Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for Aug. 17, 2025

Birthdays: Davy Crocket, Mae West, Marcus Garvey, Sam Goldwyn- born Schmuel Gelbfisz, Harry Hopkins, Monte Wooley, Boog Powell, Belinda Carlisle, Guillermo Vilas, V.S. Naipul, Jim Courier, Donnie Wahlberg, Belinda Carlisle, Maureen O’Hara, Sean Penn is 65, Martha Coolidge is 80, Robert DeNiro is 82

 

 

1838- Lorenzo da Ponte died in New York City at age 89. In Vienna he was a librettist for Salieri and Mozart. He wrote La Nozzi de Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutti and Don Giovanni. Failed business ventures and bankruptcy made him move to America in 1805. He once said, "He who believes in his dreams is mad; and he who does not believe in them--what is he?"

 

 

1876- Richard Wagner’s 4 hour opera Gotterdammerung- the Twilight of the Gods, premiered.

 

1908- D.W. Griffith signed a contract to begin directing movies for Biograph Pictures. He was paid $50 dollars a week plus royalties. 

 

1908- The premiere of the first fully animated film, Emile Cohl's "Fantasmagorie".

 

 

1941- EL GRUPO- Walt Disney and his artists arrive in Rio on a ten-week goodwill tour of South America, underwritten by a $70,000 U.S. government grant.  President Franklin Roosevelt was worried that some South American countries might be sympathetic to the Nazis, forcing the U.S. to worry about her backdoor. So FDR sent Nelson Rockefeller to give the Latin American countries whatever they wanted to keep them out of the world war. One of the things they wanted was Donald Duck. Back in LA the federal mediator Stanley White had worked out with Roy Disney that if they got Walt out of town, they could finally settle the Disney animator's strike. The name comes from hotel footmen in Buenos Aires paging the artists as “ El Grupo Disney! Your bus is here.”  The films Three Caballeros and Saludos Amigos result.

 

1954- Walt Disney’s True Life Adventure, “The Vanishing Prairie”, directed by James Algar, opened in theaters.

 

1960- Georg Pal’s The Time Machine opened in NY.

 

1962- The Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. One of the reasons they decided on Ringo was that he came with his own car.

 

1979- Monty Python’s The Life of Brian premiered. Directed by Terry Jones. Just before principal photography was due to begin, a key sponsor got cold feet about the dodgy religious connotations and withdrew their funding. At the last-minute Beatle George Harrison stepped in and donated $3 million of the $4 million dollar budget. He said he just wanted to see it. “ It is the world’s most expensive theatre ticket.”

 

1984- The Walt Disney Company executive board informed its chairman Ron Miller that they wanted his resignation. Disney had fallen to 14th in film box office by then. Miller had been Walt’s son-in-law and he was he was once a tight end for the LA Rams. Within two years of Roy Disney Jr. and Michael Eisner taking power Disney was number one. 

 

1985- The Hormel Meat Packing Strike, severely threatening the world’s supply of SPAM.

 

1986- Pixar short Luxo Jr, premiered at Siggraph ’86 Dallas. 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 16, 2025

Birthdays: Fess Parker, Karl Stockhausen, George Meany, Charles Bukowski, Menachem Begin, Otto Mesmer the creator of Felix the Cat, Myron Grim Natwick the creator of Betty Boop, Hal Foster the creator of Prince Valiant, Kathie Lee Gifford, Edie Gorme, Bill Evans, Leslie Ann Warren, Angela Bassett is 67, Julie Numar is 92, Robert Culp, James Cameron is 70, Bruce Beresford, Steve Carrell is 64, Madonna, aka Louise Ciccone of Bay City Michigan, is 67

 

1858- Queen Victoria sent the first transcontinental wire message to President James Buchanan via Cyrus Field's incredible UNDERWATER TRANSCONTINENTAL CABLE, stretching from London to New York.  After great fanfare about progress and a new era in communications it broke down, as well as the next several tries to fix it. Just hours after the first message a fisherman pulled it up in his net, thought it was the tail of a sea serpent and cut off a chunk to take home and brag to his friends. Other attempts were ruined when technicians tried to correct the faintness of the signal by boosting the voltage beyond the safety range of the insulation-Zapp! The final, working version of the cable was laid down by Cyrus Field in 1866. 

  Transcontinental communications didn't really become commonplace until wireless broadcasting. But the who-ha over this scientific marvel did inspire author Jules Verne to write "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”

 

1877- BIRTHDAY OF THE WORD-"HELLO". In a letter dated today Thomas Edison wrote to the first president of AT&T about how people should initiate conversation on the new telephone machine. A genteel Victorian would think it impolite to speak until spoken to. Alexander Graham Bell, an old navy man, always thought the right way to start a phone conversation was to say "AHOY!"  Edison explained that the results of sonic tests proved the old English fox hunting call "Halloo!" was most audible over great distances. In most languages around the world the word hello is the same.  

 

1896- THE YUKON GOLD RUSH. Four miners find gold in Bonanza Creek in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory. When a boatload of gold was brought down to Seattle and San Francisco, it caused a stampede of prospectors north. Prospectors included poet Robert Service, Wyatt Earp, and Donald Trump’s immigrant grandfather, Friedrich Trump.

