadd) was implicated in a gang murder. This day four drug dealers called The Wonderland Gang were found beaten to death in his home. Holmes was tried as an accomplice but acquitted. Johnny Holmes died in 1988, and his story became the basis for Mark Walhberg’s character in the film Boogie Nights. 

1996- The movie Dinosaur Valley Girls premiered.

1998- Barbara Streisand married James Brolin.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 30, 2025

Birthdays: Buddy Rich, Lena Horne, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Hayward, Deanna Durbin, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, William Goldman, Martin Landau, Essa-Pekka Salonen, David Alan Grier, Vincent D’Onofrio, Monica Potter, Mike Tyson is 59, Michael Phelps, Rupert Graves is 62 

1643- In Paris, the son of an upholsterer named Jean Coquelin signed a contract to establish The Ilustre Theatre. Jean also took on a stage name- Moliere.

1841- The never-explained Day It Rained Fish Over Boston.

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

1859- Daredevil Emile Blondin crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope. The stunt was duplicated by Nick Wallenda in Spring 2014.

1864- Abraham Lincoln signed a bill protecting the Yosemite Valley in California as a natural preserve or “park” from developers and mining companies.

1894 - London Tower Bridge opened.

1908-A mysterious explosion occurred in remote Tunguska Siberia, with the estimated strength of several atom bombs. No meteorite remains were ever discovered. Soil at the epicenter had been turned to glass.  It was speculated as an ice comet impact or a UFO crash. But it has never been completely explained. 

1933- A group of actors met in secret at Frank (the Wizard of Oz) Morgan’s house and form the Screen Actors Guild. The secrecy was because studios threatened to blacklist anyone who so much as breathed the word union. Among the founding members that night is James Cagney, Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, Frederic March, Robert Montgomery and Boris Karloff. Karloff said every member carried pockets full of nickels so they could use the nearest payphone to talk. They feared the studios had gotten the police to tap their home and office phones. 

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

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

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

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

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

1950- The Goofy short Motor Mania released.

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 28, 2025

Birthdays: King Henry VIII, Peter Paul Rubens, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dillinger, Richard Rogers, Herb Ryman, Gilda Radner, Cartoonist George Booth, Leon Panetta, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kathy Bates is 77, John Cusack is 59, Mel Brooks is 99

1868- Twenty-something artist Claude Monet was so broke and depressed he jumped in the Seine River. After splashing around for a while, he decided it’s silly to drown himself, so he swam to the riverbank and went for a drink. He outlived all the Impressionist painters of his generation, dying famous in 1926 at age 86.

1922- Twenty one year old Walt Disney started Newman's Laugh-O-Grams in Kansas City.

1928- Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines recorded West End Blues.

1955- Walt Disney sent a memo to his studio employees to please come to the grand opening day of Disneyland Park on July 17. He was concerned not enough people would show up the first day, and it would look bad on live TV.  He shouldn’t have worried. 100,000 people came that first day.

1969- THE STONEWALL UPRISING- New York City Police got a false tip about a stabbing at the mob-owned Stonewall gay bar in Greenwich Village. Others claim the cops were there to get their money kickbacks, and when it wasn’t paid, they started arresting patrons. But for once the patrons didn’t go quietly but began to fight back. 

As she was being loaded into a paddy wagon, A drag queen began by kicking a policeman, then the others rushed out. People on the street began pelting the policemen with pennies and nickels, symbolizing there being there for graft. When the cops formed a blue wall to advance, gays formed a wall and fought them, shouting:” WE ARE THE VILLAGE GIRLS! WE WEAR OUR HAIR IN CURLS!” In the 60’s era of social revolution, the incident caused three days of urban rioting, and The Gay Pride Movement was born.

1971- The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of prizefighter Mohammed Ali for draft evasion.

1975- Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling died during open heart surgery. He was 50. His last movie script was called The Man, about resistance of the Washington elite to the first black president of the United States. Twenty years later a black man was indeed president.

1997- Heavyweight prizefighter Mike Tyson was banned from boxing and fined $3 million for biting off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a match. 

tom sito's animation almanac for june 27, 2025

Birthdays: Swedish King Charles XII "the Madman of the North", Helen Keller, Norma Kamali, Charles Stuart Parnell," Captain Kangaroo" Bob Keeshan, Emma Goldman, Marine General Chesty Puller, Walter Johnson, Ross Perot, Isabella Adjani is 70, Lauren Hill, Alice McDermott, J.J. Abrams is 59, Tony Leung Chu Wai is 63, Toby McGuire is 50. Katherine Beaumont- the voice of Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Wendy in Peter Pan 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1986 -Labyrinth as released, fantasy directed by Jim Henson, written by Terry Jones, with concepts by Brian Froud. With David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly. The animated owl in the opening is the first ever digitally created rendering of an organic animal. Done by Bill Kroyer.

