Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 8, 2022

Birthdays:  Ponce De Leon, King Albert of the Belgians, Mary Pickford, Yip Harburg, Betty Ford, Sonja Henje, Catfish Hunter, Jacques Brel, Darlene Gillespie, Julian Lennon, Carmen McCrae, Shecky Green, Douglas Trumbull, Robin Wright is 57, Patricia Arquette

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

1879- Milk first sold in glass bottles.

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

1933-The WPA- Works Progress Administration, later renamed the Works Projects Administration founded. It was the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s massive jobs program to heal the Depression by putting unemployed people back to work. They built bridges, dams, roads, federal buildings. The WPA arts projects employed artists like Grant Wood, Berenice Abbott and Thomas Hart Benton and put on plays with Orson Welles and John Houseman. 

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

1974- Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs set in 1935. Hammerin' Hank hit #715 off Dodger pitcher Al Dowling.  Aaron had tied the Babe’s record at the end of the previous season and had to endure an entire winter of stress and racial threats before he could come up to bat again and break the record on opening day of the new season. His locker had sacks of vicious hate mail alongside it. Henry Aaron retired with a new record of 755, done without steroids. Pitcher Al Dowling joked: "I never say 7:15 anymore. I only say, 'It's a quarter after seven'." 

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

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

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

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

1995- Disney’s A Goofy Movie premiered.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 7, 2022

Birthdays St. Francis Xavier, William Wordsworth, Mongo Santamaria, Walter Winchell, David Frost, Percy Faith, Daniel Ellsberg, Jerry Brown, Alan Pakula, Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Irene Castle, Wayne Rogers, Stan Winston, James Garner, Olkirk Christenson- the inventor of Lego toys, Francis Ford Coppola is 83, Russell Crowe is 58, Jacky Chan is 68

1891- Showman P.T. Barnum died of old age. The last words of the man who invented kiddie matinees, the Greatest Show on Earth, and coined the word “Jumbo” were "How were the box office receipts today?"

1927- An audience at the Bell Laboratory watched a three inch television screen broadcast a sound image of US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

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

1933- Hitler's regime passed the Professional Civil Service Restoration Act, which ordered Jews and other political undesirables fired from all government posts including university professorships, museum curators, and arts funded grants. The exile of Germany's intellectual elite began- Bertholdt Brecht, Billy Wilder, George Gropius, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, George Grosz, Michael Curtiz, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, Max Reinhardt and Otto Klemperer -Colonel Klink's dad.  

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

1949- Musical "South Pacific" debuts. Some Enchanted Evening…

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 6, 2022

Birthdays: Raphael of Urbino, Sacajawea, Ram Dass, Butch Cassidy, Gustav Moreau, Lowell Thomas, Merle Haggard, Billy Dee Williams, George Reeves, Michelle Phillips, Andre Previn, Barry Levinson, Roy Thinnes, John Ratzenberger, Gheorghe Zamfir, Paul Rudd is 53, Zach Braff is 47.

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

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

1906 - Cartoonist James Stuart Blackton created a sensation when Edison filmed him doing sequential drawings and they seemed to come alive.  The film was The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Today it is considered the first animated film. Blackton made a fortune, lost it, and was hit by a bus in 1940. But his animated antics paved the way for Mickey, Bugs, Bart, Gollum and Laura Croft. 

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

1933- the Screen Writer's Guild, later the WGA, formed. It took about seven years for them to unionize screenwriting in Hollywood. Jack Warner called them: "Communists, Radical Bastards and Soap Box Sons of B*tches !" David O. Selznick, who prided himself on running a writer-friendly studio, told them: “What? You put a picket line in front of my studio and I'll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow you all down!!" Despite these protestations, the Guild today represents most Hollywood writers.

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

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

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

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

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

1991- The first episode of Darkwing Duck premiered.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 4, 2022

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Edweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence-Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters-born McKinley Morganfield, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Bea Benaderet, Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr is 57, Barry Pepper, Craig T. Nelson is 78, Hugo Weaving is 62

1850- The City of Los Angeles was incorporated under U.S. law. 

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

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

1958- Screen goddess Lana Turner and her gangster lover Johnny Stompanato had a violent argument that ended when Turner’s teenage daughter plunged a kitchen knife into his chest. She was acquitted as justifiable homicide, and rumors maintain the daughter was covering for her mother’s own actions. 

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

1987- Ronald Reagan’s hand-picked FCC voted to repeal The Fairness Doctrine, which mandated news services report unbiased news, reflecting all opinions. This set the stage for the highly partisan news reporting of today.

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

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

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 3, 2022

Birthdays: King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington Irving, William Marcy "Boss"  Tweed,  Sally Rand the Fan Dancer, Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Marlon Brando, Amanda Byrnes, David Hyde Pierce is 64, Alec Baldwin is 64, Eddie Murphy is 61

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

1897-composer Johannes Brahms died.

1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald got married.

1968- Stanley Kubrick's epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered. The N.Y. Times review said it was: " Somewhere between hypnotic and boring". Pauline Kael called it "monumentally unimaginative!" Writer Arthur C. Clarke always said HAL the computer was not a coded reference to IBM. At the Oscars, Clarke and Kubrick lost the best screenplay award to Mel Brooks for The Producers. 2001 won only one Oscar, for visual effects. It was the only Oscar a Stanley Kubrick film ever won.

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

1975- Eccentric chess champion Bobby Fischer was stripped of his World Chess Championship for refusing to play any more matches to defend his title. 

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

Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for April 2, 2022

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

 

1877- First man shot out of a cannon.

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

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

1943- Warner short “Super Rabbit”.

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

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

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

1974- Later at that same Oscar telecast, Francis Ford Coppola presented the last award of the evening, the Best Picture to Cabaret. But he held up the show to launch into a speech that a Revolution was coming in Digital Technology “that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a small town try-out!” 

The audience was confused and annoyed at being delayed any longer to get to their parties. No one knew what he was talking about.

1978-The TV show "Dallas" debuts.

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

2004- Walt Disney Studio released Home on the Range.

2005- Polish Pope John Paul II died after reigning for 26 years.

Tom Sito's Animation Almanac for April 1, 2022

Happy April Fool’s Day – The Ancient Romans considered today ALL FOOLS DAY-a day of comedy- For the end of the time sacred to Hilaria, goddess of laughter. They did things backwards, men and women swapped clothes and carried on. 

Before the Gregorian reforms some Old Style Calendars had the year begin in late March instead of January. As the new modern calendar became more widely accepted, the people who stubbornly clung to the old practice were made fun of, and called April-Fools. 

Birthdays: Big Jim Fisk , Edmund Rostand, Lon Chaney, Sir William Harvey, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ali McGraw, Toshiro Mifune, Debbie Reynolds, Phil Neikro, Wallace Beery, Jane Powell, Bo Schembechler, Annette O’Toole, Barry Sonnenfeld, Rachel Maddow is 46, animator Andreas Deja is 64

1747-Georg Frederich Handel premiered his oratorio Judas Maccabeus with the song "Hail, Conquering Hero!", frequently used at royal functions.

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

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

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

1949- Zsa Zsa Gabor married George Sanders.

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

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

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

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

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

2004- G-Mail invented.