 

1930- Ub Iwerk's "Fiddlesticks" the first Flip the Frog cartoon, done in a simple two-color process called Harriscolor. Iwerks was the first designer and animator of Mickey Mouse, who had left Walt Disney to open his own studio.

 

1938- In Three Forks Mississippi, Blues legend Robert Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband.

 

1942- Happy Birthday Mighty Mouse. Terrytoon's short: "The Mouse of Tomorrow".

 

1954- First issue of Sports Illustrated.

 

1965- The AFL, American Football League offered it’s first expansion franchise to a new team called the Miami Dolphins. The AFL merged with the NFL in the 80s.

 

1969- “ Hey Man, we’re gonna serve breakfast in bed for 500,000” So was hippy Wavy Gravy’s announcement at dawn on the second day of the Woodstock Rock Concert. Toasted oats in hot water was ladled out en-masse in paper cups. Wavy declared this was the day Americans first learned about Granola. 

 

1974- The Ramones play their first gig at the NY club CBGBs. Hey-Ho, Lets Go!

 

1977- E-DAY in Memphis. Elvis Presley, donuts and Pizza Hut box in hand, died of a heart attack while sitting on the toilet. He was reading a book-the Historic Search for the Face of Jesus. He was 42.

 

1985- On her birthday, Madonna married Sean Penn. They divorced shortly after.

 

1987- The Harmonic Convergence- Another one of these celestial events that the mainstream media trumpeted as the end of everything. All nine planets of our solar system were in perfect alignment and the subsequent gravitational forces were supposed to knock the Earth into the Sun or something or other that would send us to Hell in a Handbasket. Lots of New Age types flocked to occult sites like Mt. Shasta and Stonehenge to meditate on the End of All Things. So, what happened? Nothing. 

 

1991- The original Shamu the Whale died of respiratory failure at age 16.

 

2005- Top Pixar story-artist Joe Ranft was killed in an auto accident. He was 45.

 

2019- Animator Richard Williams died of cancer at age 86.

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 15, 2025


Birthdays: Napoleon Bonaparte, Leon Theremin- inventor of that weird electronic musical instrument that is in all those 1950s flying saucer movies, Samuel Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia 1685, Lawrence of Arabia, Ethel Barrymore, Huntz Hall, Bill Baird, Edna Ferber, Sir Robert Bolt, Rose-Marie, Linda Ellerbee, Gene Upshaw, Oscar Peterson, Shimon Peres, Mike “Mannix” Connors, Nicholas Roeg, Animator Dick Lundy, Julia Child, Anthony Andrews, Ben Afleck is 52, Debra Messing is 56, Jennifer Lawrence is 34. 

 

 

1843- Tivoli Gardens opened in Copenhagen. One of the oldest amusement parks in the world. King Christian said. “When people are amused, they don’t worry about politics.” Hans Christian Andersen was a frequent visitor. One hundred years later, Walt Disney visited to get inspiration for his Disneyland.

 

 

1885- Sir Richard Burton completed his translation from medieval Persian of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. There had been earlier attempts like a French edition in 1809, but Burton’s edition introduced the west to Aladdin and his magic lamp, Sinbad the Sailor and Scheherazade.

 

1911- Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco shortening.

1935- Humorist writer Will Rogers and his pilot Wiley Post were killed when their small plane crashed in Barrow, Alaska. 

 

1936- Disney animator Ward Kimball married painter Betty Lawyer-Kimball.

 

1939 - In 1st night game at Comiskey Park, Sox beat Browns 5-2.

 

1

1965- The Beatles played their largest U.S. concert yet, at New York's Shea Stadium.

 

1968- The pirate radio station Radio Free London began transmitting.

 

1969- WOODSTOCK-Three Days of Peace and Music- The rock concert of the 20^th Century opened. The promoters, one of whom was heir to the Polident Denture Cream fortune, were hoping to host 50,000 people and launch a recording studio in the quiet New York farming town. What they got was 500,000 young fans and the social phenomenon that defined an age. 

 

1973- Westworld with Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin opened. 

 

1979- Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now” opened. Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, young Harrison Ford and even younger Lawrence Fishburne. Future Pixar director Ronnie Del Carmen (Inside Out) got his first job as a student painting scenery.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 14, 2025

Birthdays: Gary Larson, Erwin "Magic" Johnson, Lina Wertmuller, David Crosby, Alice Ghostly, Buddy Greco, Nehemiah Persoff, The 20's Parisian nightclub singer Bricktop, Dick Lundy, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, C.S. Watson, James Horner, Rene Goscinny, Wim Wenders, Emmanuele Beart, Halle Berry is 59, Mila Kunis is 42, Steve Martin is 80

 

1873 - "Field & Stream" magazine began publishing.

 

 

1908- The first international beauty pageant held in Kent, England.

                                

 

1928 - Ben Hecht & Charles McArthur's play" The Front Page," premiered in NYC. They later went on to become top comedy writers in Hollywood after Sound pictures created a need for snappy dialogue. They came out to Hollywood after a mutual friend, writer Herman Mankiewicz sent Ben a telegram, “Hecht, some quick! Fortunes to be made and your competition are idiots!"

 

1935- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Social Security Act. Still considered the most successful US Federal social program ever.

 

 

1939 - 1st night game at Comiskey Park -White Sox 5, Browns 2.