1995- Boyishly proper British actor Hugh Grant is busted for soliciting sex from a Sunset Blvd. street hooker named Divine Brown. Grant had just released a film called “The Englishman Who went up a Hill and Came down a Mountain". Pundits had fun changing the title to "The Englishman who went to L.A. a Hugh and Came Back a John."

2007- British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped down after ten years. While in office his security codename was Bambi.

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

2011- The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team filed for bankruptcy. The team owners, Mr. & Mrs. Frank McCourt wrecked the team’s finances and almost destroyed the team fighting over their own personal divorce. The Dodgers have been doing quite well without them. In 2017, Pres Trump appointed Mrs. Jaimie McCourt as U.S. ambassador to Belgium. In 2025 The Dodgers were sold for a record $10 Billion.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for June 26, 2025

Birthdays: Peter Lorre- born Laszlo Lowenstein, Pearl Buck, Abner Doubleday, Babe Deidrickson-Zacharias, Willy Messerschmidt, Claudio Abbado, Woolie Reitherman, Gregg LeMond, Vittorio Storaro, Colonel Tom Parker, Pat Morita, Chris Isaak, Derek Jeter, Paul Julian, Chris O’Donnell, Wallace Tripp, Makeup man Dick Smith (the Exorcist), Sean Hayes is 54

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

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

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

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

1924 - The Ziegfeld Follies opened on Broadway.

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

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

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

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

1945- The United Nations is born when 50 nations sign the U.N. Charter in War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Young veteran John F. Kennedy was there, trying his hand as a journalist.

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

1959- Queen Elizabeth and President Dwight Eisenhower dedicated the Saint Lawrence Seaway- a system of locks and canals connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes in the interior of the North American Continent.

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

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

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

1964- Hollywood stars Ethel Merman and Ernest Borgnine got married. It was her fourth marriage and his third. They had a large reception at Chasen’s restaurant packed with celebrities like Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke, Bob Hope, Angie Dickinson, Jack Benny and the cast of McHales’s Navy. After their honeymoon they drove each other completely nuts and divorced one month later. Ethel Merman’s autobiography had a chapter titled, “ My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine.” It consisted of one blank page.

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

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

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

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

 25th Anniv 2000- THE GENOME- Scientists announce they had cracked the human gene code and now had a rough sketch of how our DNA is assembled. Custom drugs could now be developed matching the DNA of an individual patient. It is called the biological equivalent of the landing on the moon.

tom sito's animation almanac for June 25, 2025

Birthday: George Orwell, Marc Charpentier, Lord Louis Mountbatten, General Hap Arnold, Cajun musician Clifton Chenier, Sidney Lumet, Walter Brennan, Willis Reed, George Abbott, Carly Simon, Alex Toth, Pierre Culliford aka Peyo (the creator of the Smurfs), Patrick Macnee, Jimmy Dyne-no-Mite Walker, George Michaels, Anthony Bourdain, Justice Sonya Sotomayor, Mike Myers is 62, Ricky Gervais is 64, June Lockhart is 100!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1956- The last Packard automobile was produced.

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

1968- Pierre Elliot Trudeau elected Prime Minister of Canada. For the next twenty-five years he and his flower-child wife Margaret will be one of Canada’s most colorful leaders.

1978- The Rainbow Flag, symbolizing LGBTQ rights first flown.

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's animation almanac for June 24, 2025

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

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

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

1930- The first test of radar to detect an airplane, this test over Anacostia flats near Washington DC.

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

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

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

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

1956- GIDGET- Kathy Kohner was the daughter of a Czech-Jewish writer who fled Hitler, settling in LA to write for the movies. Kathy liked to hang out on Malibu Beach and watch the surfers. This day she tried surfing herself and at age 15 rode her first wave. It became her lifelong passion and she became a regular in the surfing community. Small slight girl, top surfer Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy called her Gidget, combining girl and midget. She would go home and tell her dad about her experiences in the surfing subculture. This inspired him to write a novel based on her stories entitled Gidget. It became a best seller, spawned a series of books, and Columbia Pictures made a series of hit movies and TV series. Kohner once said, “ Some people have Alcoholics Anonymous, some church, I have Malibu.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

2022- Marcel the Shell with Shoes On released in the U.S. written and directed by Dean Fleischer Camp. Animation by the Chiodo Bros. It was a sleeper hit and earned an Academy award nomination.

Tom Sito's animation almanac for June 22, 2025

Birthdays: Captain George Vancouver, Eric Maria Remarque, John Dillinger, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mike Todd, Billy Wilder, Joe Papp, Bill Blass, Oskar Fischinger, Pistol Pete Maravich, Klaus Maria Brandauer is 82, Graham Greene is 73, Ed Bradley, Emmanuelle Seigner, Prunella Scales, Meryl Streep is 76, Konrad Zuse, Kris Kristofferson, Paul Frees, Matt Doherty, Elizabeth Warren, 

Disney animator is Floyd Norman is 90.