 

1939 - Donald Duck Day at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Donald has been flown in from Hollywood to attend the premiere of his latest cartoon Donald's Penguin, playing at the National Biscuit Theatre in the Food Pavilion. Donald then handed out gifts to five hundred lucky children and was presented with an honorary degree of Doctor of International Friendship from Prof. Frank Monaghan of Yale University during a ceremony held in Carnival land. 

 

1942- Pluto cartoon T-Bone for Two, released. Directed by Clyde Geronimi.

 

1956- The Marilyn Monroe movie "Bus Stop" premiered.

 

1962 - French & Italian workers break through at Mount Blanc to create an auto 

Tunnel through the Alps.

 

1962 - NASA test pilot Joseph Walker takes the X-15 supersonic plane to 60,000 ft.

 

1964 –California angels pitcher Bo Belinsky is suspended after attacking sportswriter Braven Dyer.

 

1965 - Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" hits #1.

 

1965- Jane Fonda married director Roger Vadim, who put the beautiful young blonde in naughty movies like Barbarella. His previous wife Bridgette Bardot was a beautiful young blonde that he put in naughty movies….hmm.

 

1994 – The world’s most wanted terrorist "Carlos the Jackal" was arrested in Khartoum Sudan when he entered a clinic to have a varicose vein removed from his testicle.

2009- Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo opened in North America.

 

2126- Get your catchers mitts out! Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass very close by the Earth.

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Tom Sito's animation almanac for Aug 13, 2025

B-Dayz: Annie Oakley, Alfred Hitchcock, Erwin Schroedinger, Don Ho, Buddy Rogers, Bert Lahr, Ben Hogan, Richard Baseheart, Saul Steinberg, Regis Toomey, Johann Christoph Denner (1655)- inventor of the clarinet. Danny Bonaduce, John Logie Baird one of the inventors of television, Fidel Castro, Hockey great Bobby Clarke, Daniel Schorr, Bombay movie star Viyayanthimala

 

 

1934- First Little Abner comic strip by Al Capp. Dogpatch, Mammy Yokum, Daisy Mae, Kickapoo Joy Juice, Fearless Fozdick and the Schmoo are born. Al Capp was a hard drinking old curmudgeon of a cartoonist who lost one leg when as a child he fell off an ice truck and it was severed by a streetcar. 

 

 

1941- James Stuart Blackton certainly had an interesting career. The English born artist became a top newspaper cartoonist, a vaudevillian drag act as Mademoiselle Stuart, the first American animator, founder of the Vitagraph Company, the movie fanzine Motion Picture World. He even successfully faked a newsreel of the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 by using toy boats, sparklers and cigar smoke. He made fortunes but lost everything in the Stock Market Crash. On this day, a poor freelance artist for low budget Republic Pictures, Blackton died after was struck and killed by an auto on Pico Blvd.

 

1942-  Disney's Bambi opened in theaters. Based on a novel by Felix Salten. Friends sold the movie rights to MGM so Salten, an Austrian Jew, could escape the Nazis and get to Switzerland. MGM passed on the rights to Walt Disney. Today the film looks quaint but in its time artists felt it was as realistic as artists could attain. Joe Grant told me designer Rico LeBrun had a hunter friend bring in a real deer he shot in the Sierras. LeBrun set up drawing and anatomy sessions to study the dead animal. But LeBrun was so inspired by the opportunity he refused to dispose of the carcass even after several days it began to smell badly and attract flies. Finally, the other animators waited until LeBrun had left for lunch and tossed the rancid thing.

 

 

1946- MGM cartoon Northwest Hounded Police. One of the best examples of the 'Tex Avery Take" - used since in films like The Mask, Roger Rabbit and Casper.

 

1955- Shooting wrapped on Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. He was remaking the film he had done as a silent movie in 1925. One wag said: DeMille has done God one better, because he has now parted the Red Sea twice.". 

 

1967- The World’s Fair at Montreal Canada, Expo-67 Held the opening reception of its World Exhibition of Animation Cinema. Famous animators from around the world gathered in a special reception. Opening night featured a screening of Disney’s Dumbo, and animator Bill Tytla was saluted. Attendees included Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, June Foray, Art Babbitt, Walter Lantz, Dusan Vukotic’, Bruno Bozzetto, Dave Fleischer and more.

 

1967- Bonnie & Clyde with Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway opened in theaters. “They're Young. They're in Love. And They Kill People”

 

 

1991- Jack Ryan died. The toymaker was the inventor of Hot Wheels toy cars, and helped launch the doll Barbie.

 

2016- At the Rio Olympics, American swimmer Michael Phelps won his 22 gold medal, His final total was 28, the most Olympic gold medals of anyone in history. The second most wins was Leonidas of Rhodes in 164BC. But in Leonidas time they didn’t get medals. They received a laurel wreath and several large pots of premium olive oil.

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 12, 2025

Birthdays: King George IV, Cecil B. DeMille, The alien Alf- 1757, Cantinflas, Buck Owens, Edith Hamilton, Diamond Jim Brady, screenwriter William Goldman, Mtsislav Rostropovitch, Xenia Sharpe (educator who invented the children’s reader Dick & Jane) Kathy Lee Bates-the author of the song America the Beautiful, Klara Schickelgruber- Hitlers mom, Dominique Swain, Pete Samprass, Sam Fuller, John Casale, George Hamilton is 86, Casey Affleck is 50.

 

The Golden 12th. In England this is the beginning of grouse hunting season.

 

1833- The City of Chicago was founded. Chicago is an Indian word meaning “wild onions”.  The site of Chicago had been mentioned by explorers like LaSalle since 1688, and a man of African-European descent named Jean Baptiste Pont du Sable homesteaded on the site in the 1780s. He has been called the Founder of Chicago.

 

1851- Mr. Issac Singer received a patent on his new sewing machine. Elias Howe, who had invented the sewing machine first, immediately sued him. But Singers improved design was so much superior to Howes that he quickly recouped al the penalties paid and eventually bought out Howe. The Singer Sewing Machine Company is still around today. Winaretta Singer, heiress to the resulting fortune, became the Princess de Polignac, one of the great patrons of the arts in turn of the century Paris.

 

1869- San Francisco lunatic Joshua Norton, who called himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States, today published an Imperial Edict outlawing the Democratic and Republican Parties. Hmmm… he may be on to something!

 

1877- THE BIRTH OF RECORDED SOUND. Thomas Edison announced his sound recording invention and demonstrated it by recording "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a tin cylinder. Edison never quite understood the possibilities of a music industry and was convinced that the recorded sound was going to be a used primarily for people to listen to the voices of deceased family, sort of like a voice from the grave. That idea was so popular that it translated to the Logo of the RCA Company with the familiar image of the dog listening to "His master's voice". The original image of that dog listening to his master's voice, had the dog sitting on a coffin. 

A few years later Georgian Emile Berliner invented the flat record disc. Edison thought the disc was clumsy and too fragile. In the future he declared, everyone would use recording cylinders. Flat vinyl records were the global standard for the next 100 years.

 

1898- Annexation Day in Hawaii. The U.S. formally took over the Kingdom of Hawaii. The government of Queen Liliokalani had been overthrown by a group of Yankee sugar plantation owners led by Sanford Dole and handed control over to U.S. gunboats in the harbor.

 

1898- According to H.G. Well’s book The War of the Worlds, this day the first Martian cylinders were launched at our planet.

 

1915 - "Of Human Bondage," by William Somerset Maugham, published.

 

1927- William Wellman’s movie WINGS opened with Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the first silent film to win best picture at the Academy Awards before the advent of sound. Director Wild Bill Wellman was himself a former fighter pilot and flew many of the stunt shots. He bolted cameras to the nose of planes and had the actor’s film themselves while flying. 

The second silent film to ever win best picture was The Artist, in the year 2012.

 

1932 Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first published. Before anyone ever heard of gene therapy, Huxley had written a scholarly paper on the moral dangers inherent in controlled genetic engineering. Writer H.L. Mencken urged Huxley to put his ideas in a fiction form to reach a wider audience. The title comes from Shakespeare's the Tempest " Oh Brave New World, that hath such people in it!'

 

 

1951- Bob McKimson’s Warner Bros short Hillbilly Hare. The short includes the long routine animated in part by Emery Hawkins and Chuck McKimson when Bugs Bunny takes over calling a square dance and uses it to torture the two twin-brother hunters after him. At the time many Warner artists enjoyed a fashion for country dances and hayrides. One artist who disliked square dancing was NY storyman Ted Pierce. So, when he got to write this short, he put all his satiric bite into the lyrics. “Hit him low and hit him high, Stick your finger in his eye.”

 

1958- A Great Day in Harlem- Photographer Art Kane, working for Esquire Magazine, arranged a group photo of 57 of the most important figure in Jazz music and the Harlem Renaissance all standing together on one stoop in Harlem, NY. Count Basie, Thelonius Monk, Maryann McPartland, Sonny Rollins, Gene Krupa and more.

 

1968- The album Cheap Thrills released from Big Brother and the Holding Company and their lead singer Janis Joplin. Robert Crumb drew the famous cover.

 

1981- IBM introduced its first PC- personal computer and PC-DOS I. Unlike Apple, IBM shared the basic hardware design, so a myriad of cheaper competitor PC’s from Commodore and Dell soon flooded the market.

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1983- The Nelvana animated feature Rock & Rule opened in theaters. 

 

1999- In Yorkshire England, Tish, the world’s oldest goldfish, died at age 43.

 

 

2008- TV entertainer and producer Merv Griffin died at age 82. The creator of shows like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Merv Griffin Show, his last post on his website was " I was planning to go on vacation, but this is not the destination I intended."

 

tom sito's animation almanac for Aug 11, 2025

Birthdays: Antonio Salieri is 275, Frederick Ludwig Jahn 1778- founder of the Gymnastics Movement, Alex Haley, Jack Haley, Hulk Hogan, Dick Browne the creator of Hagar the Horrible, Steve Wozniak the co-founder of Apple Computers, Raymond Leppard, Lloyd Nolan, Mike Douglas, Patti Duke Astin, Viola Davis, Chris Hemsworth is 40, Rob Minkoff

1596- Hamnet Shakespeare, the 11 year old son of William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway, died of plague. 

1866 - World's 1st roller skating rink opens (Newport RI)

1874 - Harry S. Parmelee patented the sprinkler head.