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

 

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

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

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

1969- Singer actress Judy Garland OD’s on sleeping pills. She was 47. Whether it was an accident or a suicide we will never know. A pillhead from early age, she had gotten hooked when MGM chief Louis B. Mayer ordered studio nurses to put her on amphetamines so she would have the energy to finish the Wizard of Oz.  Fellow contract actress June Allyson explained- “You didn’t argue when the nurses brought them to you. They told us they were vitamins!” 

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

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

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

1979- Jim Henson’s The Muppet Movie opened in theaters.

1988-Who Framed Roger Rabbit opened in theaters.

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

2012- Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter opened. 

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for June 21, 2025

Birthdays: Martha Washington, Alexander Pope, Berkeley Breathed, Al Hirschfeld, Al Martinez, Jean-Paul Sartre, Judy Holliday, Benazir Bhutto, Jane Russell, Mariette Hartley, Bernie Koppel, Rick Sutcliffe, Maureen Stapleton, Joe Flagherty, Juliet Lewis, Tony Scott, Chris Pratt is 44, Prince William the Prince of Wales is 43. 

1879 - F W Woolworth opens his 1st five and ten cent store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanas for June 20, 2025

Birthdays: Wolf Tone, Jacques Offenbach, Lillian Hellman, Errol Flynn, Audie Murphy, Andre Watts, Cyndee Lauper, Bob Vila, Chet Atkins, Stephen Frears, Brian Wilson, Robert Rodriquez, John Goodman, Martin Landau, John Mahoney, Nicole Kidman is 58

1936- Mickey short Moving Day premiered.

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

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

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

1974- Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown opened.

50th Anniv. 1975- Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws opened, bringing back the monster-hit summer event movie. Universal called that summer, “The Summer of the Shark.” 

tom sito's animation almanac for June 18, 2025

Birthdays: M C Escher, Charles Gounod, James Montgomery Flagg, Kay Kayser, William Lassell 1799- English astronomer who discovered Neptune's moon Triton, Richard Boone,  Jeanette MacDonald, Key Luke, Isabella Rosselini, E.G. Marshall, Roger Ebert, Eduard Daladier, Carol Kane, Sammy Kahn, The Quay Brothers, Paul McCartney is 83

 

 

1682 – Quaker leader William Penn founded Philadelphia.

 

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

 

1892 - Macadamia nuts first planted in Hawaii.

 

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

 

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

 

1913- composer Cole Porter graduated from Yale.

 

1922- The Atlantic City Séance- In his later years Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was constantly trying to convince his good friend Harry Houdini in his belief in spiritualism. He set up a séance with a leading psychic-medium to try and communicate with Houdini’s dead mother. During the séance Houdini recognized the same tricks he used to fool people on stage and reacted angrily. The spectre of his mother spoke to him in English and Houdini’s mother only spoke Hungarian and Yiddish.

 

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

 

1927- The last radio transmission of the flying boat carrying famous arctic explorer Roald Amundsen to the arctic circle. Norwegian Amundsen had conquered the South Pole and flew over the North Pole. He was now called out of retirement to lead an international effort to save Italian Polar explorer General Nobile, who’s zeppelin had crashed on the arctic ice. Ironically Amundsen disliked Nobile personally. Nobile and his men were rescued, but Amundsen and his plane were never found.

 

 

1953- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. married Coretta Scott.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

1993- Hanna Barbera’s feature Once Upon a Forest opened. Directed by Charlie Grovernor.

 

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

 

 

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

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tom sito's animation almanac for June 17, 2025

Birthdays: King Edward I "Longshanks", John Wesley the founder of the Methodists, Igor Stravinsky, Don Graham, Wally Wood, Ralph Bellamy, Dean Martin, Barry Manilow, Joe Piscopo, Newt Gingrich, Martin Bormann, Jason Patric, Ken Loach, Greg Kinnear is 61, Venus Williams, Thomas Haden Church is 65, Will Forte is 55

  

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

1933-Disney short Mickey’s Mechanical Man.

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

  

 

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

 

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

tom sito's animation almanac for June 15, 2025

Question: What is the difference between a spark and an ember?

 

Yesterday’s Question answered below: : What famous singer had a guitar inscribed "This Machine Kills Fascists."?

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History for 6/16/2025

Birthdays: Stan Laurel, Willy Boskovsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Nelson Doubleday, Brian Eno, animator Pete Burness, Martha Graham, Erich Segal, Jack Albertson, Helen Traubel, Ron LeFlore, Tupac Shakur, Laurie Metcalf, Sonia Braga is 76, John Cho is 53.