1896 - Harvey Hubbell patents electric light bulb socket with a pull chain.

1908- The Hearst syndicate press published a story today that Annie Oakley was destitute and was arrested in Chicago trying to buy cocaine from a black man! The story was a phony. The woman arrested was a burlesque dancer who had previously only impersonated her. The real Annie Oakley, one of the first big media stars, spent the next 6 years suing 55 newspapers. She won all but one lawsuit.

1909-The first S.O.S.-'Save Our Ship' Morse signal sent by the liner S.S. Arapahoe off Cape Hatteras North Carolina.

1932- The original Rin Tin Tin died. The German shepherd dog was the first animal movie star. Legend was he was rescued from a WWI battlefield by a doughboy named Lee Duncan who called him "Rinty". Later in Hollywood people joked he was more spoiled than any human star. Before sound he was the main moneymaker of struggling little Warner Bros studio. Jack Warner called him “Our little rent check.” When the Academy Award was created in 1927 there was a semi-serious discussion whether to give the very first Best Actor Oscar to Rin Tin Tin. In 1967 Warners admitted they had bred 16 duplicate dogs in case anything happened to him.

1934- The Mickey Mouse cartoon The Orphan’s Benefit. The first cartoon where Donald Duck lost his temper and did his fighting stance, and they started calling Dippy Dog by his new name- The Goof, or Goofy.

1942- Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr is awarded a patent for her radio-guided torpedo. It was ignored in her time, but many years later the principles became the basis of Spread Spectrum Technology, revolutionizing wireless communications.

1946- Playwright Moss Hart married Miss America Kittie Carlisle. 

1956- Abstract artist Jackson Pollack died when he drunkenly crashed his car into a tree near East Hampton Long Island. He was 44.

1957- The Toyota Car Company of Japan introduces itself to the United States with a car called the Toyopet. It's first year’s sales were so bad; they almost gave up on the U.S.

1957- Friz Freleng’s Sylvester & Tweety short “Birds Anonymous” came out.

1960- Chad declared its independence.

1962- Actor Sir Lawrence Olivier founded the National Theatre in London.

60th Anniv.1965- THE WATTS RIOTS- 6 days of urban warfare began when an angry crowd attacked some LAPD apprehending a black motorist named Marquette Frye. 34 deaths, 1000 injured. Similar riots erupted in a number of U.S. cities that year including Detroit, Newark and Washington D.C. 

1972- San Antonio Texas holds its first annual Cheech & Chong Day.

1973- American Graffiti opened nationwide. Despite good previews Universal exec Ned Tanen hated the film and threatened to shelve it or cut his losses by sending it direct to TV. Francis Ford Coppola, coming off his Godfather success, offered to buy the rights to the movie and take it elsewhere. Tanen backed down. American Graffiti cost $777,000 to make. And it earned $140 million. Making George Lucas a serious Hollywood director. Ned Tanen’s name was used as the bad guy bully Biff Tanen in Back to The Future.

1995- The Walt Disney short Runaway Brain, featuring Mickey Mouse, premiered. Directed by Chris Bailey and written by Tim Hauser.

2001- First day shooting on the film Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou.

2014- Comedian/Actor Robin Williams committed suicide in his San Francisco home.  He had been battling depression and could feel something was wrong with his body. It was later discovered he had Diffuse Lewy Body Dementia, a form of early onset Alzheimer’s. Then incurable. He was 63.

tom sito animation almanac for Aug 10, 2025

Birthdays: Alexander Glauzunov, Billie Holiday, Eddie Fisher, Leo Fender, Herbert Hoover, Polish King Jan III Sobieski, Norma Shearer, Rhonda Fleming, Jimmy Dean, Justin Theroux, Rosanna Arquette is 66, Antonio Banderas is 65

 

 

1629- Painter Diego Velazquez traveled to Italy to study the Renaissance masters on the advice of his buddy, painter Peter Paul Rubens.

 

1675 - King Charles II lays foundation stone of Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

 

1787- Mozart completed his Eine Kleine Nachtmusik -A Little Night Music.

 

1788- Mozart’s on a roll! This day he completed his Jupiter Symphony #41. 

 

1793- In one of the more positive results of the Reign of Terror, the French Revolutionary Government opened the royal art collection of the Louvre to the public as a museum. And so it remains.

 

 

1889 - Dan Rylands patented the screw -on cap.

 

1897 -German chemists working for the Bayer Company invent Aspirin, the first mass market over the counter drug. A powdered willow tree root that was known to the Native Americans for years. The Romans ground willow root and dissolved it in water for pain.

 

 

1948 – Allen Funt's "Candid Camera" TV debuted on ABC.

 

1962- Amazing Fantasy comic #152 hit the newsstands, introducing a new character called The Amazing Spiderman, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko.

 

1964- Near Ely, Nevada the U.S. Forrest Service cut down a Bristlecone Pine that scientists thought to be the oldest living thing- 4,900 years old.

 

1966 - Daylight meteor seen from Utah to Canada. Only known case of a meteor seen

entering Earth's atmosphere & leaving it again.

 

1970 - Jim Morrison is charged in Miami on "lewd & lascivious behavior"

 

1972 - Paul & Linda McCartney are arrested in Sweden on drug possession.

 

1973 –San Francisco’s first BART train travels through the transbay tube to Montgomery St Station.

 

1979- Britain's first official nudist beach opened at Brighton.

 

1983- Discovery of the Vega Galaxy.  This was the first physical proof of a planetary system outside our Milky Way. Since then with modern orbiting telescopes we’ve found millions of them.

 

1984- Famed New Yorker cartoonist and former Disney artist Virgil “Vip” Partch died in a car crash with his wife, outside of Valencia, California.

 

1984- “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension” premiered.

 

1987- Clara Peller, the elderly actress who gained last minute advertising fame by saying Where's the Beef? died at 86.  The director and writer of the spots was the father of J.J. Sedelmier, who created the Ambiguously Gay Duo and other TV Funhouse animations for SNL.

 

2001- Warner Bros animated film Osmosis Jones opened in theaters. 

 

tom sito animation fun facts for aug 9, 2025

Birthdays: King Henry V of England, John Dryden, Sir Issac Walton-author of the Compleat Angler, Melanie Griffith, Whitney Houston, David Steinberg, Bob Cousy, Jill St. John, Robert Shaw, Robert Aldrich, Sam Elliot is 81, Gillian Anderson is 57, Pamela Travers –the creator of Mary Poppins, Marvin Minsky, Eric Bana is 59, Audrey Tautou is 49, Philippe Bergeron is 66

 

Today was the ancient Egyptian festival of Opet, when they carried the statue of Amon-Ra, to the temple of his wife the goddess Mut for their annual conjugal visit. Because it happened during a full moon, the other name for the festival was the Honeymoon, the origin of the term.

1854- Henry David Thoreau published “Walden”, the first great work about nature conservation. 

 

1896- Actors Equity formed, the first actors union. 

 

 

1919- HAPPY BIRTHDAY ZORRO! Mexican California ranchers had issues with the provincial governors sent from Mexico City. Juan de Alvarado revolted against Gov Michel de Micheltorena in 1847. In the 1850s Joaquin Murrietta was a kind of Jesse James, Robin Hood bandit who rode through California Gold Rush Country. A book was written about him in 1854.

Then in 1919, Johnson McCulley, a Los Angeles man who made a living writing adventure stories for pulp magazines, took the bio of Murietta, and wrote a story of a rebellious ranchero, borrowing also from The Scarlet Pimpernel.

He named him Don Diego De La Vega, who rode at night as El Zorro, the Fox. This day The Curse of Capistrano, the first story of Zorro appeared in All Story Weekly magazine.

 

 

1944- Antoine Du Saint-Exupery, the author of the Little Prince, died when he crashed his fighter plane. For many years the official story was his plane crash was an accident. In 1998 experts found an old German journalist named Horst Rippert who confessed that as a Luftwaffe pilot he shot him down in air combat. He didn’t know it was Saint-Exupery and was an admirer of his writing. The main protagonist of The Little Prince was an aviator who crashed his plane.

 

1947 -The British government in an attempt to bolster revenue for their shattered postwar economy, announced a 300% import tariff on Hollywood films. The also placed a cap on the amount of revenue you could take out of the country. The Big Eight-Hollywood studios retaliate by stopping the export of movies to Britain. The British film industry has a heyday and Disney started producing films locally in Britain like 'Rob Roy Highland Rogue'.

 

1961- Marvel creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby first introduced their superhero team The Fantastic Four comic book. (Its dated today, but may have come out in November)

 

1963 – Britain’s rock & roll TV show, Ready Steady Go, premieres.

 

1967- Joe Orton, English actor/playwright (Leaf, Murdered), died at age 34.

 

 

1969- The Haunted Mansion attraction opened at Disneyland.

 

 

1985- PeeWee’s Big Adventure premiered. The first mainstream feature success of Tim Burton. The first music scoring by Danny Elfman.

 

1989- The Abyss opened, directed by James Cameron. Ed Harris, Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio, and breakthrough CGI water effect. 

 

1993- Heidi Fleiss, The Hollywood Madam arraigned for prostitution. The film community shuddered when she threatened to reveal the names of her clients in her “black book”. Most were suppressed except actors Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn who admitted as much early on. Fleiss wrote a memoir called “Pandering” and still thinks prostitution is an honorable profession. “I ran an 85% cash business.”

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for Aug 8, 2025

Birthdays: Emiliano Zapata. Esther Williams, Gene Deitch, Dino DeLaurentis, Keith Carradine is 75, Rory Calhoun, Mel Tillis, Martin Brest, Peter Weir, Connie Stevens, Patricia Arquette, Dustin Hoffman is 87, Pixar director Lee Unkrich is 58, Mamoru Oshii is 74

 

 

1709 - 1st known ascent in hot-air balloon indoors by Bartolomeu de Gusmao.

 

 

1818- 22 year old English poet John Keats returned from a trip to the Lakes District only to discover the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him.

 

1876 - Thomas Edison patented the mimeograph, a forerunner of the Xerox photocopier.

 

1939- On Walt Disney’s soundstage, Leopold Stokowski met with Walt and the story artists and directors of Fantasia to hammer out their approach to Beethoven’s 6th Pastorale. Ham Luske, Webb Smith, Otto Englander, Ben Sharpsteen and Ed Penner. To fit in the movie, Stokowski had to edit the 40 minute symphony down to 20 minutes without any noticeable parts missing.