 

 

1858- Abe Lincoln said in a speech “ A house divided against itself cannot stand.” 

 

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

 

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

 

1903 –Caleb Bradham, a pharmacist in New Bern North Carolina, created a new drink at his soda fountain. A cola drink with additional sugar and vanilla. Called at first “Brad’s Drink”, he later changed to Pepsi-Cola, because he claimed it cured stomach aches, or dyspepsia, and had cola flavor. After big sales, he bought a factory. This day The Pepsi Cola Company was formed.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

70th Anniv 1955- Disney’s Lady and the Tramp premiered.

 

 

1959- Actor George Reeves, who played the 1950s television Superman, went upstairs after a dinner party and shot himself with a Luger pistol.  Actor Gig Young, who was a friend of Reeves, said the actor 's career was going well, he was getting his first directing jobs, and his love life was fine. He never believed the actor would shoot himself. Gig Young shot himself in 1981. 

Many of Reeves friends also wonder if it was a suicide because Reeves had been dating a socialite named Toni Mannix whose husband Eddie Mannix, VP of MGM had mob connections. Another story has Toni Mannix counting among her boyfriend’s Lucky Lucciano, the head of the NY Mafia. The bullet entrance in George Reeves body didn’t have the customary powder burns of a suicide and there were other bullet holes in the floor and ceiling. The gun in Reeves hand had been wiped clean of fingerprints. 

 

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

 

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

 

 

1967- The film “The Dirty Dozen” debuted. 

 

1987- Italian porn star Ciccolina announced that since all politicians were whores and she was a whore, she would run for office. This made sense to Italians, who this day elected her overwhelmingly to a seat in Parliament.

 

 

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

tom sito's animation almanac for June 15, 2025


Birthdays: Edward the Black Prince of England, Rachael Donelson Jackson- Andy Jackson’s First Lady, Edvard Grieg, Saul Steinburg, Mario Cuomo, Jim Varney, Wade Boggs, Waylon Jennings, Xaviera Hollander the Happy Hooker, Jim Belushi, Neil Adams, Roger Chiasson, Michael Barrier, Dale Baer, Ice Cube is 56, Neil Patrick Harris is 52, Courtenay Cox is 61, Helen Hunt is 62, Lang Lang is 43

 

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

 

1300- Poet Dante Alighieri got a job as one of the governing priors of Florence, sort of a city council. We don’t know if it says something about his abilities at municipal governing, but he was run out of town in 1302.

 

 

1916- The Boy Scouts of America founded.

 

1938- The Fair Labor Standards Act passed. 

 

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

 

1948- Abbott & Costello meet Frankenstein premiered.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

40th anniv 1985 Studio Ghibli was founded, headed by the directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki. The studio was founded after the success of the 1984 film NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND written and directed by Miyazaki for Topcraft and distributed by Toei Company. The name Ghibli was coined by Hayao Miyazaki in reference to the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli airplane. The Italian noun "ghibli" is based on the Arabic name for the sirocco, or Mediterranean wind, the idea being the studio would "blow a new wind through the anime industry".

 

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

 

 

1994- Walt Disney’s The Lion King premiered. 

 

 

2002- Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was knighted.

tom sito's animation almanac for June 14, 2025

Birthdays: Tomaso Albinioni, Fighting Bob LaFollette, Margaret Bourke-White, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sam Wanamaker, Cliff Edwards the voice of Jiminy Cricket, Dorothy McGuire, Burl Ives, Gene Barry, Jerzy Kosinski, Diablo Cody is 46, Donald Trump is 79.

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

1966- The Vatican abolished the Index of Forbidden Books. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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tom sito's animation almanac for June 13, 2025

Birthdays: Gnaeus Agricola- 40AD, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W.B. Yeats, Red Grange, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Sayers, Ralph Edwards, Paul Lynde, Tim Allen is 72, Darla Hood, Ally Sheedy, Simon Callow is 73, Christo, Ralph McQuarrie, Malcolm McDowell is 82, Stellan Skarsgard is 74, the Olsen Twins are 39, Chris Evans is 44.

 

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

 

 

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

 

1941-The American Federation of Labor declared a nationwide boycott of all Disney products and films. This was to support the Disney Cartoonists strike.

 

1953 “ The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms “ hit theaters. Great monster effects by Ray Harryhausen.

 

1958- Frank Zappa graduated Antelope Valley High School.

 

 

1978- Ford fired Lee Iacocca from the Ford Corporation. The creator of the Ford Mustang would later move on to run Chrysler. When asked why, Henry Ford II said: “Sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”

 

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

 

1991- Boris Yeltsin became the first and so far only popularly elected leader of Russia.

 

1997- Disney's animated film Hercules opened in theaters.

 

2010- Pixar’s Toy Story 3 premiered.