 

 

1944 – The birth of Smokey the Bear, named after NYC fireman Smokey Joe Martin.

 

 

1952- Disney short The Little House, directed by Wilfred Jackson premiered.

 

1960 – Brian Hyland’s song "Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Yellow Polka-dot Bikini" hits #1.

 

 

1963 – The Kingsmen released the song "Louie, Louie".  Many labeled it obscene, although no one is quite sure just what the song lyrics mean. In the 1980s Northwestern University staged Louie-Louie Marathons- 44 straight hours of Louie-Louie, played by punk bands, polka bands, marching bands, folk trios, and singing water glasses.

 

1964 - Rolling Stones 1st Dutch concert.

 

 

1973- Ralph Bakshi’s Heavy Traffic released.

 

 

1978- The character of Odie the dog first met Garfield in Jim Davis’ comic strip.

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 7, 2025

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Constantius II, Gen. Nathanael Greene, Mata Hari, Rahssan Rolland Kirk, Dr. Ralphe Bunche, Nicholas Ray, Dr. Richard Leakie, Grandma Moses, Stan Freberg, cartoonist S. Gross, James Randi, Billy Burke aka Glenda the Good Witch, Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, Garrison Keillor, Animator Rudy Ising, David Duchovny is 65, Charlize Theron is 50 

 

 

1914 – The famous poster of Lord Kitchner pointing and saying "Your country needs you," spreads over the UK. James Montgomery Flagg later copied the poster for the American version with Uncle Sam in a similar pose. Lord Asquith commented that by now the elderly soldier Kitchener made "a better poster than a general." 

 

1919- the First Actor’s Equity Strike.

 

1928- The US Treasury issued a smaller, leaner dollar bill. Before this, dollars were two times larger and wider than the ones we now use.

 

1931 Jazz trumpeter Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke, died of drink and drugs. He was 29. Bix along with his idol Louis Armstrong was considered one of the first jazz musicians to popularize the solo-riff, where in the body of a song the soloist would depart from the arrangement and improvise, like a cadenza in classical music. His family in Davenport Iowa were horrified that their son dropped out of school to associate with musicians and black people. Even after Bix was famous, he returned proudly home only to discover his parents had stacked up every record he sent them in a box under the stairs. They never listened to a single one.

 

1933-The first "Alley-Oop" comic strip.

 

 

1953- President Eisenhower granted Ohio statehood retroactively 150 years later. It seems when Ohio joined the union in 1803 Congress screwed up the enabling legislation, so Ohio was never officially a state. Local historians were preparing for an anniversary celebration when they uncovered the glitch.

 

1968- James Brown recorded “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”, at the Vox Studios in Los Angeles. The single became a clarion call for the Black Power movement in the U.S. 

 

1970 - Christine McVie joined the band Fleetwood Mac.

 

1970 – The first computer chess tournament.

 

1974- French daredevil Phillipe Petit strung a tightrope between the two 110 story towers of NY’s World Trade Center and walked across it. As New Yorkers watched in amazement, Petit kept his concentration by carrying on a conversation with the buildings. 

 

1979- THE RUNAWAY WARS. Hollywood Cartoonist’s Union launched a strike against studios sending their animation jobs overseas. 

 

1981- The animated Heavy Metal movie opened. Directed by Gerald Potterton.

 

2007- Leo Montulli, a programmer for Netscape, invented internet cookies. Do you accept them?

 

2020- Howard, a documentary by Don Hahn was released on Disney +. It was

 about Howard Ashman, the lyricist of musicals like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast who died tragically of HIV/Aids at the moment of his greatest triumphs. 

 

 

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 5, 2025

Birthdays: Guy de Maupassant, Amboise Thomas, William- first black child born in British America, Neil Armstrong, John Huston, Robert Taylor, Conrad Aiken, Roman Gabriel, Selma Diamond, Patrick Ewing, Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Loni Anderson, John Saxon, Jonathan Silverman is 54

1847 -Author Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne. They went for a hike together in the Berkshires.

1910- The first Traffic Light set up on Euclid and 105th St. in Cleveland.

1921- KDKA Pittsburgh does the 1st radio baseball broadcast Pirates-8, Phillies-0.

1924- Arf, Arf ! the first Little Orphan Annie comic strip drawn by Harold Gray. 

1926- Magician Harry Houdini stays in a coffin under water for one hour.

1927- RCA-Victrola record producer Ralph Peer realized there might be a market for “Hillbilly Music”. He set up a makeshift recording studio above a furniture store in Bristol Tennessee, and put an ad in the local papers for talent. In one day, he recorded stars Jimmy Rogers the Singing Brakeman, The Carter Family, The Tennessee Mountaineers and Ernest “Pop” Stoneman. This session has been called the “Big Bang of Country Music.”

1945- THE INDIANAPOLIS The ship that carried the atomic bombs, the cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-168 on the way back from Tinian Island. Because the Indianapolis was under top secret radio silence it took five days for the Navy to realize that she was even missing. By the time rescue planes reached the site most of her sailors had drowned or had been eaten by sharks. Out of 1,100 sailors in the water only 300 were found. Survivors recalled how they could feel the sharks noses bumping into the soles of their feet, then another comrade would disappear under water. 

This day the plane that discovered them did so by accident. He had spotted the oil slick and assumed it was a submerged Japanese submarine and was closing in to drop a bomb when he saw the men’s heads bobbing in the water. The Navy court-martialed the ship’s Captain McVay  for gross negligence. They even called the commander of the Japanese submarine to testify. McVay never got over the shame and committed suicide in 1968. In the movie Jaws, old salt Robert Shaw recounted the horrible story of the Indianapolis.

1953- The film “From Here to Eternity” opened, starring Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. But the big story was Frank Sinatra’s Oscar winning performance as Maggio that signaled the turnaround in his slumping career.

1955- The Screen Actor’s Guild strikes Hollywood for television residuals. Their president was Walter Pidgeon who had played Dr. Morbius in Forbidden Planet.

1956- Chuck Jones short Rocket By Baby premiered.  “Mot!”

1957- American Bandstand featuring the eternally teenage Dick Clark debuts on television.

1961- The theme park Six Flags over Texas first opened.

1962- GOODBYE, NORMA JEAN. Marilyn Monroe found in bed dead of barbiturate overdose. She was 36. Whether you think the starlet overdosed by accident, suicide, or was done in by the Mafia, the Kennedys, a Svengali like personal physician, lovesick physical therapist or space aliens, it is still a mystery. She made a call to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s office in Washington several hours earlier but was rebuffed. Her last call was to her hairdresser Mr. Guilaroff.  She left the bulk of her belongings to her drama teacher Lee Strassberg and her funeral was organized by ex-husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Her Westwood cottage had a tile over the doorway which read :"All my troubles end Here." 

1964 - Actress Anne Bancroft & Comedian Mel Brooks wed.

1966- Caesar’s Palace Hotel & Casino first opened to the public. This was the first of the super-resort casinos, with a total theme park design and three times the space and accommodations of anything yet seen on the Vegas Strip. Its success ushered in an accelerated era of building for Las Vegas casinos.

1966 –It a moment of youthful indiscretion, John Lennon declared his band the Beatles were now more popular than Jesus. This flippant comment provoked a firestorm of nationwide protest among conservative elements in the US.  Beatles albums were publicly burned in the streets. Lennon apologized, then followed up by saying he was being crucified over the comment. Paul McCartney rushed up to the mike to insist that wasn't the choice of words they preferred.

1967- Bobby Gentry released “Ode to Billy Jo”.

1980- The Osmond Brothers break up.

1984- Actor Richard Burton died of cerebral hemorrhage at 58. With a tumultuous career and two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, the hard drinking Burton was the most famous English-speaking actor of his day. But unlike Lawrence Olivier and Ian McKellen, he was never knighted. In 1974 while staring in a movie as Winston Churchill, Burton wrote an editorial titled "To play Churchill is to Hate Him". A son of desperately poor Welsh miners, he strongly objected to Churchills upper-class elitism. The British public was outraged, the royal family in particular. Richard Burton was buried with a copy of Dylan Thomas’ poems in his pocket.

1984- Joan Benoit won the first Women’s Olympic Marathon.

1986 - It's revealed painter Andrew Wyeth had secretly created 240 drawings & paintings of his neighbor Helga Testorf, in Chadds Ford, Pa

tom sito's animation almanac for aug 4,2025

Birthdays: Percy Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen, Nicholas Conte' 1755-inventor of the modern pencil and the conte'-crayon, Louis Armstrong, William Pater, Dr. Alexander Schure, Richard Belzer, Franco Corelli, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon England's late Queen GrandMum, Roger Clemens, Mary Decker-Slaney, Billy-Bob Thornton is 71, former President Barack Obama is 64

1782- In Vienna’s St. Stephen Cathedral, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart married Constanze Weber, the aunt of composer Karl Maria von Weber. Mozart had first proposed to Constanze's sister, but she chose another. They had several children, but only two survived to adulthood. They both died childless.

1821- 1st edition of Saturday Evening Post -published until 1969.

1855 - John Bartlett publishes his first book of "Familiar Quotations"

1892-" Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks, when he saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one.", etc. In Fall River Mass, Andrew and Abbie Borden were found brutally murdered and their daughter Elisabeth was accused.  Ms. Borden pleaded innocence and cited a long history of abuse from her parents. She was acquitted but the murderer was never found. When Lizzie died peacefully in 1927 she left $30,000 to the ASPCA.

1921 The Motion Picture Fund created.

1922- In honor of the passing of Alexander Graham Bell, all 13 million telephones in the United States observed three minutes of silence.

1925- Conrad Hilton opened the first Hilton Hotel in Dallas Texas.

1941- Walt Disney signed a deal with the National Film Board of Canada to create training films and bond drive promotions for the war effort.

1956- Elvis Presley released his version of the Big Mama Mabel Thornton song, "You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog".

1984- Actor Johnny Depp opened his own club on the Sunset Strip called the Viper Room. The original club on that site had once been owned by mobster Bugsy Siegel.

1995-“Babe” a charming movie about a little talking pig written and directed by Chris Noonan, in collaboration with George Miller. 

1997- Jeanne Calment of Arles France died. She holds the record of being the longest living human being. 122 years, 164 days old. She married in 1896, and once met Vincent van Gogh, who she described as, “ A dirty, smelly man with a bad character.”